The Grand Arcade

by Vinita Ramani

Vinta Ramani's debut fiction collection is a kaleidoscopic jolt to the senses. A foreign talent barricades himself in his rented condo as he gradually loses his grip on reality. A wife explores a series of affairs in order to exert control over her sexual autonomy. A retiree descends into silence when he refuses to wear a hearing aid. An artist takes a road trip to unearth why the mores of her community have led to her sexually stunted adulthood. These novellas and stories unearth the truths often hidden by polite society.

Genres: Short Stories

Paperback

First published March 1, 2024

About the author

Vinita Ramani is a writer and works at Mandai Wildlife Group, where she creates programmes on biodiversity and wildlife conservation. She has held roles as a contributing editor at RICE Media and as a data journalist and editor at Kontinentalist, covering an array of topics, including politics, race, identity and transitional justice. Her film and music criticism has appeared in BigO (Singapore), Criticine (Philippines), Kino! (Slovenia), Exclaim! (Canada) and Raj Palta (Canada); her writing has also been published in Portside Review, Kyoto Journal, POSKOD, Esquire (Singapore), Philippine Daily Inquirer, The Straits Times and The Margins, among other publications. She was a founding editor of the National Museum of Singapore’s Cinematheque Quarterly, as well as a recipient of an Arts Creation Fund grant from the National Arts Council.

Her graphic memoir Bearing Witness (with Griselda Gabriele) was released in 2022 by Difference Engine, and her first fiction collection The Grand Arcade was published by Epigram Books in 2024. Vinita was born in India, has lived in Bahrain, the UK, Hong Kong and Canada. She currently lives in Singapore with her family.

Reviews

[JrFb · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoy good prose and there is a lot of sharp, expansive and evocative writing in this collection. About womanhood, pain, loss, sexuality, desire and at times a kind of disaffectedness. The descriptions are lush and create an evocative atmosphere. It was joyful to be lulled into these fictionalised versions of Singapore and India. Some of the character interactions were also very interesting. The people in these stories behave in unexpected ways and come across as alienated or disturbed at times, but its never done in a way that feels unbelievable.

Another thing I really liked was that the short stories vary wildly in their length, some being practically novellas while others are more akin to flash fiction. The unpredictability was kind of fun to work with, and worth mentioning because it's not a common stylistic choice.

There are lots of cultural references to Hindu cosmology and deities and goddesses. I appreciated learning about them even if I felt like the references were flying over my head most of the times.

I think the biggest weakness here is that from a narrative standpoint, a lot of the stories feel unfocused and slippery. Sometimes I'll finish a story and immediately try to recall what exactly happens during the story and draw a complete blank. All I remembered was some powerful prose and thought-provoking paragraphs, but then they kind of get lost in a sea of vague impressions.

My favourite was the 2nd last story (Same Same But Different, or the Fate of the Khmer Krom) which had a more traditional structure and allowed me a glimpse into the experiences of a group of people that rarely get their stories told, but I also think the last story (The Life of a Cunty Woman) had some really hard-hitting lines that I could mull over, and I could definitely sense that its subject matter was a lot closer to home.

[Amy ☁️ (tinycl0ud) · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a collection of short stories that are not related to one another, loosely connected by the subversive themes in each of them. One is set in Singapore, one in Pakistan, another in Mumbai, and two in Cambodia. The stories vary in length, with some being only a few pages long and the last story being a quarter of the collection’s length. I found the first and last stories the strongest and most memorable.

In ‘The Grand Arcade,’ life in chameleonic Singapore is revealed to be vastly different depending on what kind of foreign worker you are. If you’re a rich white expat, Singapore is just another clean and convenient playground and laws don’t fully apply to you, but if you are a low-wage cleaner or a worker risking life and limb at construction sites, you could get killed in a lorry accident and it’s trivial.

In ‘The Life of a Cunty Woman,’ Aranya gives up a life of unfettered sexuality for motherhood, but societal demands run counter to her true, desiring, endlessly hungering nature. She definitely is no saint, but there’s something wild and daring in how she does not stay comfortably in one identity. The candid depictions of new motherhood (especially the parts about pumping and time being reinvented, iykyk) resonated—it can be isolating, insanity-inducing, and the elder women around you sometimes are so traumatised themselves that they cannot acknowledge your pain or give you the support you actually need. Aranya aggressively resists the yoke of conventional motherhood to show that the person a woman is before she gives birth is still there, no matter what it may seem.

[Wen-yi Lee]

the author said female sexuality and i sat up

[Narmeen · Rating 1 out of 5]

It is trying so hard to be literary fiction that it just sounds pretentious

[Ryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

my review on QLRS: http://www.qlrs.com/critique.asp?id=1920