What do you think?
Rate this book
Dysfunction: Stories
Dramatically different in style and form, these tales range from the wicked (a divorcee recounts her failed marriages sardonically from A to Z), to heart-wrenchingly commonplace (an older Indian woman struggles to find a husband during humiliating bride-viewings), and emotionally barren (a mother cannot understand why her family doesn't love her enough to remember her son's first birthday). At times funny, but always incisive, this collection of stories examines the survival of those whose only certainty is dysfunction.
- GenresShort Stories
170 pages, Paperback
First published December 30, 2012
155 people want to read
About the author
Annam Manthiram
2 books10 followersAnnam Manthiram is the author of the novel, After the Tsunami (Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2011), and a short story collection (Dysfunction: Stories, forthcoming from Aqueous Books, 2012), which was a Finalist in the 2010 Elixir Press Fiction Contest and in Leapfrog Press’ 2010 Fiction Contest. A graduate of the M.A. Writing program at the University of Southern California, Ms. Manthiram resides in New Mexico with her husband, Alex, and son, Sathya. www.annammanthiram.com
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
Read
June 3, 2013My HTMLGiant review:
http://htmlgiant.com/reviews/dysfunct...
"The dysfunctional nature of many of the characters that populate Annam Manthiram’s Dysfunction only serve to highlight their strange humanity. Throughout, “Variations on a Blossoming Marriage,” we are treated to an alphabetical catalog of failed relationships. The description for Calla Lily is poignantly emblematic of a plight the characters share: “He liked white— white everything. White sheets, white toothpaste, even white curry. I didn’t know how to make white curry. Everything I touched turned brown.” The clash of tactile expectation versus the moment of actual contact is the intersection that the stories hinge on and that fulcrum becomes more pronounced with the cultural context denoted by brown."
http://htmlgiant.com/reviews/dysfunct...
"The dysfunctional nature of many of the characters that populate Annam Manthiram’s Dysfunction only serve to highlight their strange humanity. Throughout, “Variations on a Blossoming Marriage,” we are treated to an alphabetical catalog of failed relationships. The description for Calla Lily is poignantly emblematic of a plight the characters share: “He liked white— white everything. White sheets, white toothpaste, even white curry. I didn’t know how to make white curry. Everything I touched turned brown.” The clash of tactile expectation versus the moment of actual contact is the intersection that the stories hinge on and that fulcrum becomes more pronounced with the cultural context denoted by brown."
February 8, 2013
These stories present so many different perspectives rendered in so many different ways, each broken in their own unique fashion. Of course, everyone is broken in some way. Where those breaks are is where individuality is, and Manthiram's characters are as fully individual as a human can be. Some of the characters you feel sorry for, some you empathize with, some you laugh at, and some you don't like so well. Regardless, these stories get you right inside them in their moments of frailty and let you step outside your own dysfunction for a while.
April 22, 2013
Dysfunction is an amazing collection of short stories, an intimate study of broken narrators and an unforgiving world. The stories can be dark and unrelenting at times, but that's where the collection's power comes from. Simply hoping for something better will only get you so far.
December 14, 2013
Recommended for those who like: characters they just might hate, Indian culture, short stories, finding love in all the wrong places, or the word "breasts."
First, I want to thank Cynthia Reeser for sending me this reviewer's copy. Aqueous Books has churned out some great fiction, and you can check out their titles here.
Manthriam's collection is split 50/50 on first- vs. third-person narrators. At first, most of the narrators, or the character the narrator followed closely, are Indian women. The stories are wither enjoyed Eastern or Western in tradition, or may be the cross between the two. Imagine the life of a woman who has had 45 bride showing appointments but is not deemed pretty enough; imagine a woman with a cleft palate whose lover is a much older man who protects her from her mentally ill mother; imagine a struggling Americanized teenager who tries to find a way to exist with her traditional Indian parents' secrets.
Read the rest at Grab the Lapels!
First, I want to thank Cynthia Reeser for sending me this reviewer's copy. Aqueous Books has churned out some great fiction, and you can check out their titles here.
Manthriam's collection is split 50/50 on first- vs. third-person narrators. At first, most of the narrators, or the character the narrator followed closely, are Indian women. The stories are wither enjoyed Eastern or Western in tradition, or may be the cross between the two. Imagine the life of a woman who has had 45 bride showing appointments but is not deemed pretty enough; imagine a woman with a cleft palate whose lover is a much older man who protects her from her mentally ill mother; imagine a struggling Americanized teenager who tries to find a way to exist with her traditional Indian parents' secrets.
Read the rest at Grab the Lapels!
July 1, 2013
I reviewed this book on Fiction Writers Review: http://fictionwritersreview.com/reviews/dysfunction-by-annam-manthiram.
Here it is:
“Marriage imprisoned the mind,” muses a character in Annam Manthiram’s short story collection Dysfunction. For most of Manthiram’s characters, marriage is a condition of shared chronic misery. Obsessed with marriage or relationships, the unattached aren’t any happier—a college student stalks her ex-boyfriend; a middle-aged woman endures forty-plus bride-viewings (visits from potential grooms to decide whether she’s acceptable), and never gets chosen.
The collection’s fourteen stories can be divided into two general categories: short experimental pieces, and longer stories with a more traditional narrative structure. Manthiram applies these varied styles to map the territory of the unloved in disturbing and memorable ways.
The experimental works are stunning. “Variations on a Blossoming Marriage” is a brilliant piece, but difficult to categorize or even describe. Calling it a series of brief evocative glimpses of marriages does not do it justice. I’d rather quote a few of the Variations in their entirety. Under the title “Yellow Rose” we have this:
And here is “Poppy”:
“The Cottonwood Borer” is a small, two-and-a-half-page masterpiece. The first-person narrator recounts her mother’s memories of an idyllic childhood along the Rio Grande; then the story jump cuts to the mother on her deathbed, imparting a cryptic last wish to her daughter. We are given a few choice details to convey a sense of the life lived between those two endpoints, childhood and final days. This compression, the sense of a whole life opening out behind a few short paragraphs, echoes throughout Manthiram’s shorter works.
Some comic relief is provided in “Superheroes,” which begins by announcing, “Superheroes are not Indian.” Even here, the traits that are missing in superheroes hint at travails that ordinary mortals are left to deal with. “Superheroes,” we are told, “don’t need to get drunk on Saturday nights in order to forget what happened before, nor do they have to pray to a God that doesn’t listen.”
Of the longer stories, the standout is “Golconda, India, 1686,” narrated by Arpana, a sultan’s daughter, whose thought-provoking observations of palace intrigue are interspersed with excerpts from rules for the board game carrom. In sharp contrast to the protagonists of the other long stories, Arpana is highly educated, beautiful, and self-confident, and the events of her tragic life unfold on a grand scale.
If the protagonists of the other long stories are in some ways Arpana’s modern descendants, they are decidedly unspectacular in their misery. There is no grandeur, only bleakness, and the characters seem resigned to their dismal lives. One of them, the narrator of “The Reincarnation of Charmuda,” reads obituaries to comfort herself after repeated rejections from possible suitors: “Awareness of my own mortality made life more manageable,” she tells us. “I related it to the chaos theory–over time, all things lead to disorder. The same could be applied to life: the way our skin degraded, how our lives became less tolerable and our spouses more violent.”
The mothers in these stories tend to be cold and disapproving at best, nightmarish at worst. In both “When You Were Young” and “Asha Ma,” the protagonists’ mothers are verbally abusive and physically violent, determined, it seems, to crush their daughters’ spirits. Maybe because these two stories are the longest in the book, the specter of the monstrous mother looms over the collection.
The book’s most despicable figure, interestingly enough, is not a mother. The title character of “How Miriam Came to Learn about Love” is a college student who subjects her hapless boyfriend Jerry to withering insults and casual violence, then stalks him when he breaks up with her. Miriam is a person who pours hand sanitizer into the eyes and mouth of a semi-conscious flu sufferer, a person who tosses a gerbil onto the road (she had it in her trunk to bring to Jerry, and decides it’s no longer of use). Don’t look for a redemptive ending (not for nothing is the book’s title Dysfunction), but the author does provide a beautifully ironic twist: dreadful as Miriam is, she arrives at a moment of self-understanding that represents an improvement over the monstrous mothers of the previous stories.
Both chaos theory and the dauntingly intricate board game carrom could stand as metaphors for interpersonal relationships throughout Dysfunction. The characters, entangled in connections that are almost never nurturing or satisfying, may want to be superheroes but instead act more like random molecules, game pieces, or befuddled gerbils, buffeted by larger forces they don’t understand. Optimist that I am, I’m hoping the gerbil escapes unharmed.
Here it is:
“Marriage imprisoned the mind,” muses a character in Annam Manthiram’s short story collection Dysfunction. For most of Manthiram’s characters, marriage is a condition of shared chronic misery. Obsessed with marriage or relationships, the unattached aren’t any happier—a college student stalks her ex-boyfriend; a middle-aged woman endures forty-plus bride-viewings (visits from potential grooms to decide whether she’s acceptable), and never gets chosen.
The collection’s fourteen stories can be divided into two general categories: short experimental pieces, and longer stories with a more traditional narrative structure. Manthiram applies these varied styles to map the territory of the unloved in disturbing and memorable ways.
The experimental works are stunning. “Variations on a Blossoming Marriage” is a brilliant piece, but difficult to categorize or even describe. Calling it a series of brief evocative glimpses of marriages does not do it justice. I’d rather quote a few of the Variations in their entirety. Under the title “Yellow Rose” we have this:
He always kissed me on the forehead. Before I do, respectful. After I do, macabre. A fossil of father.
And here is “Poppy”:
We did drugs together. I liked opiates because it always made me feel like I was standing on a ledge, waiting for him to catch me–like Superman. But he never did, the bastard.
“The Cottonwood Borer” is a small, two-and-a-half-page masterpiece. The first-person narrator recounts her mother’s memories of an idyllic childhood along the Rio Grande; then the story jump cuts to the mother on her deathbed, imparting a cryptic last wish to her daughter. We are given a few choice details to convey a sense of the life lived between those two endpoints, childhood and final days. This compression, the sense of a whole life opening out behind a few short paragraphs, echoes throughout Manthiram’s shorter works.
Some comic relief is provided in “Superheroes,” which begins by announcing, “Superheroes are not Indian.” Even here, the traits that are missing in superheroes hint at travails that ordinary mortals are left to deal with. “Superheroes,” we are told, “don’t need to get drunk on Saturday nights in order to forget what happened before, nor do they have to pray to a God that doesn’t listen.”
Of the longer stories, the standout is “Golconda, India, 1686,” narrated by Arpana, a sultan’s daughter, whose thought-provoking observations of palace intrigue are interspersed with excerpts from rules for the board game carrom. In sharp contrast to the protagonists of the other long stories, Arpana is highly educated, beautiful, and self-confident, and the events of her tragic life unfold on a grand scale.
If the protagonists of the other long stories are in some ways Arpana’s modern descendants, they are decidedly unspectacular in their misery. There is no grandeur, only bleakness, and the characters seem resigned to their dismal lives. One of them, the narrator of “The Reincarnation of Charmuda,” reads obituaries to comfort herself after repeated rejections from possible suitors: “Awareness of my own mortality made life more manageable,” she tells us. “I related it to the chaos theory–over time, all things lead to disorder. The same could be applied to life: the way our skin degraded, how our lives became less tolerable and our spouses more violent.”
The mothers in these stories tend to be cold and disapproving at best, nightmarish at worst. In both “When You Were Young” and “Asha Ma,” the protagonists’ mothers are verbally abusive and physically violent, determined, it seems, to crush their daughters’ spirits. Maybe because these two stories are the longest in the book, the specter of the monstrous mother looms over the collection.
The book’s most despicable figure, interestingly enough, is not a mother. The title character of “How Miriam Came to Learn about Love” is a college student who subjects her hapless boyfriend Jerry to withering insults and casual violence, then stalks him when he breaks up with her. Miriam is a person who pours hand sanitizer into the eyes and mouth of a semi-conscious flu sufferer, a person who tosses a gerbil onto the road (she had it in her trunk to bring to Jerry, and decides it’s no longer of use). Don’t look for a redemptive ending (not for nothing is the book’s title Dysfunction), but the author does provide a beautifully ironic twist: dreadful as Miriam is, she arrives at a moment of self-understanding that represents an improvement over the monstrous mothers of the previous stories.
Both chaos theory and the dauntingly intricate board game carrom could stand as metaphors for interpersonal relationships throughout Dysfunction. The characters, entangled in connections that are almost never nurturing or satisfying, may want to be superheroes but instead act more like random molecules, game pieces, or befuddled gerbils, buffeted by larger forces they don’t understand. Optimist that I am, I’m hoping the gerbil escapes unharmed.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews