Aruni KashyapHis Father's Disease

Abstract

well. She is dismissed as a “heartless daughter , selfish and destructive.” Forgiveness can only go so far. Forgetting is an even longer road. Reading Will and Testament is like watching ocean waves, waiting for the tsunami to hit. The rhythmic, repetitious prose rolls over the pages, bringing with it swells of intellect and emotion, leaving the debris of devastation and desperation in its wake. Robert Allen Papinchak Valley Village, California Nathalie Handal Life in a Country Album Pittsburgh. University of Pittsburgh Press. 2019. 94 pages. WHEN FACED WITH the term “country album,” I immediately think of songs from Nashville and Austin and the usual musical formula including a guitar, a twanging voice, and tragic events that unfold over beer and whiskey. I think, specifically, of the southern and western United States where the sounds of the local language often include the same cadences and colloquialisms as the very songs I imagine. Nathalie Handal’s collection of poems Life in a Country Album forces the boundaries of what a country album could really be—what the word “country” itself means, both as placeholder and a means of personal identification. In the poem “Declaration of Independence ,” Handal poeses the question, “Do you know anyone / who loves more than one country?” as if it were somehow inappropriate to even mention. Knowing that Handal is a woman with a multifaceted background, from several countries and languages herself, what I learn the most from her deeply expressive and philosophical poetry—whether it is something I can tangibly communicate or not—comes from the ways in which she meditates on place, belonging, love, and identity. What do we find at the intersection of place, belonging, love, and identity that can be expressed in any other way than poetry? The layers of discovery in this collection are a feast of all flavors, from all corners of the world, that teach me how we must reinvent our perceptions of nation and country as identifiers and how each of us presents in such an interconnected world. What does it mean to be from (insert place name here)? How do we say I am in (insert language here)? In the poem “Une fin,” Handal asks (and begins to answer), “What’s in a land, / what’s a land? The country we pretend to go to when we can’t find the / form of our faces.” It means that country is a place one might hide under a fabricated identity, when the self is yet unknown. And what is a face if not a reflection of a soul; a visage that communicates all the places we carry? Sarah Warren University of North Texas Aruni Kashyap His Father’s Disease Chennai, India. Westland Books. 2019. 184 pages. THE PUBLICATION OF the 2013 novel The House with a Thousand Stories announced the arrival of Aruni Kashyap as a new voice in the burgeoning oeuvre of anglophone fiction from northeast India. His Father’s Disease, Kashyap’s collection of short stories, continues the exploration of the impact of political violence on everyday life in the northeast Indian state of Assam that characterized The House, while simultaneously charting new territory. More specifically, the ten short stories can be loosely subdivided into three major thematic clusters that often overlap with one another: (1) living with political terror, (2) the complexities of intercultural encounters mediated usually via the perspective of a male, diasporic South Asian subject, and (3) representations of same-sex relationships and masculine homoerotic encounters. Kashyap’s writing is at its most uneven when we consider the second cluster—while a story like “Minnesota Nice” is quite predictable, he treats the intercultural encounters with a wry, comic touch in “The Love Lives of People Who Look Like Kal Penn” and with formal innovativeness in “The Umricans” (written entirely through a second-person viewpoint ). Interestingly, the literary festival (“Skylark Girl”) or an academic conference (“The Love Lives”) often becomes the locus for these intercultural encounters, making one wonder how much of Kashyap’s WORLDLIT.ORG 101 personal experiences have been distilled into fictional form. One of the great strengths of The House with a Thousand Stories is Kashyap’s ability to evoke a sense of place...