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Once Elephants Lived Here: Stories, Geetanjali Shree, translated from the Hindi by Daisy Rockwell
The 11 stories cover a wide variety of themes, but all have in common the stylistic experimentalism which came to blossom fully in Tomb of Sand. There is an iconoclasm to Shree’s writing, especially beginning with this collection. Readers will soon learn that nothing is sacred to the author: narrative and genre conventions are summarily pushed off their pedestals and in their place we find…what?
Entirely new ways of conceiving and presenting storytelling unfurl before us as we come to question our own rigid preconceptions of the short story genre. In one story, a woman spends all day compulsively walking in circles around her housing complex. There is no introduction, no explanation, no denouement. In another, a woman goes on a writer’s retreat, and in a pseudo-sci-fi turn of events, falls passionately in love with the sky. The other participants in the retreat are robots. In a third, “Butterflies”, a narrator staying in a cottage in Kerala is overwhelmed with the grief over past events, but is surprised out of her self-indulgence by a mysterious group of young women who are either nurses or diabetes patients; she’s never sure which....
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