Contemporary Authors

Could not print record from LOC

• Half Gods - 2018 Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York

• Akil Kumarasamy - https://akilk.com/home/

  About

  (photo by Nina Subin)

  Akil Kumarasamy is a writer from New Jersey. She completed her MFA in fiction from the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan and was awarded the Henfield Prize and Frederick Busch Prize. She has received fiction fellowships from the University of Michigan, the University of East Anglia, and the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, where she was a 2016/2017 fiction fellow. She will be a visiting professor in fiction at the Helen Zell Writers’ Program. Her books are forthcoming with Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

• Poets & Writers - https://www.pw.org/content/ten_questions_for_akil_kumarasamy

  Ten Questions for Akil Kumarasamy
  by Staff
  TEN QUESTIONS
  6.5.18
  Printable Version

  Log in to Send

  Log in to Save

  Twitter logo

  Facebook logo

  Tumblr logo

  Pinterest
  This week’s installment of Ten Questions features debut author Akil Kumarasamy, whose collection of linked stories, Half Gods, published today by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, “portrays with sharp clarity the ways in which 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.” Kumarasamy’s fiction has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, American Short Fiction, Boston Review, and elsewhere. She received her MFA from the University of Michigan, and has been a fiction fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and the University of East Anglia.

  Akil Kumarasamy, author of Half Gods (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).

  1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
  I usually write at home or at a café, but I’m pretty open to working anywhere. I don’t necessarily write every day; sometimes I just let an idea sit for a while, seep in my head. I might write ferociously for a week and then have a period where I don’t write at all. Maybe it’s a kind of mental crop rotation, giving the mind time to rest before the next creative burst. For Half Gods, I often wrote at night. I liked working while everyone else was sleeping. I think it made the act feel secretive, like I was tapping into some unknown frequency. Now I’m trying to write in the mornings. It feels more responsible.

  2. How long did it take you to write Half Gods?
  It took a few years of actual writing, but the earliest portion of the book was written in 2010.

  3. What was the most surprising thing about the publication process?
  How long the process takes! From selling the manuscript to the actual publication, it takes around a year and half. I’ve been working on a second book and feel pretty involved it, so it’s interesting now having to discuss Half Gods, which to me feels like a different version of myself.

  4. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA?
  It definitely depends on what you’re looking for. There are many paths toward publication and getting an MFA is just one of them. It can possibly offer the time to fine-tune one’s craft, financial flexibility, and community.

  5. What are you reading right now?
  I’m reading Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend and Catherine Lacey’s Certain American States, which is out in August. It’s amazing.

  6. If you were stuck on a desert island, which book would you want with you?
  I would want a book on how to appreciate and thrive on a desert island while you are away from humanity and the appendix should have the directions on how to build a canoe when you/if you want to reconnect with the rest of the world. In other words, maybe some Chekov.

  7. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
  Well think about how many wonderful books don’t get translated into English. The English language is currency.

  8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
  It’s probably myself. What I think is possible.

  9. What trait do you most value in your editor or agent?
  Their unwavering belief in me. It feels extraordinary.

  10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
  There’s no such thing as writer’s block. Sometimes you go to the computer and nothing valuable comes out and that’s okay. It’s all about how you see the writing process. You don’t need to call it writer’s block and you don’t need to feel guilty when you’re not sitting by the computer. The work requires so much of you that if the guilt doesn’t make you more productive, then the feeling is not worth it. You always have a choice in how you are going to perceive something.

• FSG Work in Progress - https://fsgworkinprogress.com/2018/06/01/roth-unbound/

  The Superpowers of Akil Kumarasamy
  Akil Kumarasamy and Sara NovicIn Conversation

  tartlingly beautiful debut, Akil Kumarasamy’s Half Gods brings together the exiled, the disappeared, the seekers. Following the fractured origins and destinies of two brothers named after demigods from the ancient epic the Mahabharata, we meet a family struggling with the reverberations of the past. 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 and gorgeous prose the ways that parents, children, and friends act as unknowing mirrors to one another, revealing in their all-too-human weaknesses, hopes, and sorrows a connection to the divine. Here, Kumarasamy joins Sara Nović, author of Girl at War, in conversation.Sara Nović: Can you say a bit about your writing process in general, and then how and why this book, specifically, came into being?Akil Kumarasamy: I remember as a child reading comic book versions of the ancient epics, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. They took place during a time when gods still walked the earth. It all seemed quite thrilling—the battles, the hidden identities, the heartbreak, the secret powers—especially since I lived on the swamplands of New Jersey (my house was built on wetlands officially called “Dismal Swamp”). I eventually moved on to other comics like the X-Men and was convinced I could speak to deer and squirrels like some animal-loving telepathic mutant. When writing the book, I was thinking of the mythic nature of childhood, how we long for our own origin stories, how they take on greater meaning, and how they ultimately cast a light, a shadow on the stretch of our lives.In your book Girl at War, the murder of Ana’s parents feels supernatural. They were just eating their lunch like a normal family and the next scene they are being shot into a ditch with other corpses. I think the juxtaposition creates a kind of heightened reality. As children, we are more porous to experiences. Myths help us understand our lives and that is probably why as children we gulp them down so readily. When Ana’s father dies, I kept returning to the fairy tale he was reading to Ana earlier in the book about an old woman who decides to suffer rather than lose her son.In my book Half Gods, two of the main characters are brothers and named after demigods in the Mahabharata. Their grandfather constantly recites ancient tales to them. He left Sri Lanka right when the ethnic conflict broke out and has watched his own intimate losses permeate the lives of these boys, even on the other side of the world. Telling myths becomes a way of survival but it can also be a path to salvation. It allows for the agency to construct one’s own narrative.I grew up in a town that had a strong South Asian presence. While the Sri Lankan civil war hovered more deeply in my consciousness because of my father’s involvement, I was aware of how violence crafted the histories of many of my neighbors and friends. The Partition of India and Pakistan in 1947. The Bangladesh Liberation War in 1971. The 1984 massacres in Delhi. They were like open wounds. There was never any justice. Faceless perpetrators. Do you feel the same about the war crimes in the former Yugoslavia?Nović: Yes, in a lot of ways. Justice is still being sought decades later—we see war criminals from all sides of the Yugoslav conflict being brought to trial in The Hague and elsewhere. Yet even when sentencing goes through, the balance of power doesn’t feel restored—the punishment feels lopsided against the breadth and ugliness of these crimes. And more than that, there are so many ways in which people are still living this war. Rural parts of Bosnia and Croatia are still being de-mined of cluster bombs; Bosnia’s unemployment rate is around 50%, and higher for young people because the governmental system prescribed by the Dayton Accords is stagnant and there’s no clear way to transition out; mass graves are still being excavated.The thing I worry about most is how the war is being taught to this new generation of children who weren’t alive during the conflict or in its immediate aftermath. It’s such a complex tangle of money and power and hatreds, and it’s easy to flatten or try and ignore completely. It was important to me that Ana came to understand there was more than just her personal suffering, awful as it was, in this war. I think she says something like, “the guilt of one side doesn’t prove the innocence of the other.” That’s a hard message to swallow; it’s easier just to be angry. How the story of this war is written in the history books, and otherwise passed down, will determine whether it happens again.Kumarasamy: In some ways that’s also how I feel about the war in Sri Lanka. It’s been almost ten years and the war hasn’t ended. The northeast area of the country is still deeply militarized, and disappearances, sexual assault and torture are still rampant. The military has built victory monuments in many of the areas where Tamils were massacred at the last stages of the war. The government has even banned public memorialization by Tamils in the region, so mourning is criminalized. The government clearly tells one narrative of the story so I do wonder how future generations will respond to the war, but I am also startled at the current blindness about what is happening on the island. There’s a really insightful report by the People for Equality and Relief in Lanka that discusses Sri Lanka’s failure in the Transitional Justice Process. Without the truth, without justice, I do not know how the island will move forward. Excavating mass graves is in some ways a reckoning with the past, but the government of Sri Lanka is not willing to do this.Writing Half Gods, I was thinking of the ways we pass down our trauma in the diaspora, especially the secondhand pain that is left for children. At school, we might swap stories but history is often told in isolation, contained within borders. I didn’t necessarily see myself fitting easily into any construct of nationality. My parents grew up in southern India and my grandfather worked in a rubber plantation in Malaysia so some of my uncles were born there. India is more of a continent than a country. For all I knew, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka could have all been one country. They were carved out of some colonial dream. Incidental and destructive lines on a map. Why would I want the limiting view of colonists to define me? Borders are fictitious, but the violence inflicted over them speaks of the realities of our lives. Many of the conflicts we see in the world today go back to these colonial lines. In my work, I wanted to explore the messiness of these so-called borders by questioning how history is told and whose stories are told side by side in a book. I wanted to write a book that would be hard to reduce. I wanted to create my own kind of geography. Uniting colonies and histories was a kind of subversion to the current order of the world. The two main brothers are Tamil Punjabi American and Hindu Sikh Sri Lankan (though they go by the Tamil name for the island Eelam). The 1937 massacre of Haitians in the Dominican Republic is described in the same sentence as the 1983 massacre of Tamils in Sri Lanka.
  I wanted to explore the messiness of these so-called borders by questioning how history is told and whose stories are told side by side in a book. I wanted to write a book that would be hard to reduce. I wanted to create my own kind of geography.
  Often people have mentioned that the story in Half Gods “The Butcher,” where an Angolan butcher from Botswana visits the Tamil family in New Jersey for dinner on a snowy evening, reminds them of Joyce’s “The Dead.” Did you have that kind of association?Nović: That’s so interesting! I hadn’t thought of it initially, but now that you mention it, it does feel quite a lot like “The Dead”—not only in its premise, but also on a technical level. Something I find impressive about this story, and about Half Gods in general, is the way in which the narrator can quickly shift from a close-third to a more sweeping perspective, or from the story’s present into a memory (or the future) without it ever feeling jarring or like, “HERE’S A FLASHBACK!” It’s something that at first I’m tempted to call stream-of-consciousness, but in reality is more precise. At times I find the third person very challenging and the breadth it gives me as the author overwhelming—but you command it well, and never in a way that feels authorial. I love that about this book.Was Joyce an influence for you in this project? Who are some of your other writing role models?Kumarasamy: I do love Joyce and the Dubliners! I didn’t necessarily study English literature in college so I definitely had literary gaps of knowledge. I actually read “The Dead” in graduate school after I wrote “The Butcher,” and looking back on it I can see how it speaks to its content and structure in surprising ways. The story is a get-together of immigrants and refugees in central Jersey and I stayed near the mind of the main character, Marlon, which was really helpful in navigating through the crowd of people and also essential for the narrative development of the story. I did draw inspiration from many Irish writers like Maeve Brennan and William Trevor. Also authors like Aleksandar Hemon, Edwidge Danticat, and Hassan Blasim were definitely on my mind throughout the writing process.Nović: Hemon is a personal favorite. The Question of Bruno definitely comes to mind.At what point did you realize some of these characters were growing beyond the bounds of a single story? How did you decide to write an interconnected collection versus a novel? Was it difficult to strike that balance of writing complete and self-contained stories within the larger thread of the collection or character arcs?Kumarasamy: I first wrote this book as a play and it only focused on the family and the story of the Mahabharata ran tangentially to it. I had these large monologues where Gods in their full regalia talked about their lives on earth. It was strange but it opened up the book in my mind. There is a scene in Half Gods where Karna shows his class a picture of his family and one of the drawings is of the sun dressed up in a suit. I am interested in how the mystical or divine brush up against the ordinary—something that often happens when the pressure is building, when reality becomes unbearable.Nović: A play? That’s fascinating! Do you have a background in theater? Was there a reason you were drawn to a script as a form? And how did it then transform into a collection?Kumarasamy: I have always loved film and theater, and in college I read fiction alongside scripts and plays. I don’t have a background in theater but I did take many film classes. In my fiction I do see aspects of film and plays filtering into the work. I love the intimacy and the ambiguity of film. You may sense what a character is feeling but you don’t know exactly. Also, you have a budget, so you have to be very selective with scenes. All this is useful when editing fiction, where one can have a tendency to overwrite because the budget is seemingly nonexistent. In plays, there is quite a visceral immediacy—the relationship between the actors and the spectators—as if they are creating the experience together, which I feel happens for fiction as well. The reader is willing the language into life.I didn’t necessarily set out to write a novel or a short story collection. I would love if I didn’t have to categorize it as anything, but I suppose since it deals with the messiness of borders it makes sense that the structure falls somewhere between the two. I knew the main family was fractured by violence and I was trying to tell a story that was marked by absence but still feels full of life. For me that meant working with multiple points-of-view and a non-linear storyline. War messes with any conception of chronology, and the past can feel more lived-in than the present. Also, since the work deals with displacement, I knew it would not be fixed by one geographic location. I eventually found that the interlinked short story form allowed me both expansiveness and a tight construction for the work. I could jump from New Jersey to a tea plantation in pre-independent Ceylon somewhat seamlessly while also building on the narrative. Sometimes I thought of the stories as chapters as I shuffled across time. I wanted the work to accumulate power as the stories progressed, revealing different layers of the characters, and also for each story to be able to stand individually.I wasn’t too nervous about repeating information because I felt each “chapter” was achieving something different and was revealing in its own specific way. I was more focused on tightening connections between the stories and making sure details followed through to the end, so it could offer a richer experience with each potential re-read (assuming someone picks up the book again). Even if no one else notices those details except me that’s fine too. As readers, we all grasp different layers and details of books and that’s part of the joy of it.I am often wary of a book structure that feels too clean or that is obviously following a pattern. It might make the work feel too constructed and I don’t want the reader to feel my authorial presence so strongly. I want the reader to disappear into the world of the book, for it to exist without me. Part of my intent in writing this book was to capture the nuances of brownness, placing brownness against a brown wall. In other words, seeing brownness from the point of centrality rather than from the margins. I want the book to feel capacious and full of life while feeling deeply connected for purposeful reasons. When an Angolan butcher from Botswana visits the family in New Jersey for dinner, it needs to feel integral to the narrative arc of the book.As a writer, what I can play with is point of view and tense so I really tried to utilize it for maximum effect. Especially since I am working with stories, there is more understanding if sudden jumps in time, place, or even characters, occur. I did find the chronological and geographical jump from the first section of Girl at War to be especially startling, partly because section one ends with such devastation. It was very refreshing to see that kind of break in time so early in the book. Also, it reinforces how Ana is trying to block her own access to memory—we feel that absence on a very visceral level.I too was questioning how to write about violence in a way that felt inventive without being exploitive. And I wanted the book to feel joyful, which I think comes across even when you look at the cover. There is a lot of death in the book, but it’s also bursting with life. Death is not the opposite of life; it is what gives life value. How did you think about representing violence in your work? When I think of the end of the first section of Girl at War, it is the accumulation of the everyday love of a family that makes that final scene in the forest so unbearable.
  There is a lot of death in the book, but it’s also bursting with life. Death is not the opposite of life; it is what gives life value.
  Nović: You’ve phrased that so well—death being what gives life value. Since one of the motivations for writing Girl at War was the fact that so few people knew the details of this conflict, there was part of me that wanted to make it ugly, to force people to look at that violence up close. I think there are moments in the book where that happens and it works to shock people or get their attention, but ultimately, it’s not what carries the emotional heft of the story. That scene in the forest was one of the first parts of this manuscript I wrote, and there’s an intimacy to it because of that—there weren’t yet a lot of other moving parts or characters in play, so the focus is completely on the relationship of that family. Which is to say, I sort of stumbled into the thing that became my central philosophy about writing war and violence—that it should be intimate and should rub up against the everyday of people’s lives, as it does for so many.Kumarasamy: I was also struck by the section in your book where Ana becomes a child soldier. Often when political structures mention child soldiers, it’s used as a point of criticism, especially in association with rebel groups. For Ana, the war recontextualizes what childhood means. Applying our norms of childhood to her reality no longer feels relevant. How do you see her role in the war? What does a female fighter mean to you? Also, I was very interested in how you spoke about the United Nations. When Ana goes to give testimony, it reminded me of the ways that organizations try to reduce individuals to the moment of their trauma (rape victim, child soldier, etc.) Srebrencia is an example of how the United Nations breaks down. I also see the end of the war in Sri Lanka as an example of how international agents allow genocide to happen.Nović: And that was actually my “light” take on the UN. The thing I find so frustrating about the UN is its impotence even in a situation as overt as Srebrenica, and many genocides before and since. But really its problems are just representative of all the ways we as countries and individuals allow busyness—or bureaucracy—to serve as an excuse for stepping back and averting our eyes when it comes to genocide and mass murder. And, as Ana’s time in the UN explores, there are also these very specific ways certain peoples’ plights can be packaged in order to get people to care about it.I wrote Ana’s time as a child soldier as pushback against that. Just as you mentioned the joy amidst the death in Half Gods (the cover nails it, by the way), for me Ana’s time in the safe house is actually about coming back to life, rather than the death she encounters there. She becomes part of a community; she has agency, and though part of that is very dark and disturbing, it’s also essential in drawing her out of that trauma of the forest. I wanted to challenge readers to think about war differently than so many Americans do as a thing that happens “over there,” and also an adult (male) thing. For so many, the reality of war is inextricable from childhood, from family—war in your home. That’s something I hope readers grapple with in the Safe House section, and the whole novel, really. And because Ana regains some of her childhood in the Safe House I found it the most compelling part of the novel to write, as if I was rooting for her, even though it was the least familiar territory with respect to where I sat at the time—scribbling into a notebook on the NJ Transit.Regarding the dual settings for your collection: one part is set in places more familiar to your own everyday experience, while the other is more tethered to your family’s history and culture. When I was writing across a similar divide, I found the further place from where I sat at any given moment much easier to write about. Did you experience something similar? Did one side lend itself to fiction more readily? And how did you render both places equally vividly?Kumarasamy: In this book I am writing about places that are both familiar and unfamiliar to me simultaneously. I’ve never been to Sri Lanka but the war has inhabited such a vast part of my consciousness growing up. Even New Jersey feels like an imagined homeland. Though I grew up there, it still feels strange and mysterious to me. I remember there was a baseball field by my house where everyone used to play cricket. A group of grandfathers would regularly sit on the bench and watch. They were all from different places around the world and couldn’t speak to each other but were bound by their love for cricket. There was something subversive in seeing cricket being played on a baseball field but I also felt the invisible hand of the empire. The fact that this was all happening in a place called Dismal Swamp strengthened my theories that Jersey was a kind of twilight zone.I wrote a bulk of an early draft of this book in Michigan, so I do think being away from Jersey helped me write about it. Distance from the Garden State Parkway surely gave me some clarity. Maybe just being away from people, places, and stories that feel familiar to you allows a new channel of access, a kind of beginner’s mind in seeing your own experiences. Also, I’m deeply impressed that you got so much writing done on the NJ Transit!
  Just being away from people, places, and stories that feel familiar to you allows a new channel of access, a kind of beginner’s mind in seeing your own experiences.
  Nović: Do you have a secret favorite character?Kumarasamy: I feel like this is a trick question. Like when someone asks a parent if they have a favorite child. I kind of love them all, even though they are deeply flawed and awful sometimes. I do feel especially sympathetic for Gurmit in “Brown Smurf.” I see him beyond the story and he’s grown and I just hope he finds love, that he finds people who understand him. I guess that’s a very parent-like inclination though I am not a parent. But fiction is wonderful in that way, giving you a feeling of something that you have not experienced.Nović: And now an even worse question! What’s next for you? I remember after turning in Girl at War to my editor there was an acute emptiness, like, “well, those were all my thoughts!” and it took a while for me to feel I had something interesting to say again. Did you feel that kind of book hangover? Do you have new projects percolating?Kumarasamy: I think I had that kind of emptiness a few years back when my father suddenly passed away and I found myself back in Dismal Swamp, living with my mum and sleeping in my childhood bed. I didn’t have much interest in reading or writing fiction. I remember opening books and staring at the curves of ink and not being able to alchemize anything. I felt like I had lost a secret power that had sustained me for so many years.My mom was the one who found the manuscript of Half Gods, my recent grad school thesis, while she was cleaning. I had somehow forgotten about it but on reading it again, I had the strange sensation that I had written the book for my future self, when I would lose a parent. I had never thought that I could get comfort from my younger self, but how affirming it was that the person I had least expected was looking out for me.While finishing Half Gods, I began working on a second book, which is very much informed by that time. Agnes Varda’s Vagabond and Alice Coltrane are definitely big influences. I’m excited to finish it. After this first book, I have become more comfortable with the uncertainty in the artistic process, how much writing is an act of faith, and how necessary it is to trust again and again that the words will come.Akil Kumarasamy is a writer from New Jersey. Her fiction has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, American Short Fiction, Boston Review, and elsewhere. She received her MFA from the University of Michigan, and has been a fiction fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and the University of East Anglia. Half Gods is her first book.Sara Nović is the author of the novel Girl at War, which won an American Library Association Award, was a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist, and is forthcoming in thirteen more languages. She holds an MFA in fiction and literary translation from Columbia University, and is an assistant professor of creative writing at Stockton University, a public liberal arts school in southern New Jersey. She lives in Philadelphia.

7/26/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1532606132040 1/5
Print Marked Items
Kumarasamy, Akil: HALF GODS
Kirkus Reviews.
(May 1, 2018):
COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Kumarasamy, Akil HALF GODS Farrar, Straus and Giroux (Adult Fiction) $25.00 6, 5 ISBN: 978-0-374-
16767-7
A collection of stories about a family for whom the Sri Lankan civil war is a constant backdrop.
The Sri Lankan civil war, a bitter fight between the country's majority Sinhalese and minority Tamils, lasted
for decades; tens of thousands of people died. In Kumarasamy's first book, that war is always present. At
the center of these stories is a family: Nalini, her father, and her two sons, Arjun and Karna. During the war,
Nalini's mother and twin brothers were brutally murdered. She and her father manage to flee to New Jersey,
but the war, and their grief, follows close behind. Each story takes a different vantage point: In one of them,
Nalini is a child, making friends in their dinky apartment complex; in another, she's a grown woman with
teenage sons. The stories vary between characters' points of view as well as location and time. The result is
a kaleidoscopic vision of a family. While the book is moving and the writing elegant and clear, the
collection begins to feel almost like a writing exercise, moving from third-person to first-person and back;
when it finally comes to the rarely used second person ("You are thirty but can pass for someone seven
years younger"), the effect isn't nearly as surprising as it might otherwise have been. It might be that
Kumarasamy's control on the stories is too tight. One wonders what might happen if she were to loosen her
grip.
An otherwise moving collection feels overly prescribed.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Kumarasamy, Akil: HALF GODS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 May 2018. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A536571123/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=5d6e08c6.
Accessed 26 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A536571123
7/26/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1532606132040 2/5
Half Gods
Publishers Weekly.
265.16 (Apr. 16, 2018): p64.
COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Half Gods
Akil Kumarasamy. Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
$25 (224p) ISBN 978-0-374-16767-7
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 Kama. 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. (June)
Caption: Akil Kumarasamy's collection of linked stories, Half Gods, is a wonderful, auspicious debut
(reviewed on this page).
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Half Gods." Publishers Weekly, 16 Apr. 2018, p. 64. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A536532679/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=c0e105b1.
Accessed 26 July 2018.
7/26/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1532606132040 3/5
Gale Document Number: GALE|A536532679
7/26/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1532606132040 4/5
Briefly Noted
Molly Long
The New Yorker.
94.18 (June 25, 2018): p71.
COPYRIGHT 2018 Conde Nast Publications, Inc.. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The
Conde Nast Publications, Inc.
http://www.newyorker.com/
Full Text:
Briefly Noted
tif71tif71tif71tif71
Half Gods, by Akil Kumarasamy (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Thick with suburban magic realism, this novelin-stories
tracks three generations of Tamil refugees from Sri Lanka, living in Jersey City. A teen-ager
named Arjun feels guilty about asking his brother to pray for domestic stability while the family's country
burns. His grandfather, whose wife and children were killed in Sri Lanka, recites Tamil poetry at the
television. "Only myth had any real pleasure left for him," Arjun observes. In episodes spanning a century
or so, family dramas mingle with tales of murder in colonial Ceylon, of an Angolan butcher who names his
daughter for a sea nymph, of a man who defiantly sticks out his tongue as he is burned alive. The recurrent
theme is one of human life thrown off course by disaster, whether world-historical or mundane.
Unworthy, by Antonio Monda, translated from the Italian by John Cullen (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday). The
narrator of this short novel is a young Catholic priest suffering under the strain of a double life: in spite of
his vows, he continues to sleep with women. After falling in love with one of them, he begins stealing from
his church to buy her gifts. His agonized confessions amount to a meditation on the contradictions of a
calling that demands both a sensitivity to the beauty of God's creation and the restraint to remain detached
from its most intense pleasures. "There's no morning, no day, no moment when I don't thank him for this
frailty that makes me feel human, and for the joy my sin gives me," the priest confides.
Rome, by Matthew Kneale (Simon & Schuster). This propulsive "history in seven sackings" tells the story
of Rome from the Gauls' invasion, in 387 B.C., to the arrival of the Nazis, in 1943. Kneale depicts the city
as its various attackers encountered it: Gauls, arriving naked on horseback, found a nearly rural settlement;
the Visigoths, invading eight centuries later, laid waste to unimaginable architectural marvels. He carefully
charts continuity as well as destruction: when the Normans came, in 1084, many ruins were still integral to
daily life; the crumbling Colosseum had become "the city's largest housing complex." The buildings, vastly
altered yet recognizable, epitomize a civilization repeatedly threatened yet still thriving today.
The China Mission, by Daniel Kurtz-Phelan (Norton). Shortly after the end of the Second World War,
President Truman dispatched General George Marshall to broker a peace deal between China's repressive
National Government and the revolutionaries led by Mao Zedong. Kurtz-Phelan's detailed account of the
diplomatic mission's failure reads like a parable of America's evangelizing idealism and paternalistic hubris.
Marshall spoke of "the awakening of backward and colonial peoples" and handed Chairman Chiang Kaishek
a draft bill of rights, calling it "a dose of American medicine." For China-watchers back home, the
mission's success was a foregone conclusion. But a ceasefire quickly collapsed and soon the Communists
were on their way to military victory.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
7/26/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1532606132040 5/5
Long, Molly. "Briefly Noted." The New Yorker, 25 June 2018, p. 71. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A544248481/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=d5359cd1.
Accessed 26 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A544248481

"Kumarasamy, Akil: HALF GODS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 May 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A536571123/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 26 July 2018. "Half Gods." Publishers Weekly, 16 Apr. 2018, p. 64. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A536532679/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 26 July 2018. Long, Molly. "Briefly Noted." The New Yorker, 25 June 2018, p. 71. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A544248481/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 26 July 2018.

• New York Times
  https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/05/books/review/half-gods-akil-kumarasamy.html
  Word count: 847

  FICTION

  Debut Stories Trace the Aftershocks of the Sri Lankan Civil War
  Image
  Akil KumarasamyCreditNina Subin
  BUY BOOK ▾
  When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.

  By Tania James
  July 5, 2018

  HALF GODS
  By Akil Kumarasamy
  224 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $25.

  In Tamil, farewells are never final. As Akil Kumarasamy pointed out in a 2017 interview, the Tamil equivalent of goodbye is poyittu varen, meaning “I’ll go and return.” These are parting words especially suited to the refugee: ever running away, ever looking back.

  Kumarasamy poignantly illustrates this tension in her debut story collection, “Half Gods.” Across decades and continents, her characters are haunted by catastrophic violence, their emotional scars passed from one generation to the next.

  Wisely, Kumarasamy takes a muted approach to the violence. In “The Office of Missing Persons,” a Sri Lankan Tamil father engages with the police to find his teenage son — this during the final and bloodiest phase of the nearly 30-year Sri Lankan civil war between the Sinhalese majority and the separatist Tamil Tigers. From the outset, it’s obvious that Jeganathan, an entomologist beloved for his research by the Sinhalese government, will never find his son, and so the story’s momentum feeds on a growing dread that is crystallized when “the officer asked for Jeganathan’s son’s name and he knew it was a trick. He needed his name to find him and then have reason not to find him.” Between those lines exists an entire world in which killing a man is as easy as erasing his name from a ledger of missing persons.

  Image
  On the other side of the world, in New Jersey, Jeganathan’s friend Muthu is tormented by what he has already lost: his wife and twin sons killed by a mob. In his old age, Muthu and his remaining family watch television to track the end of the civil war in 2009, when the Sri Lankan government besieged whole northern villages, and brutality from both sides resulted in the massacre of tens of thousands of Tamil men, women and children. Yet only state-sanctioned celebration is televised, with the sitting president declaring “in Sinhala that there were no casualties from the war and the people of Sri Lanka were finally free from terror.”

  Muthu and his family’s is a suffering visible only to themselves. Rather than describing their sense of futility, Kumarasamy folds the emotion into an image of birds pecking at newly planted seeds, so that “in the end, the garden looked more like a series of mousetraps.”

  You have 4 free articles remaining.

  Subscribe to The Times
  Most of these stories are defined by contemplation rather than plot. In “New World,” a child laborer runs away from a tea plantation in an act of cunning and audacity, yet the act itself occurs offstage. It’s hard not to want a front seat to that delicious bit of drama; instead Kumarasamy bears testament to the laborers who have been left behind. In spite of the repercussions sure to befall them, the women find a fleeting comfort in writing the boy’s future: “He is an actor in a film … then he’s a teacher, a doctor, a train conductor.” Their voices, muted by history, deliver the story to surprising heights of compassion and hope.

  At one point, Muthu’s teenage daughter, Nalini, asks, “Why do a few sad events have to make a whole life unhappy?” This question raises another: What does happiness mean in the context of a shattered life? Kumarasamy’s characters have managed to piece their lives back together, but her preoccupation lies with the seams — and how these are continually tested by the small, private aftershocks of trauma.

  Still, a life without happiness is not a life without wonder. In “The Butcher,” a grown-up Nalini reaches across the meat counter to clean the butcher’s wounded hands; later he marvels at the memory of her fingers on his wrist. The prose itself is a marvel because of Kumarasamy’s attention to ugliness: “his skin hard and cracked like a frozen glove.” Such intimate gestures arrive like shafts of light throughout this lyrical and affecting collection, sparing us briefly from the dark.

  EDITORS’ PICKS

  Parents Behaving Badly: A Youth Sports Crisis Caught on Video

  What the Mystery of the Tick-Borne Meat Allergy Could Reveal

  When She Earns More
  Tania James is the author, most recently, of “The Tusk That Did the Damage.”

  Follow New York Times Books on Facebook and Twitter, sign up for our newsletter or our literary calendar. And listen to us on the Book Review podcast.

  A version of this article appears in print on July 7, 2018, on Page 21 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: War Wounds. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

• The Masters Review
  https://mastersreview.com/book-review-half-gods-akil-kumarasamy/
  Word count: 1096

  Book Review: Half Gods by Akil Kumarasamy
  Every few years, somebody resurrects the old debate over whether reading books can increase a person’s empathy. On the one hand, researchers at The New School and the University of Toronto have conducted studies that suggest that, yes, projecting ourselves into the lives of fictional characters makes us more sensitive toward others. On the other, as essayist Teju Cole has observed, no less than the Nazis harbored a deep admiration for high culture, and Barack Obama’s love for Marilynne Robinson did not stop him from launching drone strikes throughout the Middle East.

  I thought of this debate while reading Akil Kumarasamy’s captivating story collection Half Gods, which follows a single Sri Lankan family as they flee their country’s bloody civil war to seek asylum in New Jersey. This massive displacement echoes sharply down the family line, from Muthu, the aging patriarch who grew up on a Sri Lankan tea plantation in the 1950s, to his daughter Nalini, to her two American-born sons, Arjun and Karna. Theirs is a story irrevocably marked by loss and unbelonging, a slow, steady undercurrent of pain that leaves them as emotionally estranged from their new home as they are from their old.

  Half Gods’ ten narratives span decades and continents, leaping from character to character to reveal the often-devastating impact immigration has had on each. There is Nalini, who finds herself drawn into a love affair with her brother-in-law, a childhood friend with whom she finds unexpected solace: “their lovemaking had the familiarity of children who had grown up together, witnessed all the unflattering and lasting effects of puberty…[they could] move years into the past, slow down the future, and pause on the present.” There is Muthu, who quietly hordes old clothes and magazines and memorizes whole books to account for the libraries burned by the soldiers back home. Most heartbreakingly, there is Karna, whose alienation is compounded by his queerness, and who turns to acting to escape his own identity: “You are a convenience store owner, a taxi driver, a doctor, a terrorist, an IT worker, an exchange student. An Egyptian, a Pakistani, a Trinidadian, an Indian. You wear your skin like it’s something borrowed, not owned.”

  Each of these stories is a fully-formed thing, ten carefully sculpted little worlds. And yet each is so deeply interlinked with its neighbors that to label this a “collection” feels like a disservice to the wider tapestry Kumarasamy has woven. Much like Celeste Ng’s Everything I Never Told You, Kumarasamy is concerned with the repressed traumas and unspoken resentments that, left alone, can pry families apart piece by piece. Indeed, Half Gods gains its emotional resonance not only from its characters’ nuanced internal lives, but from the cumulative effect of stacking these narratives next to each other. The result is a subtle and complex book that requires and rewards a reader’s attention, one that feels less like a group of individual stories and more like a sweeping family epic in disguise.

  It is also, I imagine, a challenging read for anyone not well versed with Sri Lankan history. Half Gods is laced with references to the Sri Lankan Civil War, the Tamil Tigers, and the Mahabharata, the Sanskrit epic from which Arjun and Karna, the two sons, take their names. But Kumarasamy offers little historical context beyond that, no hand-holding: we are expected simply to keep up. As a critic, I was initially tempted to label this a fault in the book. It was a bold choice, I thought, to presume American readers would be familiar with the characters of the Mahabharata, or to understand the tensions and ethnic differences between the Tamils and Sinhalese, or to know the events of the Sri Lankan Civil War. I certainly was not; I suspected I was not alone. Perhaps, I thought, I was simply not the intended audience for the book—and it is true that Half Gods provides important and much-neglected literary representation for Sri Lankan Americans. But this too felt like a lousy excuse to let myself off the hook, to avoid confronting the harder questions I knew were there.

  For the more background reading I did, the more uneasy I became with my own knee-jerk reaction. The Sri Lankan Civil War lasted for sixteen years, claimed more than 100,000 lives, and displaced almost a million people. Toward the end of the war, the country had a higher number of missing persons than any in the world except Iraq. (One of Half Gods’ strongest stories, “The Office of Missing Persons,” concerns an entomologist who becomes an activist following his son’s disappearance.) In other words, this was not some small, obscure conflict—and to complain about Half Gods not compensating for my ignorance seemed an act of selfishness. We would not critique a book set during the Civil War for not explaining who Robert E. Lee is, just as we do not criticize Graham Greene’s novels for presuming familiarity with Catholicism. In the same way, it should not be Kumarasamy’s job to catch us up on the facts of the Sri Lankan conflict. That role belongs to us.

  This is not limited to Half Gods. As narratives by and about immigrants become increasingly prominent in our national discourse, it is important for us as readers—especially white readers—to meet these books on the author’s terms, rather than critiquing them for venturing out of the realm of our expertise. In the introduction to her classic Borderlands, Gloria Anzaldúa explains her decision to write the book in a hybrid of English and Chicano Spanish. “Chicanos no longer feel that we need to beg entrance, to make the first overture, to translate…apology blurting out of our mouths with every step,” she writes. “Today we ask to be met halfway.” This is the same request Half Gods makes—and if there is a book in the world that can increase a person’s empathy, it is surely a book like this: one that not only presents us with a culture outside our own, but pushes us to consider how we engage with that culture’s narrative: to look beyond the words on the page for answers, to put in the work, to acknowledge and redress the limits of our own blinkered knowledge. I am grateful for it.

  Publication date: June 5, 2018

  Publisher: FSG

  Reviewed by Will Preston

• Los Angeles Review of Books
  https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/melancholic-mythologies-half-gods-and-the-mahabharata/#!
  Word count: 2652

  Melancholic Mythologies: “Half Gods” and the “Mahabharata”
  By Kalyan Nadiminti

  42 0 0

  JUNE 16, 2018

  EARLY IN Half Gods, the debut story collection by Sri Lankan-American author Akil Kumarasamy, Muthu, a Sri Lankan refugee-patriarch, narrates the melancholic reality of surviving the Sri Lankan Civil War. As an exile, he engages in games of “word memory,” compulsively absorbing text as a coping mechanism, but he complains that his grandchildren have no interest in “safekeeping words.” The children have a quick reply: “Sometimes we need to forget something to make room for new memories.” Half Gods asks its readers to do much the same with history, memory, and mythology. As the title suggests, the collection conjures various forms of incompleteness, whether in a search for identity, for a place that could be called home, or for bonds that endure as family. In each of the 10 stories, half of which have been published in venues like Harper’s Magazine, American Short Fiction, and Boston Review, home emerges as a distant and unwieldy concept that threatens to strand its characters in what Georg Lukács has dubbed the fundamental predicament of the novel form, that of “transcendental homelessness.”

  The collection’s title also refers to the status of the Pandavas, who are the sons of Pandu, the king of Hastinapur in the Hindu epic Mahabharata — one of the most influential wellsprings of South Asian literary and popular narratives over the last four decades. From B. R. Chopra’s Indian television adaptation (1988) to Shashi Tharoor’s retelling of postcolonial Indian history in The Great Indian Novel (1989) to Ashok Banker’s ongoing Mahabharata book series (2011–present), a veritable cultural industry has found that the longest epic poem in the world makes for strong intellectual and cultural capital. Throughout these disparate projects, the Mahabharata has served as a crucial allegory of post-Independence as well as a spectacular event for the Indian popular imagination. Tharoor, in particular, doubled down on the epic’s allegorical resonance by mapping its narrative structure onto the founding of the nation in a tragicomic register that nonetheless gestures toward its monumental scale.

  Kumarasamy takes a different approach to the epic tradition, embarking on a much quieter allusion to the Mahabharata to reflect on the magnitude of the Sri Lankan Civil War, which began in 1983 and lasted for 26 years. It was a conflict between the Sinhalese-controlled national army, the political party Eelam People’s Revolutionary Liberation Front (EPRLF), and the globally vilified separatist insurgent group Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), ultimately ending with the Sri Lankan army declaring victory in 2009. While Sri Lankan authors have often invoked the other great Indian epic, the Ramayana, by restaging its Indian antagonist Ravana as a tragic hero, Kumarasamy’s turn to the Mahabharata gestures toward the unhomed, divided condition of diaspora. The collection’s imperative epigraph — “Man or god or demon, let him in!” — appears early in the Mahabharata, when Drona — a mentor to one of the most accomplished Pandavas, Arjuna — allows the enigmatic tragic hero Karna to enter a warrior demonstration. Karna, who happens to be Arjuna’s secret half-brother, surpasses Arjuna easily but will go on to join their losing cousins, the Kauravas, in the succession war for the Kuru dynasty. The Pandavas are exiled from Hastinapur after losing to their cousins in a game of dice, spending 12 years disguised as Brahmins in a forest and preparing for the eventual Kurukshetra War. The epigraphic utterance, a relatively minor moment of uncertainty, takes on a surprising resonance with the vulnerability of the refugee seeking sanctuary, thus suggesting a structural resonance between the Pandavas’ exile and that of Sri Lankan diaspora more broadly.

  Half Gods unfolds in the form of a punctuated story cycle, wherein the narratives offer brief, nonlinear portraits of a Sri Lankan immigrant family in the United States and the other immigrant lives they encounter. Kumarasamy’s refugee tales bring into focus atrocities in South Asia that remain relatively underrepresented in literary fiction. Diasporic narratives of refugees and stateless persons have become a prominent feature of contemporary American and global fiction, and Kumarasamy joins established Sri Lankan authors like Shyam Selvadurai, Michael Ondaatje, Romesh Gunesekera, and Shehan Karunatilaka in her return to the Sri Lankan Civil War. Half Gods straddles postcolonial pasts and American futures, asking whether it is indeed possible for its melancholy subjects of diaspora to remake their homes in a new land. Kumarasamy unsettles the Sri Lankan-American concept of home, not by gesturing explicitly to the conceptual similarity between the Pandavas’ exile and the Sri Lankan refugees but by meditating on the impossibility of making the allegory stick.

  Instead, Kumarasamy casts Arjun and Karna, respectively, as the dutiful, good son and the unconventional, errant brother. Meanwhile, their mother, Nalini, finds herself in an affair with her husband’s brother and thinks of “ancient stories where men were married to many wives, and sisters agreed to wed the same man. She could not imagine Draupadi without the five Pandava brothers, all her beloved husbands.” Her father, Muthu, who is also the boys’ school janitor, smokes himself down to a single functional lung while secretly memorizing any book he can lay his hands on, perhaps an allusive reference to Vyasa, the purported author of the Mahabharata. While the focus holds on the experience of diaspora, Kumarasamy renders slow-moving pictures of both Sri Lankan-American and Sri Lankan grief that unspool over the course of the collection, weaving between nonlinear timelines that continuously revise the family narrative.

  Signaling the resonances between family, community, and nation, Kumarasamy experiments with the use of the first-person plural “we” in her story “New World,” which narrates the bewilderment and confusion of Ceylon’s independence from Britain. Narrated by a chorus of women working on a tea estate, the story captures both the political eagerness of new freedom and the stark realities of infrastructural lack:

  Our children clung to us tighter, fearful in their smallness, and we told them not to be afraid, because we had nothing to lose in the first place. We own none of this, we reminded them patiently, and their wide eyes looked over the imploded houses, the silver glint of metal, and they pointed at their buried things, waiting to retrieve what was lost.

  The strength of “New World” is that its lyrical realism, though overwrought, conveys the fragility of South Asian post-Independence. At key moments, Kumarasamy references India to distinguish the uncertain position that Ceylon (renamed Sri Lanka) occupies in the geopolitics of decolonization.

  Another story, “The Birthplace of Sound,” uses the second-person perspective of “you” to place the reader inside the consciousness of an established character, Karna. Writers like Mohsin Hamid have used this technique to renovate the bildungsroman or redeploy the self-help genre as fiction. Kumarasamy contextualizes Karna’s marginality within the family by aligning his growth with that of other marginalized diasporic figures. The story begins with an interpellation that arrests the reader with an expansive immigrant cast:

  You are a convenience store owner, a taxi driver, a doctor, a terrorist, an IT worker, an exchange student. An Egyptian, a Pakistani, a Trinidadian, an Indian. You wear your skin like it’s something borrowed, not owned. Like all those hand-me-downs that belonged to your brother your mother saved, so you were always five years behind the latest trends. Who you are right now is temporary, you tell yourself when you break out with acne and miss an audition.

  The multitudes of Karna, a struggling actor, also imply the polarities of immigrant work within an American narrative of race, such as the upwardly mobile lawyer Arjun or his working-class refugee grandfather. Half Gods is interested in the latter: there are times when the author seems to be trying to create images reminiscent of the stark refugee fictions of Viet Thanh Nguyen — broken communities that gather in decrepit housing complexes or failing restaurants. However, the sheer number of perspectival shifts — first-person plural, direct address, second-person address, and more — prevents a proper sense of character development. Surprisingly, for example, the collection gives relatively little space to Nalini, whose untroubled infidelity makes her one of the more intriguing family members.

  The collection also portrays the difficulty of Sri Lankans, who do not manage to make their way to the United States, Britain, or another reluctant sanctuary. One story, “The Office of Missing Persons,” stands out as a grim representation of the Sri Lanka’s government’s genocidal practices toward the Tamil people and the LTTE. It presents a Kafkaesque tale of a university professor, an entomologist, who mounts a nonviolent demonstration to protest the disappearance of Tamil people after his son vanishes without a trace. Deviating from the lyricism of the rest of the collection, Kumarasamy prefers an approach that walks the thin line between reportage and satire. The story also seems to pause its allusive structure to speak directly about state-sponsored violence:

  War had seeped into the meaning of everything. Forty-seven students and one insect ex-professor sitting cross-legged and calling for the return of the disappeared were terrorists in training according to the reports from the central government. That week the United Nations Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances also released a report ranking Sri Lanka as the country with the second highest number of disappearances.

  In later stories like “Lifetimes in Flight,” the portraits differ in their exploration of both Sri Lankan-American family values and the experiences of other global South immigrants. While Kumarasamy gestures toward a resonance between the Sri Lankan diaspora and other immigrants (like Marlon, the eponymous character from Angola in “The Butcher”), the collection loses its conceptual clarity by deliberately blending the Sri Lankan family into the generalized frame of global immigration. After inhabiting the inner workings of all four family members, “The Butcher” is too self-consciously staged from the perspective of an outsider and ends up rehearsing familiar conventions of immigrant displacement. “Lifetimes in Flight” reveals the crisscrossing immigrant history of Selvakumar from the second story “New World,” but its transatlantic shift to Essex seems too removed from the story cycle to have a significant payoff. In this sense, the collection does not add anything especially new or startling about the particularity of Sri Lankan refugees.

  The collection remains in the shadow of established protocols of postcolonial and diasporic representations. The opening story “Last Prayer” pauses briefly with the charged symbolism of the National Geographic to reverse the magazine’s carefully Orientalized images of the East to its Western audience. Instead of deliberating on its images, Arjun dreams of natural disasters stripping various parts of the United States. The fascination with the magazine appears in small but crucial ways, recalling a similar conceit in Kiran Desai’s 2006 Booker Prize–winning novel, The Inheritance of Loss. In “New World,” possibly the collection’s most well-wrought story, Kumarasamy reaches for an overused conceit that recalls another Booker Prize–winning novel, Arundhati Roy’s 1997 The God of Small Things. “Whatever was left of our girlhood survived in small things,” writes Kumarasamy:

  [T]he stones our daughters carried in their pockets, and the shriek of a koel bird we had dreamed of eating for its voice. For the new world, we must all transform, shed our skin and rename everything. The flowers were stripped, the trees slanted with torn limbs, and we needed to make sense of it while the water shriveled us into old women and plowed through the land to bring new life.

  Much like the perspectival shifts, its lyrical realism retreads a predictable style of narration that privileges preciousness in its presentation of melancholic truth, a style that certainly worked for Roy but one that she has abandoned with alacrity in her more recent novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017). Neither does the prose have the same restraint or aesthetic conviction that Michael Ondaatje conjures in Anil’s Ghost (2000), perhaps one of the most prominent novels about the Sri Lankan Civil War.

  In Half Gods, the Mahabharata’s allegorical distance from Kumarasamy’s realism, though intriguing at first, falls short of providing a clear generic or scalar purpose; it is never quite clear why Kumarasamy chooses to treat the epic obliquely through realism. How might the Mahabharata provide an ironic sense of scale of the civil war for Sri Lankan diasporic communities, for example? The family’s story cycle is frustratingly cryptic on the precise mechanics of the epic throughout the collection, pointing to a larger problem with the use of mythology in contemporary Anglophone literature. If, indeed, the Mahabharata is being invoked as an abstract, affective mythology, one that relies on a constitutive forgetting, then it seems that Kumarasamy relies on a conceptual slipperiness to invoke the family as a fluid rendition of the epic. In other words, the family members move through a variety of mythic roles — scribes, warriors, gods, men — in what often reads as an arbitrary assignment. It is certainly compelling to reimagine the Kurukshetra War as the battle between the Tamil and Sinhalese ethnic populations, but this too provides an unsatisfactory mapping: how might we account for Tamil lives — civilian, activist, or rebel — who have either perished or endured the war within the island nation in such an allegory?

  Indeed, a return to magical realism as allegory, like Salman Rushdie’s much-debated reinterpretation of Islam’s origins in The Satanic Verses (1988) or Vikram Chandra’s satirical use of the Mahabharata in Red Earth and Pouring Rain (1995), will hardly sidestep the problem of inventiveness. But the collection highlights a tendency with contemporary Global South/diasporic writing to reach for epic traditions rooted in vernacular languages to renovate the diasporic as well as Anglophone realist narrative. What transpires in this instance is that the world is both saturated with mythic potential and curiously evacuated from its central conceit. In fact, what is most surprising is that Kumarasamy keeps her readers at a remove from the civil war, which features as a persistent but peripheral location, despite the war having ended as recently as 2009. While three stories, “Last Prayer,” “A Story of Happiness,” and “The Office of Missing Persons,” certainly describe the civilian population caught between the government and the LTTE, the author’s emphasis on Sri Lankan-American lives privileges the haunting of diaspora over contested realities on the island nation, which is perhaps only reasonable given the writer’s American nationality. This tactic also calls to mind Zadie Smith’s complaint about the cost of lyrical realism, that of an “authenticity fetish” that comes “embroidered in the fancy of times past.” The fault is not so much that of Kumarasamy’s as that of a global writing and publishing industry that orients itself toward an inevitable Westward horizon, even when it attempts to account for difference, in the process relegating the non-bourgeois non-Western subject as mere background for its target audience.

  Notwithstanding its allusive opacity and predictable prose, Kumarasamy’s debut moves in the right direction, provoking serious questions about the writing of human rights and the ways in which literature bears the burden of representing unsolvable political problems. Writing about the innately interpretative nature of mythology, Indian poet A. K. Ramanujan defiantly opined that “no text is original, yet no telling is a mere retelling — and the story has no closure, although it may be enclosed in a text. In India and in Southeast Asia, no one ever reads the Ramayana or the Mahabharata for the first time.” Kumarasamy adds Sri Lanka to this literary map by rescaling the grand narrative of the Mahabharata into a captivating story cycle.

  ¤

  Kalyan Nadiminti writes about 20th- and 21st-century Asian-American and global Anglophone literatures, law and immigration studies, and affect theory.

Word Count