I Am An Executioner
Love Stories
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
A Bengal tiger wakes up one morning realising he is ravenously in love. A pompous railway supervisor in a small Indian village bites off more than he can chew when a peculiar new clerk arrives on his doorstep. In another place and in another time, a secret agent who spends her days watching the front door of an unknown quarry discovers something she isn't meant to. An immigrant housewife in an American suburb geeing up for Thanksgiving makes a wish she may come to regret. And a small and famous country's only executioner claims his conscience is as clean as his heavy, washed stones.
With this glittering, savage and elegant first collection, where reality loops in mind-bending twists and dazzles with cinematic exuberance, where frayed photographs take on a life of their own and where elephants wish only to die with dignity, Rajesh Parameswaran bursts onto the literary landscape as an astonishing new talent.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In the staggering title story, the awkward, love-starved narrator maneuvers between his day job finishing off convicted criminals and his home life, where he tries unsuccessfully to reassure his new wife that he's not as bad as his profession would imply. His poetic, if exaggerated, Indian English creates its own cadence just as his compulsive justification creates its own logic: "I am an honest executioner. I take good care and I don't tell lies, minimum of possible. And each time I pushed down that rock, and it landed with the bad sound, I thought myself: Truth!" Despite this accomplishment, however, the other stories in this admirably risky debut collection vary wildly in both scope and success. In "The Infamous Bengal Ming," a story that feels like it parodies M.F.A. workshops, Parameswar an writes from the perspective of a tiger. In "Demons," a middle-aged Indian immigrant responds to the trauma of her husband's sudden death by ignoring his corpse on the living room floor. But Parameswaran should be applauded for pushing the limits of the genre and for the occasional searing brilliance of his language.
