Seeking Fortune Elsewhere : : Stories

Locations
Call Number: Fiction / Bhanoo, Sindya, Adult Book / Fiction / General / Bhanoo, Sindya
On Shelf At: Downtown Library, Malletts Creek Branch

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	Fiction / Bhanoo, Sindya	4-week checkout	On Shelf
Malletts Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Fiction / General / Bhanoo, Sindya	4-week checkout	On Shelf

Malliga homes -- A life in America -- Buddymoon -- Amma -- Nature exchange -- His holiness -- No. 16 Model House Road -- Three trips.
"These intimate stories of South Indian immigrants and the families they left behind center women's lives and ask how women both claim and surrender power"-- Provided by publisher.
Traveling from Pittsburgh to Washington to Tamil Nadu, these astonishing stories about dislocation and dissonance see immigrants and their families confront the costs of leaving and staying, identifying sublime symmetries in lives growing apart.
Contents: Malliga homes. -- Life in America. -- Buddymoon. -- Amma. -- Nature exchange. -- His holiness. -- No. 16 Model House Road. -- Three trips.

REVIEWS & SUMMARIES

Library Journal Review
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Summary / Annotation
Author Notes

COMMUNITY REVIEWS

Uneven but compelling submitted by redwood on June 25, 2023, 4:11pm The characters range from elders who have never left India to teenagers who have hardly been there. These characters were never generically “Indian,” always specifically Tamil, which was refreshing. Most of the stories explored grief in some form or another, whether it was the crushing loss of a child or various forms of growing apart. Some of the premises were more out-of-the-box than others—I particularly enjoyed reading about an older professor realizing he may have exploited Indian grad students and the musings of late Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Jayalalithaa’s childhood bullies.

Not every story here worked for me—some felt a bit too self-consciously melancholic in the way they dramatized generational tensions. I’m not that person who compares all Indian American writers to Jhumpa Lahiri, but there was something Lahiri-like here, especially in the multiple registers of audience. Based on the levels of explanation, I felt like this was both for and not for me—everyday foods and religious rituals might be rendered in too much detail, while I can’t see a non-Tamil reader understanding, for example, the full weight of the Jayalalithaa story, or that the senior home in the first story is a real and specific one. The level of insider-outsider detail felt fairly consistent throughout the collection, though, so I can only assume this bridging of audiences was intentional; still, I found it sometimes took me out of the stories’ moving emotional beats. Despite this particular criticism, I really enjoyed these stories, which were imaginative, specific, and beautifully emotional.