Global reach
Deepak Unnikrishnan’s “Temporary People” won the inaugural Restless Books Prize for Immigrant Writing, and it’s immediately evident why. Shot through with dark absurdist humor, the 28 stories explore the lives of temporary foreign migrant workers of the United Arab Emirates who are usually never afforded citizenship or the rights associated with it. Unnikrishnan grew up in Abu Dhabi, and has lived all over the United States, including Chicago, where he received his master’s degree in fine arts.
Some of these stories are traditionally linked, while others are linked only by Unnikrishnan’s stylistic and linguistic experiments, which often hinge on the Malayalam word “pravasis” (meaning migrant). With its casually fantastic elements and kinetic, propulsive prose, the lineage of Unnikrishnan’s fiction can be traced to George Saunders and Nikolai Gogol.
In many of the stories, the fantastic illuminates deeper truths related to the condition of migrant workers. A laborer and his roommate in a work camp metamorphose into a passport and a suitcase, with which the third roommate runs away through an airport. A woman sews up construction workers who’ve been injured after falling from their work on skyscrapers, but whose real wounds are “the loneliness and anxiety falling imposed on their minds.” Among the most striking tales are two about cockroaches who acquire language.
Other hyperreal stories gain their manic power through the hysteria of what they’re relating. A fat boy is abandoned by his friends at a critical moment in “Moonseepalty.” A trained clown sells detergent in “Kloon,” and turns the tables on a woman who is mocking him.
While the premises of these stories are weird gems, the true wonder is Unnikrishnan’s masterful drive, his pushing of each story’s starting point to wild, interesting places. “Temporary Workers” is streaked with artistic genius — it is startling, deeply unnerving and urgent.
Italo Calvino wrote in the foreword to “Six Memos for the Millennium,” “My working method has more often than not involved the subtraction of weight. I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities; above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language.”
Kanishk Tharoor’s cosmopolitan short story collection “Swimmer Among the Stars” reminds me of Calvino’s brand of storytelling — airy, whimsical and disinterested in the specific minds or motivations of individuals. Appropriately, the collection’s epigraph is a quote from Calvino’s “Invisible Cities.” It seems evident, however, that Tharoor’s international background — time spent in New York, India, London and elsewhere — informs his fiction, which is shaded by melancholy, a strong awareness of things lost.
The 13 stories in Tharoor’s collection circle loss in its many forms. Ethnographers show up to record the speech of the last speaker of her language. The princess of Morocco summons an elephant to be brought with his mahout from across the ocean. A coal miner confronts a magazine photographer about an exploitative image of him that was selected for publication. All have a fabulist’s sensibility, the propensity for what is imaginable rather than probable.
In a time and place where immigration is a fraught political issue, these freewheeling stories appeal by disregarding conventional boundaries — they zigzag across nations, ethnic identities and linguistic traditions. Most notably, they transcend traditional notions of time.
The truths expressed are unusual, but they could be at home in any time or place. For example: “When the number of speakers of a language shrinks, so does the language itself. She grew up with an impoverished vocabulary, a skulking tongue, never with the means to recover those lost words.” Archaic elements of the past are interlaced with what is of the moment, the better to plumb what might be universal.
Although Syrian-born writer Osama Alomar’s “The Teeth of the Comb & Other Stories” appears slight, it packs a punch. The collection consists of tiny, original parables and allegories that philosophize about the human condition at this moment in time.
Alomar is a visionary writer, extending metaphors every which way. Nothing is dead, nothing is inert — his limpid prose pulses with psychedelic life. Animals and inanimate objects alike are personified. An elevator shouts with disdain at another elevator. An unemployed young man suffers a psychological earthquake that’s 8 points on the Richter scale. Ants discuss fate before being killed by a shoe.
Some of these stories are no longer than a sentence, almost koans. Yet many require a degree of care and attention to understand. One of the shortest stories, “Bitter Cold,” reads only: “Because he had spent long years luxuriating in the warm paradises of his family home, he fell gravely ill and nearly died in society’s bitter cold.” Another, “Free Elections,” is two sentences about slaves who re-elect their executioner of their own volition.
Alomar’s longer flash fiction is equally powerful, careening between political and moral concerns, and occasionally delving into love and other human considerations. In “War,” aliens try but are unable to land on Earth due to its civil wars. In “The Temple,” a man undertakes a project that horrifies his family, and it turns out to be the worship of money.
It takes immense skill to forge work that creates meaning by distilling life to its essences. In the best moments of the collection, including the title story, Alomar illuminates our common humanity, and our refusal, at times, to recognize it.
Anita Felicelli’s writing has appeared in the Rumpus, Salon and the Los Angeles Review of Books. Email: books@ sfchronicle.com