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July 15, 2013
When Lovedeep signs up for a New Age “de-cluttering” class, she finally finds the change she’s been hoping for in Ian, the shy man she meets there, in this collection’s title story. Sidhu’s debut offers 12 varied snapshots of the lives of Indians at home and abroad. “Hero of the Nation” features a student at a special needs school, Ruby, who sneaks her mute grandfather cigarettes while he torments the rest of her family with his incontinence. “The Good Poet of Africa” involves a low-level diplomat who, soon after arriving at a new post in San Francisco, discovers that everyone there thinks he’s a famous Urdu poet. In “The Consul’s Wife,” Pavarti considers her life married to a diplomat and grieves her pet snake’s death while deciding what to serve at a dinner party, and in “Children’s Games,” an Indian orphanage falls under the sway of a cult. Though weird and eccentric, Sidhu’s stories are also empathetic and refreshingly free of the clichés of immigrant narratives. He manages to portray his characters as uniquely Indian without losing sight of their individuality, offering small, piercing looks into the humanity that resides in every situation and person, no matter how strange.
Starred review from September 1, 2013
Achingly merciless, London-born author Sidhu's 12 short stories sharply delineate the edges of identity and sanity. Playwright, novelist and Pushcart Prize winner Sidhu populates his collection with Indian diaspora. These haunting tales simultaneously attract and repel, enchant and shatter, evoking the ambiguous relationships between past and present, others and self. An airplane crash prompts a gas station employee to descend deeper and deeper into a madness in which everything, beginning with India itself, drops out of existence. Hoping to gain self-confidence and perhaps love, a young woman joins a decluttering class and finds herself drawn to a serial killer. A diplomat's wife has spent so many years adapting to new cultures that she is dismayed to learn of her husband's plan to retire. With the discovery of her pet python's death, her confusion--what could India possibly mean to her now, after so many years and so many personas?--merges with an erotically tinged grief. Mysteriously promoted from a bottom-rung post in Africa to a cushy job in San Francisco, an alcoholic Indian diplomat tries to figure out why everyone believes he is an Urdu poet. Complicating matters are his emotionless lover and her father, who wields a strange power over her. A man's addiction to classic novels impels him to hire a professional reader, which ruins his marriage. The discovery of a skull at an orphanage catalyzes a cult, a cult that replicates the hierarchy and complicity of colonization. Each ending seems unfinished, leaving each heart cracked open, perhaps to endure more pain or perhaps to remain simply unfulfilled. Deftly sifting through a range of less-often-visited emotions, Sidhu creates inscrutable characters inhabiting bewildering circumstances. Smart, provocative and poignantly disturbing, this collection, the author's U.S. debut, signals a writer to watch.
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September 1, 2013
A drunken, misanthropic diplomat transfers to a post in California after being mistaken for a poet in hiding. A young woman seeking to improve her life instead finds herself face-to-face with the end of it. A bibliophile watches as his marriage fails and his perfect world slowly unravels. These are among the 12 tales that, tending toward the nightmarish and sordid, make up this intense collection. A husband and wife celebrate his birthday with a potent drug trip. A lonely wife prepares to cook her deceased pet python and serve him at her upcoming dinner party. The formation of a cult at a boys' school in India evokes the devolving savagery of The Lord of the Flies. With adeptly drawn characters, Sidhu demonstrates a dexterous grasp of the human psyche, while the prevalence of dark twists displays his love of the fatalistic. This propensity for the morose will be of-putting for some but is sure to please those with a taste for black humor and shades of the diabolical.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)