Swimmer Among the Stars: Stories

by Kanishk Tharoor

An interview with the last speaker of a language. A chronicle of the final seven days of a town that is about to be razed to the ground by an invading army. The lonely voyage of an elephant from Kerala to a princess’s palace in Morocco. A fabled cook who flavours his food with precious stones. A coterie of international diplomats trapped in near-Earth orbit. These, and the other stories can be found in this collection.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Magical Realism, Contemporary, Fantasy, India, Adult

256 pages, Paperback

First published March 14, 2017

About the author

Kanishk Tharoor is the author of Swimmer Among the Stars: Stories, a collection of short fiction. His journalism and criticism have appeared in international and Indian publications. His short fiction was nominated for a National Magazine Award in the U.S. He writes the “Cosmopolis” column for The Hindu Business Line’s BLINK magazine. He is currently at work on a radio series to be aired on BBC Radio in the spring of 2016, and on a novel. He studied at Yale, where he graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa with BAs in History and Literature; at Columbia, where he was a FLAS fellow in Persian and South Asian studies; and at New York University, where he had a fellowship in the Creative Writing Programme. He lives in New York City.

Reviews

[Hannah · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some of these stories are breathtakingly beautiful – and others are ever so slightly forgettable. I have problems reviewing short story collections at the best of times, but especially with this one. One a sentence by sentence level, this is stunning. The first story (“Swimmer Among the Stars”) starts like this:

“As a rule, the last speaker of a language no longer uses it. Ethnographers show up at the door with digital recorders, ready to archive every declension, each instance of the genitive, the idiosyncratic function of verbal suffixes. But this display hardly counts as normal speech. It simply confirms to the last speaker, that the old world of her mind is cut adrift from humans and can only be pulped into a computer.” – like seriously, stunning, stunning, stunning.

But even though I adore the way Kanishk Tharoor constructs his sentences, with their flow and ebb and wonderful eloquent excursion, the stories themselves did not always work for me. When the plot and the language converged, as they did in my favourite of these stories (“Tale of the Teahouse”), the result is breathtaking in that way that makes me clutch a book to my heart. But when they don’t, all the beautiful language in the world cannot connect me to the story; this was especially the case in “The Mirrors of Iskandar” – a story told in short vignettes that felt laboured to me.

But still, even though not everything worked for me here, the mastery of language and tone is enough for me to pick up whatever the author writes next. And, can we have a moment of appreciation for this beautiful cover?

You can find this review and other thoughts on books on my blog.

[Eric Anderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was drawn to reading this debut short story collection by the beauty of its deep-blue, silver-illustrated (Picador UK) cover and the strength of blurbs from excellent cutting-edge writers Helen Oyeyemi and Sjon. These imaginative stories do feel in some fundamental way to be aligned with these authors because of the way they similarly bend reality to give new insight into society, language and our perceptions of the past. The subjects of Tharoor's stories are far-ranging from a town awaiting its imminent destruction by an invading army to a conqueror cursed with impotence to a Russian ship hedged in by icebergs. They span great swaths of time from soldiers conversing in a heated battle in 190 BC to diplomats from dying nations marooned on a luxury spaceship in a dystopian future. Yet, there is a curious unity between these invigorating and fascinating tales which ponder the evolution of our civilization by focusing on migration, storytelling and what's left in and selected out of recorded history: “Humanity, after all, was nothing but a library.”

Read my full review of Swimmer Among the Stars by Kanishk Tharoor on LonesomeReader

[Tijana]

Sve ove priče dele dve osobine: elegantne su i melanholične. I tako se lepo uklapaju u celinu da zaista zbirka na kraju pruža neko zadovoljstvo u čitanju koje nadilazi zbir pojedinačnih utisaka, iako nisu povezane ni žanrovski ni tematski: lutaju u rasponu od čistog i blago satiričnog SF-a preko postkolonijalnog Borhesa (ok, možda bi se cela zbirka mogla podvesti pod taj kišobran, ali to bi zvučalo potcenjivački a priče su zaista dobre) do uslovno govoreći realizma ili lirske rekonstrukcije istorije. Retko koja pripovetka se spušta ispod proseka a uglavnom su dosta iznad njega.
Na mene su možda najjači utisak ostavile priča o putovanju jednog slona kao diplomatskog poklona, i priča o tome kako dva stara ratna druga gunđaju u poslednjim redovima falange za vreme bitke, i priča koja se raščlanjava u niz minijatura o Aleksandru Velikom ali posredovanih preko islamske tradicije (o da), i jedna koja se raščlanjava u niz minijatura o padovima velikih gradova (zapravo bar još jedna obrađuje istu temu gotovo jednako dobro), i jedna bolno objektivna priča o odnosu fotografa i modela (ne, ne tako kao što mislite) i dobro, da, priča o Ujedinjenim nacijama u svemiru koja na jednom nivou deluje kao jedan najprekrasniji, najozbiljniji zamislivi fanfik Hetalije a na drugom kao prikaz spore apokalipse sa umereno bezbedne iako melanholične distance.
Kanišk Tarur je na mahove opasno blizu istoričara koji se bacio na umetničku prozu, ali nekako uspeva da spektakularno destiluje svoje znanje i da umesto suvih informacija u čitaocu ostanu samo čežnja i tuga.

[Sairam Krishnan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow.

I did not come to Kanishk Tharoor’s collection of stories with a lot of expectation. I had read Amitav Ghosh’s essay on Tharoor’s writing a while ago, and had seen a couple of reviews. Nothing conveyed to me the magic that are these stories and therefore I moved on to other things before coming to this on a whim on a flight.

I then proceeded to be astounded.

These are strange, sad stories, set in worlds I both understand and don't. Tharoor echoes this in the last line of an interview I read after I’d finished the book. “..readers everywhere,” he says, “will feel equally familiar with and, in a good way, estranged from the worlds of my fiction.” He’s spot-on, that’s exactly what I felt. But what I also felt was that, after a long time, I was reading literature that carried this much beauty on the level of the sentence.

Tharoor’s sentences are heavy, laden with words that when alone seem innocuous enough, until they perform some sorcery and become something more. Elephant at Sea, the opening salvo, has a line that is so sudden, so unexpected, and so funny that I laughed out loud, and went on for a while. I won’t give it away, that doesn’t seem right. You have to read it for yourself.

My favourites were Tale of the Teahouse, the gorgeously sad The Loss of Muzzafar and the magical sequences in Letters Home. My only personal disappointment was that I read this on my Kindle, and I felt that the device did not do justice to the stories: The beautiful Aleph hardcover will have to be acquired, and these stories will have to be reread.

[Jenny (Reading Envy) · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Life can be comfortable among the ruins," a line from the story "Cultural Property," sums up many of these stories. Different cultures amid destruction, from the past, future, or an imagined present. Beautiful details and interesting scenarios. I didn't feel like I was reading anything I had read before.

Some of my highlights:

United Nations in Space
The rulers of the world are watching the world fall apart, and worse, they've run out of funds to pay the proprietor of the spaceship...

Tale of the Teahouse
A city is awaiting complete and utter destruction by the Khan's Army, and they decide to keep business as usual. I loved the description of the "cockfighters who loved nothing more than long conversations with librarians."

Letters Home
Remnants of worldwide cities of the past... one of the longer stories told in different sections.

Thanks to the publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.

[Alice · Rating 2 out of 5]

The stories in here that I did like were absolutely amazing, but they were few and far between. Had kind of a hard time getting through this, sadly.

[Sarah · Rating 2 out of 5]

Sucked in by the beautiful cover (the hardback edition is really something!), but let down by this disjointed collection of short stories.

Of the thirteen stories, I’d say I really liked two, enjoyed a couple more and found the rest disappointing. My two favourites were the titular story (which is the first one in the book) - where the last speaker of a language is interviewed; and Portrait with Coal Fire, where a photographer speaks to a coal miner he/she photographed after the miner’s photo has been published in a magazine, and we discover the tricky relationship between photographer and subject, and the power dynamics that exist in such a relationship - all in about 15 pages. It is a shame that the other stories don’t live up to this standard, as I think the Kanishk Tharoor’s writing has real promise... I just found the historical nature of the topics of some of the stories weren’t to my taste, and these stories seemed out of place with some of the others, and didn't make for a cohesive collection. Overall this was “just ok”, so giving it more than two stars would not reflect my reading experience.

[Inderjit Sanghera · Rating 5 out of 5]

The gentle undulations of the sea beneath the blundering weight of a lachrymose elephant; the swirls of the shadows beneath the hand of the puppeteer; the harlequin colours of a rapidly flooding earth as seen from the vast blackness of space. These are the passages which give this collection of short stories their verve and beauty, whether it be the inconsolable grief of the miner who only sees the chicanery of the cameraman who in seeking to capture his degradation only ends up catching his hopelessness or the emptiness felt by the mahout as he has to let go of the elephant who has been his charge, Tharoor is able to, with great skill and pathos, the inner lives of the characters he depicts. It is in his pale pastiches of Calvino that his stories begin to suffer in quality; when Tharoor gives free reign to his imagination his stories soar, when he is engaging in deliberate homages to writers he admires they begin to sink into mediocrity, as with his Alexander The Great stories.

What is particularly impressive about this collection is the sheer range of different styles or stories Tharoor is able to depict. ‘Cultural Property’ depicts the strains of a modern relationship between individuals from vastly different cultures, the humorous vein of ‘The Phalanx’ belies is essentially tragic mediation on war, ‘The Astrolabe’ the last moments of a sailor as he is heaved over a cliff by a group of islanders or ‘United Nations in Space’ a depiction of a dystopian future where most of the world has been flooded as the United Nations witness the greatest storm in history from a dilapidated space station. The mark of many writers is no doubt imprinted in these stories, but the influence is not too obvious as Tharoor gives his imagination free reign and delight the reader with the multitude of wonderful stories which exist in his mind.

[Bandit · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pleasant surprise. Immensely enjoyable. For a while now I've been reading novels and it was something of an effort to readjust to a short story form, but this book attracted me on Netgalley, something about the title, something about the cover and it was short enough to not require a major commitment. It wasn't a love at first sight, more of a tentative attraction that turned into love around the third story (my favorite) and from then on maintained a steady like to love ratio. I didn't dislike any of the stories. Every one was different, not quite slices of life, more like slices of dreams. Magic realism, maybe, but again not quite. It'll probably be unavoidably compared to Rushdie if only because both feature eastern motifs, but the author is talented enough to stand on his own literary feet as it were. There is a hypnotic beauty to his writing, whether the subjects are more realistic (actual history, loved it) of more fairy tale like. These stories take you out of this world for a while. How can you ask for more. I'm dangerously close to awed and this is certainly a most auspicious of debuts. Thanks Netgalley.

[Namitha Varma · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ok, don't beat me up for giving this just 3 stars. Kanishk has a brilliant way with words. His descriptions are mesmerising. His choice of subjects is fascinating. BUT - despite a good mix of ingredients, each short story in the collection - except The Loss of Muzaffar, which I really loved - seemed to lack something. Each story seemed to end abruptly, or deliberately not ending, or incomplete. Some of the stories read like historicals with beautiful descriptions that have not been brought to life. Which is why the collection took me such a long time to read (29 DAYS!!!).

Overall, I expected a little more clarity from the stories. The collection is, however, worth a read - take it with you on a seaside holiday, to a river-view cottage, to a mountain tent.

[Dea · Rating 2 out of 5]

This collection started off so strongly with the title story. “Swimmer Among the Stars” was absolutely beautiful, from concept to execution. It’s a story that makes you think that you can’t quite believe your luck that you’ve found such a gorgeous piece of writing to enjoy again and again.

Unfortunately, that was the only story in the collection that captured my attention. Though several other stories had interesting concepts, I was immensely bored throughout the remainder of the collection. I am so sorry to say that I had to force myself to finish reading it.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the e-galley.

[Abby · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tharoor's prose is the most purely beautiful I've read in a long time, and aside from the technical, he has sharp insight into the heart. This is, I think, the best book I've read all year. His settings are, somehow, both non-specific (often unnamed or nameless countries) and incredibly vivid, and he creates his worlds with a few confident strokes. I can't do this justice. I cried a lot of cathartic tears.

("This exhausted her and offered her further proof, as if she needed it, that while an exile can escape her country, she can never escape her exile.")

[Izilen · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a superb collection of short stories about distance —sometimes bridged, sometimes uncrossable— between peoples, places, languages, and cultures. Each short story is fresh, unique, and often unexpected, and the characters who inhabit them span the breadth of time and place as well as narrative.

Though Tharoor has a distinct voice, the people in his stories shrink and expand to fill the space of the different kinds of tale he tells. Every story is touched by a sense of wonder, but they have greater or lesser degrees of the fantastical. In one tale, wishes upon eyelashes might well come true, whereas in another, what's most wondrous is the poetic turn of a newly coined phrase. In a third, sand from a drowned island dissolves in space. There is a sense of the absurd (an elephant is sent across the world pushed ever onwards by slow and stalwart bureaucracy; a stuck icebreaker in the Antarctic ice attracts others, until stuck in a chain they can do nothing but barter lumpias, vodka and Bollywood films) but beyond that, there is a grounded sense of human nature, and what draws us together or keeps us apart.

[Divya · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kanishk Tharoor's language is really beautiful. There is an otherworldly, fable quality to all the stories. I really liked "Tale of the Teahouse", "Elephant at Sea", "Portrait with Coal Fire" and "The Mirrors of Iskandar". There is a deep love for language, history, archeology and culture in these stories. The obsession with the point of destruction of languages and places is also fascinating. Time moves in a zigzag way in and some of these movements are disorienting. The main problem that I found in are the endings. All of them are bizarre and they don't make any sense. There is no closure in any of these stories except for a few. The author is good at beginnings rather than endings. I got mired in the short vignettes of "Letters Home" and it took me a long time to finish it. I would recommend this collection to anyone with a short attention span looking for something eccentric and different in their stories.

[Kenneth Chanko · Rating 4 out of 5]

I almost certainly wouldn't have picked up this collection of short stories if I wasn't currently participating in an advanced fiction workshop being run by Kanishk, who -- not surprisingly after reading this collection -- is a generous soul and a learned young man. The best of these stories -- "Tale of the Teahouse" prominent among them -- reminded me of the transporting stories (often centering on the telling of stories) by Ivo Andrić, the late Bosnian-born Nobel winner whom I was reading last fall while traveling in Bosnia, Croatia and other countries of the former Yugoslavia. Kanishk's is a rare talent, especially in someone so young. I hope to be reading more of his work in the future.

[Clara Coulson]

DNF. I read a few of the stories, but they didn't do much for me.

[Katia N · Rating 4 out of 5]

The is a debut collection of short stories written by the young American author of Indian heritage. The collection is truly global in both spirit and geographical spread. And that made it very special for me. There were the stories which reminded me of Borges and those actually I liked less. But there were quite a few stories told by the fresh voice, bringing out an unusual and poignant perspective on well known events. As any collection, it is hard to review it as a whole. I mention just three stories which i remember even now, a few months since I’ve read the book. There is a story of an Indian archeologist who works on a dig somewhere in England. He arranges for the illegal transfer of an artefact from England to India. There is another story about a wonderful cook - immigrant, who has been taken from the street by a well to do family in New York. The family consists of 3 generations, the first of which of course are immigrants themselves. 9/11 strikes… And the last story I want to mention, is the story which gives the book its title; it is about an old lady who is the last person speaking her language. It will disappear with her. She talks to the anthropologies and thinks about what her language means to her:

"They will never know that in her language there were more than a dozen ways of indicating and describing gratitude. Here are a few more: the gratitude of natural things for one another, like the hive for the branch, the tree for the bees, the cloud for the sun; collective gratitude, the thanks of a family or a town or a people; gratitude—directed to the cosmos—for superiority, for knowing that one is better than everybody else; the gratitude of one saved from death by starvation.

Her language boasted many verbs for which no simple equivalents exist in the common language. For example, this means to be afraid of seeing time pass. This means to tell stories in the depths of winter. This is the action of stirring a kind of gravy in a pot; this also denotes the motion of a pig rooting around in the mud. This refers to the way light splinters against a range of mountains at dusk. This describes in one word how mountains gain mass and shape at dawn. This means to feel strange in an unfamiliar place. This means to be patient for spring. As does this. And this.


The stories are diverse, but what unites them is the beauty and the economy of the language and the unusual point of view on the world we all live in together.

[Bryn Hammond · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am infatuated with these stories for subject matter, for writing that hits the spot for me (beauty is subjective), and for his subtle endings. The understated sting in the tail, the conclusion that looks inconclusive, the soft-end.

There isn’t a story that wasn’t of interest. Of course I’m most keen on those I can stow in my ‘imagined fiction’ grab-bag: historical or futuristic or fantastical. Most of them were, if not all when you think about it.

I’m fascinated by the Alexander Romance’s travels in the east: one of those story-frameworks that wound its way around the world, Persia, India, Central Asia and onwards (see The Alexander Romance in Persia and the East). ‘The Mirrors of Iskandar’ takes these tales as they were or might have been: Iskandar invents a submarine, tries to rescue (very like himself) the greatness of a whale’s corpse from the ‘ignominy of the sea’. Another set of short tales is ‘Letters Home’, which includes a sketch on the discovered bag of Sogdian mail at a fortress, abandoned on the road between China and Samarkand: this story is almost straight history (because what else do you need?), but with the graces a history book never gives it.

I also want to stick a label on the book: ‘Utterly free from sexism. Enjoy without a worry.’ It seems crass to say so; but when most fiction, perhaps, is still ‘May contain traces…’ I did notice this quality.

[Parvathy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am not sure what to make of this book. That it is clever, there is no doubt - the sheer range of the stories is proof enough. The writing itself is engaging, with its mixture of wry humour and a lyricism that surprises you from time to time. And the surname of the author had me predisposed to liking it. Yet, it doesn't do it completely for me. Is it that nagging feeling of having read this before? Maybe in a Mitchell or in a Rushdie or even an Atwood? Or is it the variety itself that is at fault? Why would anyone put together a set of stories as diverse as this, unless you don't have enough material to create something more cohesive, something larger? Either way, this is a very intelligent set of stories that somehow seems short of soul.

[Samantha · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's hard to know how to rate this because it was such a mixed bag. Some stories (the title story and Portrait with Coal Fire especially) were some of the best stories I've ever read full stop, but then some were so...skippable. With the right idea, Tharoor has the potential for great things to come.

[Imogen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Evocative, imaginative storytelling about language, time, space. I loved some more than others, but that's almost always the way with short story collections.

[Rogue Male · Rating 4 out of 5]

8/10

[Anne-Marie · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars
I really, really loved this collection!

Some favourite stories:
Swimmer among the stars
Tale of the Teahouse
Elephant at Sea
A United Nations in Space
The Mirrors of Iskandar
The Fall of an Eyelash
Letters Home
Icebreakers

But really I liked them all!

[Louis Skye · Rating 4 out of 5]

Why aren't there more short collections out there? I love short stories.

I met Tharoor at a festival and we had such a great chat about our hometown and our shared joy of being twins, I decided I had to get a copy of his book. I'm glad I did.

Almost each and every story is fantastic in its own right. Of course, in a collection like this one will have favourites. I particularly loved the eyelash story, icebreakers, the astrolabe and the elephant story.

As much as I enjoyed reading these stories but I have to admit I found some of the others' endings anticlimactic. Or rather, I was expecting the usual beginning-middle-end to the narratives so when I didn't get that I was a bit thrown.

The title story fell into this category. I loved it till the end. Similarly with the coal fire story and the Muzzafar story that everyone else seems to love.

Discussing this book at a book group I learnt that the British and Indian versions are different. There are some stories missing in each version and the order of the stories is completely different. Why would the publishers do this? It makes no sense!

The stories missing in the Indian version are Cultural property and Phalanx. The British version is missing Lessons in Objects. What is the point of this? I am so annoyed right now.

Despite all that I am glad I read the book. I feel that some stories were meant to be open-ended and others deliberately vague or unexpected endings. It didn't mean the stories weren't good; I would have prefered a different ending is all.

I loved reading this book and am looking forward to more from Tharoor.

[Manish · Rating 2 out of 5]

The stories in this collection were definitely memorable for the sheer range of characters and the settings in which they unfolded. But having said that, this debut work still fell short of living up to all the marketing hype that surrounded its launch.

However, I just loved his narration of the cult of Ezili Danto. From imagining a mosquito's perilous journey from Africa, its contribution to the yellow fever outbreak in Haiti which decimated the Poles who in-turn were sent by Napoleon to crush the resistance moment and the eventual adoption of the cult of Ezili Danto in the Americas was very captivating.

[Joylita · Rating 2 out of 5]

The prose is lyrical, the stories diverse. This diversity is what put me off. It read like a mix of Chimamanda, Atwood and Rushdie without that feeling of being carried away by the stories. I love it when a book or a story leaves me wondering about the characters - people, places - long after I'm done. Except the mahout and the last speaker of the language, none left with me with that nostalgia for what may have been.

[Jennith Chen · Rating 2 out of 5]

As a rule, the last speaker of a language no longer uses it. Ethnographers show up at the door with digital recorders, ready to archive every declension, every instance of the genitive, the idiosyncratic function of verbal suffixes. But this display hardly counts as normal speech. It simply confirms to the last speaker, that the old world of her mind is cut adrift from humans, and can only be pulped into a computer.

[Holly · Rating 2 out of 5]

I just couldn't get into this book at all. There were bits that I thought were beautiful examples of storytelling, but altogether I found it disjointed and a struggle to read. It might just be a case of the wrong book at the wrong time. I'll try again in the future.

[Heather · Rating 3 out of 5]

An anthology made up of stories that center around history and different aspects of anthropology it seems.

Some of the stories were interesting and clever while others I could barely get through.

[Rita · Rating 2 out of 5]

Favorites: The Fall of an Eyelash, Portrait with Coal Fire (and kind of Elephant at Sea and The Loss of Muzaffar)