Half Gods
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- S/ 49.90
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- S/ 49.90
Descripción editorial
A startlingly beautiful debut, Half Gods brings together the exiled, the disappeared, the seekers. Following the fractured origins and destines of two brothers named after demigods from the ancient epic the Mahabharata, we meet a family struggling with the reverberations of the past in their lives. These ten interlinked stories redraw the map of our world in surprising ways: following an act of violence, a baby girl is renamed after a Hindu goddess but raised as a Muslim; a lonely butcher from Angola finds solace in a family of refugees in New Jersey; a gentle entomologist, in Sri Lanka, discovers unexpected reserves of courage while searching for his missing son.
By turns heartbreaking and fiercely inventive, Half Gods reveals with sharp clarity the ways that parents, children, and friends act as unknowing mirrors to each other, revealing in their all-too human weaknesses, hopes, and sorrows a connection to the divine.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Kumarasamy's debut collection of linked stories, a boy disappears in the wake of a storm, an entomologist stages an act of political resistance after his son disappears, and a pair of brothers go to Lake George with a young Sikh boy who changes both of their lives in different ways. At the center of it all is a family whose patriarch, Muthu, escaped Sri Lanka during the civil war and settled in New Jersey with his only surviving daughter, Nalini, who would later birth two sons, Arjun and Karna. Each gets his or her turn as the focus of a story. Nalini, who straddles both her father's war-torn Sri Lanka and her sons' suburban New Jersey, is easily the collection's strongest character, embodying the tension between the two. Though, as a young woman, she seems to get it all right she escapes from New Jersey, finds a loving husband and a big house the lingering trauma of her past leads her to implode her marriage, sending her back to her father's side. Kumarasamy's prose is gorgeous and assured, capable of rendering both major tragedy (war, the dissolution of a marriage, the loss of a child) and minor tragedy (a botched effort at matchmaking, a pitying Christmas invitation) with care and precision. Though the stories can sometimes blend together, the writing is strong throughout, resulting in a wonderful, auspicious debut.