There are nine stories here. Two are merely excellent,
merely beautifully written and perfectly crafted stories, poignant and affecting.
The other seven? They. Blew. Me. Away. Five of those seven ("The Infamous Bengal Ming," "Four Rajeshes," "I Am an Executioner," "Elephants in Captivity Part One," "On the Banks of Table River") blew me so far away
that I have yet to reassemble myself. Last night I dreamed myself
into one of the others—that's how deeply these stories affected me, and I don't
recall this ever happening before with anything I've read, though perhaps it
has and I've forgotten—I dreamed myself wandering in a gigantic file room, one
square mile gigantic, filled with filing cabinets so tall they reached all the
way to the yards-high ceiling, and I dreamed that I was trying to find the file
reporting on the minutiae of a certain facial expression I might have exhibited
one afternoon 22 years before.
Never mind me, though. Perhaps I'm overly susceptible to
this sort of thing. Perhaps tonight I'll dream myself an arthropod, not of a
Kafkaesque variety, rather one among a future Andromedan population coping with
Earth-based colonialism. Oy, I hope not, because I'm afraid my dreaming mind
might explode in the effort to meld elements of science fiction, political
allegory, thriller, police procedural and tragic romance, all of which elements
Parameswaran melds seamlessly in the book's final story.
I don't know if I've ever read fiction that so splendidly
interweaves so many layers and levels. These stories, especially the seven mind
blowers, are about so very much. Weirdly, as far as I can tell from the several
reviews I've read and reader comments at sites like Amazon and Goodreads, very
few seem to have picked up on this. They note the postmodern aspects, check.
The metafictional element, check. The virtuosity of voice and structure, check
check. But is no one reading the multiple meanings in each of these stories?
Far be it from me to impose my own worldview on an author whose life and
opinions I know very little about, but I don't think I'm nuts to divine in
these pieces a great deal beneath the surface. These stories variously touch on
racism, emigration and immigration, imperialism, colonialism and
neocolonialism, misogyny, homophobia, violence and more. You can read them without taking
any of that in, but it's the echoes of the real world embedded in even the most
fantastical of the stories that deepen and enrich them, make them not only
riproaring wild rides but thought-provoking, profound.
All this, and I haven't even mentioned hilarity sprinkled throughout. Or the panoramic
literary and historical allusions with which these stories are packed. Here, named or not, are William Shakespeare, Satyajit Ray, Vladimir Nabokov, Srinivasa Ramanujan and more, probably more than I caught though I caught enough to keep my mind spinning.
And the language! Oy gott the words, the sentences! I NEVER underline in my books—but I couldn't help myself with this one. Some of the sentences, even whole paragraphs, are so stunningly perfect, so evocative and provocative, that they stopped me cold, had me reading them over and over, ultimately unable to proceed unless I underlined them so I could find them again. And I will. Some day when a yearning to read a perfectly expressed fictive idea overcomes me, I'll pull I Am an Executioner off the shelf and find the underlined passage and be delighted anew, reminded again that literary genius, though rare, does exist out there in the world. Over here, in fact, in Queens, where perhaps I've sat next to Rajesh Parameswaran on the #7 train, never knowing I was sitting beside a master.
