I mostly really enjoy Indrajit Garai’s books and I am a sucker for a short story. In this collection, there are three stories: The Alignment, The Changing Turf and The Eye Opener.
The first story is Franck’s, a married man, a consultant, an expectant father. He is stressed by his life circumstances and it’s about to get a whole lot heavier. He has a big mortgage and the expenses of a new baby as well as the threat of losing his job, his home and he feels like he has to face it on his own as he doesn’t want to worry his already burdened wife.
We follow him as he tries to stay above the things that threaten to take him under, one of these being unethical business. This is just one of the elements that Franck can’t control, leading him to a situation that he would have wanted desperately to avoid.
It has all the traits of Garai’s style: people, just trying to make their way as best they can through the trials of life and the unscrupulous behaviours of others.
The second story, The Changing Turf charts Nathan’s arrival in New York to begin a university course after the busy streets of Mumbai, India. He is green but willing and there are pivotal moments in his story that shape his understanding of where he finds himself as he has encounters with the people around him, hardship he sees and the sadness of others. He is essentially a nice person.
The bones of this story are good and it starts reasonably well; however, I felt like the latter part of it was rushed. Key events were introduced and mentioned with such brevity that they read like a side-note even though they crucially altered the course of Nathan’s life and this was the same for the ending which is apt but I felt was not fully conveyed. It was abrupt and lacking depth and came as a surprise, not because of the content but in the way that it was delivered. It was like a word limit had been reached, the conclusion had been met but no real emotion had been injected into it and what reinforced this feeling is that the ending is emotional and it should be full of warmth with a soupçon of sentimentality and I felt like there was none of that.
The third story is The Eye-Opener and it tells the story of Cedric, told in the first person and charting an existence which has not been easy. Cedric is a young man still but with little prospects, living in a place with limited opportunities, a situation which is also compounded by transgressions from his past.
As a reader, we follow him through ups-and-downs as Cedric tries to break free of the life in which he finds himself which is very much one he has not chosen.
This was a fairly good story but I felt like it could have been more. My reading of it was halted by the dialogue which I felt was underdeveloped: I did get a sense of personality from Cedric’s exchanges with others by punctuation used but not so much of character. Speech was positioned in the text but the padding around it, telling you of genuflection or tone was lacking so it felt like it was dropped into the text rather than being part of its flow. I also found the ending a little sharp in its cut-off.
However, Garai’s stories always have heart: they show people enduring and showing resilience despite the odds and I like this. This is where the strength of his fiction lies in that he understands the fight and how important it is and all these stories have that.
Rachel Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
I was given a copy of this book for free to review. This is an unbiased representation of my reading of the book.
Scuffed Granny 