If Goodreads had headlines for their reviews, mine would be "Lydia Davis meets David Foster Wallace."

I would have given this book 6 stars if Goodreads had let me.

Maybe my headline is misleading, but I was hoping it would get readers’ attention and they would check out the review and then want to read the book.

Actually Kuzhali Manickavel has a totally unique voice that really can’t be compared to anyone else. I struggle with how to describe it. It is as if she has some very refined Asperger’s syndrome where everything that pops into her head flows through to her pen (or whatever she writes with) and comes out in funny, snarky, crude, wtf way that somehow in a weird Kuzhalian way makes perfect sense.

Perhaps an example would help.

Here is a somewhat random selection from her story, “a basic guide to instigating violence among gentoo penguins in the tropicool icy-land urban indian slum”

…Hot, angry pieces of penguin will block out the sun and rain upon the urban Indian slum in fat, lazy drops of ferocious blood and cartilage. Beaks and flippers will clog the gutters, causing sewage to overflow into the street and pipefish and leafy sea dragons to die in such numbers that an albino killer whale will start hurling itself into the sky screaming, ‘Genocide Genocide Mother of God Oh the Humanity Oh the horror horror!’ thus signaling the beginning of great violence.

I don’t think I can add anything to that. It’s a great collection.
( )

The weirdness wore thin after awhile, which really took me by surprise, because I expected to unconditionally love a new KM book and unfortunately this was not the case. Poverty, racism, dead migrants and sex workers, Indian class elitism and casteism--after a while it feels like the weirdness justified the number of middle-class characters here who are conflicted and angry and guilty but apathetic, unable to act, and thus retreat into surrealist solipsism. The "it's all crap and meaningless but we can get a good image out of it" form of writing is perhaps something I should stay away from, currently, so I don't know if this is the Kuzhali I've always loved or the Kuzhali I've always loved is now revealed to me as a bit of a problem. ( )