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WORK TITLE: Swimmer among the Stars
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.kanishktharoor.net/
CITY: New York
STATE: NY
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY: Indian
http://www.npr.org/2017/03/11/519807700/author-kanishk-tharoor-on-language-and-short-stories * http://www.npr.org/2017/03/16/515439633/swimmer-among-the-stars-infuses-relics-with-resonance
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Son of Shashi Tharoor (father) and Tilottama Mukherji (mother).
EDUCATION:Yale University, B.A. (magna cum laude); attended Columbia University and New York University.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, editor, broadcaster, researcher, and short-story writer. BBC radio, presenter. Guantanamo Bay Oral History Project, Columbia University, researcher and interviewer.
MEMBER:Phi Beta Kappa.
AWARDS:Recipient of prizes for short fiction; FLAS fellow in Persian and South Asian Studies, Columbia University; Writer in Public Schools fellow, New York University.
WRITINGS
Contributor to magazines and newspapers, including the New York Times, Nation, National, Hindu, Los Angeles Review of Books, Caravan, Paris Review, Cairo Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Guernica, Foreign Policy, New Yorker, and Guardian (London). Author of weekly column, “Far & Near,” Hindustan Times; author of monthly column, “Cosmopolis,” Hindu Business Line.
SIDELIGHTS
Kanishk Tharoor is a writer, editor, broadcaster, and short-story writer. He writes frequently on topics in politics and culture, and his work has been featured in newspapers and magazines such as the New York Times, Hindu, New Yorker, Paris Review, Foreign Policy, Nation, and London Guardian. He is a columnist for the Hindustan Times, where he writes the weekly “Far & Near” column, and for the Hindu Business Line, where he writes the “Cosmopolis” column every month. His broadcast work includes duties as the presenter of a ten-part BBC Radio series, “Museum of Lost Objects.” This series focused on “cultural destruction in Iraq and Syria,” noted a writer on the Kanishk Tharoor Website. His editorial work includes the position of associate editor at openDemocracy.net, an online magazines of politics and culture, and as the global soccer editor at Roads & Kingdoms. He also served as an interviewer and researcher or the Guantanamo Bay Oral History Project at Columbia University.
Tharoor graduated magna cum laude from Yale University, where he earned B.A. degrees in history and literature. He also attended Columbia University, where he was a FLAS fellow in Persian and South Asian studies. At New York University, he served as a “Writer in Public Schools” fellow, the Kanishk Tharoor Website writer reported.
Swimmer among the Stars is Tharoor’s first short-story collection. The group of stories “ranges widely across geography, between centuries, among circumstances,” observed a Kirkus Reviews writer. In “Tale of the Teahouse,” residents of a small city drink tea and eat snacks as they prepare to be overtaken by Genghis Khan and his murderous band. “Elephant at Sea” tells the story a young Moroccan princess who asks for an elephant and the inefficient diplomatic processes that take years to finally deliver.
In the book’s title story, a group of earnest and dedicated scholars set out to interview the last living speaker of a nearly dead language. Their intent is to preserve the language, but what they get is a playful engagement with the speaker in which the “traditional” wedding song she sings in the language gives her the opportunity to coin new words and meanings, giving the language one more chance at life before it is extinguished with her death.
In discussing the story with Weekend Edition host Scott Simon, Tharoor commented on the subject of language extinction. “You know, we live an unprecedented period of language loss,” he told Simon. “I think it’s incumbent upon us, all of us who read, live and think and dream in the English language, to be aware of the losses incurred by this great linguistic empire that we live in running roughshod over the Earth,” Tharoor further remarked in the interview with Simon.
During his radio interview with Simon, Tharoor also discussed what he sees as the differences between the short story and the novel. “I do think that short stories require—both in the reading and in the writing—require a kind of intensity that the novel doesn’t. And so I think the short story does have the potential to leave quite a strong mark on its readers, to take them places,” he said to Simon. He further stated, “I think a short story opens doors to a world outside sometimes, whereas a novel brings you into a home.”
“Kanishk Tharoor’s new collection of short stories is gentle in voice, majestic in imagination and assured in craft. These aren’t stories that you read, enjoy and cast aside. Rather, these are the tales you’d ferret away and recount, whether to a friend on a car journey, a child declining to go to bed or to yourself on a muddle of a day,” commented Nandini Nair, writing in the periodical Open. “It’s a testament to the author’s empathy, rich voice, and immaculate craftsmanship that the book succeeds . . . even as it comforts, illuminates, and unnerves,” commented Jason Heller in a review on the National Public Radio Website.
A Publishers Weekly writer remarked, “Tharoor’s collection is imaginative and relevant.” In Kirkus Reviews, the contributor concluded, “Tharoor is clearly a monumental talent, and his debut is a pleasure, from the first page to the last.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, January 1, 2017, review of Swimmer among the Stars.
Open, January 22, 2016, Nandini Nair, “Kanishk Tharoor: Past Forward,” profile of Kanishk Tharoor.
Publishers Weekly, January 9, 2017, review of Swimmer among the Stars, p. 39.
ONLINE
Kanishk Tharoor Website, http://www.kanishktharoor.net (October 22, 2017).
National Public Radio Website, http://www.npr.org (March 11, 2017), Scott Simon, Weekend Edition, “Author Kanishk Tharoor on Language and Short Stories,” transcript of radio interview with Kanishk Tharoor; (March 16, 2017), Jason Heller, “Swimmer among the Stars Infuses Relics with Resonance,” review of Swimmer Among the Stars.
Bio
Kanishk Tharoor is a writer and broadcaster. His debut collection of short stories is Swimmer Among the Stars: Stories, published by Aleph Book Company in India, Picador in the UK and Commonwealth, Farrar, Straus and Giroux in North America, and Editions Le Seuil in France. His short fiction has won numerous prizes and been nominated for the National Magazine Award. He is currently at work on a novel.
He is the presenter of “Museum of Lost Objects,” a ten-part BBC radio series on cultural destruction in Iraq and Syria on BBC Radio 4 and BBC World Service in 2016.
His pieces on politics and culture have appeared in publications around the world, including the New York Times, Guardian, The Nation, The National, The Hindu, Caravan, New Yorker, Los Angeles Review of Books, Paris Review, Al Jazeera America, Roads & Kingdoms, Foreign Policy, Cairo Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Guernica. His appearances on radio and TV include BBC’s Today programme, BBC News, BBC Radio Scotland and the Colbert Report.
He writes the weekly “Far & Near” column for the Hindustan Times, and the monthly “Cosmopolis” column for The Hindu Business Line.
He was an associate editor at the online politics and culture magazine openDemocracy.net, a researcher and interviewer for the Guantanamo Bay Oral History Project at Columbia University, and the Global Soccer editor at Roads & Kingdoms.
He studied at Yale, where he graduated magna cum laude and phi beta kappa with BAs in History and Literature, and at Columbia, where he was a FLAS fellow in Persian and South Asian studies. He was a “Writer in Public Schools” fellow at New York University.
Follow him on twitter @kanishktharoor.
Author Kanishk Tharoor On Language And Short Stories
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Author Kanishk Tharoor's first book, Swimmer Among the Stars, is a compilation of short stories. He tells Scott Simon the format requires intensity and offers an opportunity to be playful.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Kanishk Tharoor's first book of short stories has a lot of comings and goings. The last speaker of a language that's about to be lost sings a song. An elephant travels from Kerala to Morocco in the hold of a ship then slurps water from the pond of a golf course on his way to the gardens of a princess. And ice breakers of several different nationalities get frozen in the same Arctic ice, run low on food and Indian movies. And so the stories spin around the world.
"Swimmer Among The Stars" is the title, and Kanishk Tharoor, who's written for The Guardian, The Hindu, Foreign Policy and is presenter of the "Museum Of Lost Objects" series on BBC Radio 4, joins us from New York. Thanks so much for being with us.
KANISHK THAROOR: Thank you for having me.
SIMON: The title story - it occurred to me when I was three or four stories beyond that you've written a story about the last speaker of a language without really letting us in on the language.
THAROOR: The question of language extinction - I was drawn to this subject for a number of reasons. You know, we live an unprecedented period of language loss, so I didn't necessarily want to localize the issue to a particular region, a particular place. I think it's incumbent upon us, all of us who read, live and think and dream in the English language, to be aware of the losses incurred by this great linguistic empire that we live in running roughshod over the Earth. So this story, which yes, it came out of a specific place that I've been to and spent time in, but I didn't want to name it because I wanted to give it a slightly more universal quality since it is a universal problem.
SIMON: Yeah. You make plain in the course of the story that once the language is lost, certain bridges of thinking will be lost too.
THAROOR: I'm also ambivalent about that idea. The main figure of this story is a woman who is thought to be the last speaker of her language. And the sort of drama of the story takes place in an interview she has with a team of anthropologists who, of course, are concerned about the loss of this language and want to do their best to record it in a rigorous, scientific way. But at the same time, I wanted to sort of test this idea that we can know a people, a culture, by just knowing their language in such a scientific way. And as the story unfolds, you see that the interviewee, the supposed last speaker, pushes back at these ethnographers and, you know, plays with what constitutes a language, what constitutes a culture. And there's something more dynamic there that even in the very important task of recording and cataloging can be lost.
SIMON: She sings a wedding song to the researchers.
THAROOR: (Laughter).
SIMON: And in her language, the wedding song doesn't have what I'll delicately refer to as the traditional payoff.
THAROOR: (Laughter) That's right.
SIMON: Which makes you think these guys are headed the same way of the Shakers.
THAROOR: (Laughter) Well, she's - she begins the story by dutifully singing the kind of song she expects her interviewers to want to hear. That is, a traditional folk song, and in this case, it's about a wedding. But then when she thinks about what she's doing, she revises that task and decides to invent a story about something else altogether. And she thinks about how she doesn't want this language that she is now the sole possessor of to be a repository of the past. And she tries to create something new, and in so doing, I think is really pushing towards what language is.
SIMON: Don't mind saying my favorite story, and I enjoyed them all, but my favorite was "Elephant At Sea."
THAROOR: (Laughter).
SIMON: A Moroccan princess wants an elephant for her garden. The Indian government wants to comply. The small but hilarious bureaucratic touches and details you have in here I couldn't help but thinking, in some measure, do they trace back to the experience of a young man who grew up going to the United Nations School?
THAROOR: Well, you know, this story is actually based on a perfectly true story that was told to us by a family friend who was in the Indian Foreign Service. I grew up in a U.N. family. We had a slightly peripatetic upbringing across a few continents but grew up mostly in New York City once my father was with the U.N. secretariat.
SIMON: Shashi Tharoor was - we should explain for those who don't know it - was undersecretary general of the United Nations for many years.
THAROOR: He was. And anyway, this story about a Moroccan princess asking an Indian ambassador in the 1950s for an elephant is actually true. And it was related to us by a family friend, and it stuck with me from a young age. It seemed sort of comic - a comic example of this pace of Indian bureaucracy that, you know, once this request is made by the Moroccan princess, it passes through the normal sclerotic bureaucratic channels. And finally, many years later - six, seven years later - the elephant is finally sent to Morocco. At which point, this princess, who made the request in the first place, has completely forgotten, grown up and is no longer interested in this elephant.
But let me - if I may tell you a little story about this - so I had this story in my head and about a decade ago, I went to Morocco and traveled around and this story sort of revived itself in me. And eventually, I wrote this short story. Like many writers, I followed my imagination and didn't try necessarily to dig into the facts of this story. But what was remarkable - when I launched this book in India, at my book launch in Delhi in the audience was a lovely woman who turned out to be the daughter of the Indian ambassador to Morocco at the time.
SIMON: Oh, my gosh.
THAROOR: And she had read this story of mine and was so moved by it because apparently, A, I had gotten certain details right, including the way her father looked and the way he acted.
SIMON: And this was totally - total luck, happenstance.
THAROOR: Complete - I mean, complete fortune, yes. And she brought a picture of herself sitting next to the Moroccan princess, and she claims to have seen this elephant when it actually arrived to Morocco. So it was quite a wonderful moment when, you know, as a writer of fiction to produce something full of whimsy and even a touch of fantasy and to put it out into the world and then to see it come back to you in real life was quite a remarkable thing.
SIMON: Yeah. Can a short story leave a mark that a novel might miss?
THAROOR: I do think that short stories require - both in the reading and in the writing - require a kind of intensity that the novel doesn't. And so I think the short story does have the potential to leave quite a strong mark on its readers, to take them places. The power of the novel is that it makes you, as a reader, live in a world for a sustained period of time. And the short story I think, while it can do that, it's really more I think - I think a short story opens doors to a world outside sometimes, whereas a novel brings you into a home.
SIMON: Kanishk Tharoor - his first book of stories - "Swimmer Among The Stars." Thanks so much for being with us.
THAROOR: Thank you, Scott.
(SOUNDBITE OF JAI UTTAL AND THE PAGAN LOVE ORCHESTRA'S "GURU BRAMHA")
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Kanishk Tharoor: Past Forward; Kanishk Tharoor creates fiction not from a castle of fancies but from the realm of history
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Byline: Nandini Nair
Kanishk Tharoor creates fiction not from a castle of fancies but from the realm of history
It is the nature of blurbs to simper, effuse and oversell. But when the book jacket of Swimmer Among the Stars (Aleph, Rs 499, 188 pages) proclaims 'the arrival of a blazing new talent,' you'd be the wiser to believe it. Kanishk Tharoor's new collection of short stories is gentle in voice, majestic in imagination and assured in craft. These aren't stories that you read, enjoy and cast aside. Rather, these are the tales you'd ferret away and recount, whether to a friend on a car journey, a child declining to go to bed or to yourself on a muddle of a day. After all, as the epics illustrate, what is the worth of a story unless it passes from person to person, voice to voice, from this time to another?
It is no surprise then that this 31-year-old author's strongest influences are medieval folk tales and ancient epics. Sipping masala chai, at his father Shashi Tharoor's residence in Delhi, he says, "These texts for me are as powerful, moving and stimulating as the 20th century novel. They are not just historic curiosities. They are texts that move me. I like to think my writing is steeped in them as well."
And steeped they are like custard into jelly, each melting into the other in swirls of delight and pastels. Take 'The Mirrors of Iskandar', the last and longest story in the collection. Here Tharoor builds on the various legendary accounts of Alexander the Great-be it Armenian, Persian or Mongolian-to create his own version. He uses history as his launch pad from where he rockets off into his own retellings. He reimagines the ways Iskandar, his men and Aristotle escaped tedium during the early weeks of spring; they smoked hash and went rafting. He conjures up the siege of Russian towns, where Iskandar's army 'ran out of things to steal and people to rape'. He brings to life the charmed life and horrific death of the emperor's favourite wife Nushabah.
While 'The Mirrors of Iskandar' was the last story he completed in this collection, it is also the one that has stayed with him for 15 years and in many ways is representative of this entire collection. As a teenager, he came across the folio 'Alexander is lowered into the sea' from a khamsa of Amir Khusrau Dihlavi at an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. That image impaled itself in his memory, led to his deep interest in the doings and undoings of Alexander and finally wound up as the cover of his book. He says, "That image was one of my inspirations for the entire cycle. It is in many ways emblematic of my own interest in history," he adds, "I like the cover a lot. I really hope people judge the book by the cover."
His study of the ancient will soon result in a ten-part series on the destruction of antiquities in Syria and Iraq for BBC radio. This interest also permeates through his book and translates into an "old way of telling".
Of the dozen stories in the collection, only one is told in first person. The rest are narrated in an omniscient third- person voice. This voice of remove connects Tharoor back to the world of epics. He says, "I really like that third-person voice. It is the voice I am writing my novel in as well I try to be lyrical in much of my writing, but I aspire to a kind of flatness in the narrative style. It can be sort of deceptive and intriguing to people, even if it comes across as straight forward."
The one exception is 'A Lesson in Objects', told in the voice of a vegetarian college boy navigating the perils and perks of roving flatmates and girlfriends. This penultimate story breaks the rhythm of the narrative and sets it up for the entrance of Alexander. Tharoor explains this dexterous literary manoeuvre, "I wanted to include that story as a demonstration of something else that I could possibly do. It breaks the flow. In plumbing, they say, the flow of water can get blocked in a pipe that is straight. That is why pipes are like this (gesturing turns with his hands). Writing is like that too."
While this omniscient voice of the narrator might connect Tharoor to the epics, it extracts him from this time, and this place. At the end of the collection, the reader is left not with a sense of having travelled through India, or Morocco or Persia. Rather she feels she has returned from a different period, perhaps, even a different dimension.
This happens for reasons of intent and accident. As Tharoor says, "As long as you are an English language speaker, no matter where you are from, these stories will be equally familiar and estranging. They don't privilege anybody from a particular place, with a sense of closer proximity to the story, than anyone else. That is not something I did intentionally. It goes back to the omniscient third-person storyteller. You have to place that person somewhere. And I am placing that person, that voice in an un-national space. Where you can't tell the nationality, the race, the origin of the storyteller."
At a time when the memoir and confession have become de rigueur, when the milieu of writers determine their audience, Tharoor's erasure of the self from the narrative is a welcome break, and hopefully a beacon for others to follow.
Tharoor's passion for history and reading was stoked at a young age. His mother Tilottama Mukherji and his father played a big part in this. He spent his childhood in New York in a house that was cramped with books. His early memories wind back to his mother reading the Persian Book of Kings and Russian folk stories, and his father reading Enid Blyton, to his twin brother Ishaan and him. Since his mother was a professor of literature and his father a man of letters, the world of writing and reading were always close at hand. And this is a privilege Tharoor is deeply aware and grateful for.
While he has forgotten the first stories that he wrote down, he recently found "textual evidence" of a story (complete with illustrations) he wrote at age six, called 'Sir Kanishk and the Magic Lamp' and another one titled, 'Little Turtle and the Battle for Freedom'. While the first one told of the wish fulfilment of a child, the second is an "anti-colonial, native American versus the British epic set in pre-modern Manhattan." As an eight-year-old, the first story he typed out on his father's computer dealt with the Mauryan Empire. Even 25 years ago, it was evident that Tharoor would create fictions not from the castle of fancies but from the realm of history.
As a "helpless sponge of historic material," Tharoor was prepping for a career in academic history. He graduated from Yale with BAs in History and Literature, and was a fellow at Columbia University in Persian and South Asian studies. A twist of fate landed him at New York University where he was encouraged to read and write fiction. To compensate for this change in direction, it is only in the last few years that he has taken to reading more fiction.
But as Tharoor and the reader of Swimmer Among the Stars will tell you, the worlds of fiction and non- fiction are not entities unto themselves. Rather, they slip in and out of each other's embrace, like partners in dance. The opening story 'Elephant at Sea' recounts the mammoth journey of an elephant from Cochin to Morocco for the amusement of the princess. Told with wry and sparkling humour, it recreates the toils of the mammal, the tragedy of the mahout and the bewilderment of the officials.
Years ago, Tharoor had heard snatches of this story third-hand and it had gestated within. But recently, he got the most extraordinary message from a woman whose father was the Indian Ambassador in Morocco and had even seen the elephant. With evident glee, Tharoor says, "I had no intention of delivering a real life story. I just wanted to write a fun one. The fact that someone who was close to the real story finds my embroidered narrative moving that is amazing."
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Nandini Nair
Swimmer Among the Stars
Publishers Weekly.
264.2 (Jan. 9, 2017): p39.
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Swimmer Among the Stars
KanishkTharoor. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $25 (256p) ISBN 978-0-374-27218-0
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
In "Cultural Property," one of the most intriguing and salient stories in Tharoor's debut collection, a young Indian
archeologist is waiting on a cold beach on the North Sea, having secretly uncovered a centuries-old sword of AngloSaxon
iron. Having just called smugglers to bring the sword to a museum in Patna, India, he imagines the sword
labeled there as an artifact of "Primitive Britain," a thought that confirms for him that this act is far more than
"revenge." It's these big themes--of history, war, invasion, and exploration-that Tharoor seeks to humanize. In the title
story, an old, unnamed woman in an old, unnamed country is the "last speaker" of an old, unnamed language, and
young academic ethnographers have arrived to record her, unintentionally raising all kinds of questions about the quest
to capture what's already been lost. In "Elephant at Sea," a princess in Morocco requests an Indian elephant. But by the
time one arrives, years later, the princess is studying abroad and everyone, including the elephant, is vexed by how one
powerful person's whim can create a mess no one knows how to fix. In "A United Nations of Space," a future
delegation of international ambassadors convenes in the cosmos to "rally the world around the memory of order."
Though the tendency to keep characters unnamed and their lives painted in broad strokes blends the stories together,
Tharoor's collection is imaginative and relevant. (Mar.)
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"Swimmer Among the Stars." Publishers Weekly, 9 Jan. 2017, p. 39. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA477339262&it=r&asid=98e2931261d1ed25a9382181b6f01ea8.
Accessed 1 Oct. 2017.
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10/1/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
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Tharoor, Kanishk: SWIMMER AMONG THE
STARS
Kirkus Reviews.
(Jan. 1, 2017):
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Full Text:
Tharoor, Kanishk SWIMMER AMONG THE STARS Farrar, Straus and Giroux (Adult Fiction) $25.00 3, 14 ISBN:
978-0-374-27218-0
Tharoor's debut story collection ranges widely across geography, between centuries, among circumstances.In the first
story, a woman, the last speaker of an unnamed language, is interviewed by a handful of anthropologists. "Please speak
as it comes naturally to you," they tell her, so they can record the language before it dies out completely. She finds
herself making up a story for them: a bride takes off on a rocket after realizing she'd always wanted to be an astronaut
and never a bride. But because there is no word for "astronaut" in the woman's language, she constructs one herself,
from suffixes that literally mean "swimmer among the stars." So language becomes both the setting and the means for
exploration, for wonder. The idea echoes through the collection's other stories. In "Tale of the Teahouse," a small city
prepares to be overtaken by Genghis Khan's army: men and women sip tea and munch pastries as they speculate on the
habits and customs of the marauders. In "Elephant at Sea," an Indian diplomat assists in the laborious transportation of
an elephant to Morocco, a gift for the Moroccan princess. Tharoor, who presented the popular BBC program Museum
of Lost Objects, seems equally at home in the present and in the distant past. His debut work of fiction is a truly global
collection: he skips as easily between continents as if he were jumping rope. Sometimes he specifies the time period
and setting of a story; other times, you're left to wonder. Either way, he takes obvious delight in the playful, the gently
absurd. His prose can be elegant, ironic, deadpan. Just as often, it is sweetly melancholic. Tharoor is clearly a
monumental talent, and his debut is a pleasure, from the first page to the last.
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"Tharoor, Kanishk: SWIMMER AMONG THE STARS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Jan. 2017. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA475357401&it=r&asid=7fed02735a44062d17c9e960274d8397.
Accessed 1 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A475357401
'Swimmer Among the Stars' Infuses Relics With Resonance
March 16, 201710:00 AM ET
JASON HELLER
Swimmer Among the Stars
Swimmer Among the Stars
Stories
by Kanishk Tharoor
Hardcover, 239 pages purchase
"Swimmer Among the Stars," the title story of Kanishk Tharoor's debut collection, tackles one of the trickiest subjects for fiction writers: using language to discuss language itself. In it, a team of ethnographers track down an elderly woman in a remote village who's believed to be the last living speaker of a soon-to-be-extinct language. As they record her speech, hoping to capture enough of it to reconstitute and preserve it for archeological posterity, things go sideways. She begins to sing a narrative song in her fading tongue that features a woman who wishes to become a "swimmer among the stars," an astronaut, who dances among the "invisible lightning moths," or satellites.
But unlike, say, Ted Chiang's "Story of Your Life" — currently the most talked-about short story concerning linguistics, thanks to its being the basis of the film Arrival — "Swimmer" isn't science fiction. At least not overtly. What unfolds instead is a sparkling, magical, heartbreaking meditation on the way tradition clashes with technology, and the way our reality is both defined and restricted by the language we use to represent it.
It's no surprise that Tharoor's fiction is obsessed with history, archeology, and the dynamic between cultures. Born in Singapore, he's lived around the world; he's now settled in New York, where his writing has appeared in The New York Times and elsewhere, although he's best known as the presenter of the BBC's popular radio show Museum of Lost Objects, which traces the destruction and looting of antiquities in the Middle East.
In a way, Museum of Lost Objects could have also served as the title of Swimmer Among the Stars. The book is a storehouse of relics that Tharoor infuses with resonance. In "Portraits with Coal Fire," a copy of a National Geographic-like magazine is mailed to the Asian village where a photo essay was taken; the result is a Skype conversation, dripping with ironic miscommunication and undertones of exploitation, between one of the magazine's editors and a villager whose photo appeared in the essay. Again, Tharoor probes the flaws of language when paired with technology, but he also playfully dwells on the way modern media allows us to sift through the world and see it however we wish.
... Tharoor probes the flaws of language when paired with technology, but he also playfully dwells on the way modern media allows us to sift through the world and see it however we wish.
For all its preoccupation with modern technology, a good number of the stories in Swimmer take place in the past. "Tale of the Teahouse," a nominee for the National Magazine Award, is structured like a countdown: As each day passes, an invading army of the ancient world approaches a city whose inhabitants continue their blissful pastimes. It's strongly reminiscent of Italo Calvino's dreamlike Invisible Cities — Tharoor, after all, chose a Calvino quote as the book's epigraph — but also eerily reflects the recent rise of the extreme right in the UK and the US. More contemporary and far less grim, the whimsical and wise "Elephant at Sea" takes place in 1979, as the Indian embassy in Morocco prepares for the inexplicable arrival of an elephant from the homeland.
Another story in Swimmer features ambassadors, but it couldn't be more different. "A United Nations in Space" is the most outright example of science fiction in the collection, depicting a not-so-distant future where the UN has retreated to an orbiting hotel in the wake of massive natural disasters on the planet. From that Olympian perch, these representatives of Earth's nations — who are referred to only by the names of their countries, as if they're the living symbols of them — decadently wait out the end of the world, playing table tennis and waltzing in zero gravity. "Even my desires feel weightless," says one ambassador after a halfhearted attempt at seducing another. As apocalyptic fiction goes, it's as graceful, haunting, and soaked in melancholy fatalism as it comes.
The same way that "Swimmer Among the Stars" offers a short story nested within a short story, Borges-like, so does another part of the book offer a short story collection nested within a short story collection. "The Mirrors of Iskandar" is a sequence of fourteen brief tales imagined to exist within the framework of the real-life Romance of Alexander, a form of viral fiction written between the 4th and 16th centuries. In explaining this framework, Tharoor's preface states that "the purpose of the romance was never to tell a straightforward story. Its stories offered variously a vision of ideal kingship and courtly behavior; a cautionary tale about arrogance and ambition; prophetic revelations; a description of fantastical adventures; and a sense of the deep, conflicted past of the world as well as its fundamental impermanence." Cleverly and with no small amount of chutzpah, Tharoor is telegraphing his own checklist for the stories in Swimmer.
It's a testament to the author's empathy, rich voice, and immaculate craftsmanship that the book succeeds in being all these things — even as it comforts, illuminates, and unnerves.
Jason Heller is a senior writer at The A.V. Club, a Hugo Award-winning editor and author of the novel Taft 2012.