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I Am an Executioner: Love Stories, by Rajesh Parameswaran
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In the unforgettable opener, 'The Infamous Bengal Ming,' a misunderstood tiger's affection for his keeper goes horribly awry. In 'Demons,' a woman tries to celebrate Thanksgiving after the sudden death of her husband, even though his corpse is still sprawled on their living-room floor. In 'The Strange Career of Dr. Raju Gopalarajan,' an ex-CompUSA employee sets up a medical practice in a suburban strip mall armed only with textbooks from the local library and fake business cards. The heroes - and anti-heroes - of this collection include a railroad manager in a turn-of-the-century Indian village, the newlywed executioner of the title, and an elephant writing her autobiography - the creations of a riotous, singular imagination that promises to dazzle the universe of American fiction.
- Sales Rank: #9738811 in Books
- Published on: 2012-04-10
- Formats: Audiobook, CD, Unabridged
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 8
- Dimensions: 5.47" h x 1.13" w x 6.45" l, .51 pounds
- Running time: 35291 seconds
- Binding: Audio CD
Review
""These short stories hum with life through the steady cadence and confident tones of narrators Neil Shah and Lina Patel... Appropriately, Patel's female immigrant characters come through more gently than Shah's male characters. On the whole, this is a wonderful jaunt through a first story collection."" - AudioFile Magazine
A Best Book of 2012 choice. - Amazon.com
Starred review. ""Lethal innocence and the uncanny pairing of brutality and tenderness [shapes] Parameswaran's macabre love stories. A thoughtful zoo tiger is only trying to express love when he inadvertently goes on a killing spree. The thin line between freedom and imprisonment is traced to provocative effect in a story told by a captured elephant, though the footnotes written by her alleged translator, a curious sort of elephant-man obsessed with suicide, take over her narrative. Venturing into Kafka and Borges territory, Parameswaran writes pristine, even serene prose that flows in disquieting counterpoint to the grotesqueness of most of his tales, with one sterling exception, the heartbreaking, Chekhovian story about an aging art director helplessly in love with the wife of a world-famous filmmaker. A potent, haunting, darkly sublime, and completely compassionate debut collection."" - Booklist
Starred review. ""Parameswaran is a dazzlingly versatile stylist and the conceits and voices here are varied and evocative. An inventive, impressive and witty book."" - Kirkus Reviews
""...Parameswaran's stories combine narrative brio, ringing voices and beguilingly looped plots."" - The New York Times
""In the staggering title story, the awkward, love-starved narrator maneuvers between his day job finishing off convicted criminals and his home life, where he tries unsuccessfully to reassure his new wife that he's not as bad as his profession would imply. His poetic, if exaggerated, Indian English creates its own cadence just as his compulsive justification creates its own logic...Parameswaran should be applauded for pushing the limits of genre and for the searing brilliance of his language...[An] admirably risky debut collection."" - Publishers Weekly
""The characters in this first collection, including a frustrated Bengal tiger and a woman gamely managing Thanksgiving dinner with her husband sprawled dead on the floor, suggest an offbeat temperament at work. The venues where these stories have appeared - e.g., McSweeney's, Granta, and Zoetrope - suggest talent at work as well. Great expectations!"" - Library Journal
""...the advent of a genuinely distinctive voice in American fiction, abundantly inventive, deceptively cunning and fearless..."" - The Washington Post
""Rajesh Parameswaran has a sharp sense of what makes a story work, his stories reveal their mysteries gradually and very cleverly zero in on the heart of the matter."" - The Huffington Post
""Parameswaran writes like a demon...When you read this, you will be telling everyone you know about this book."" - Jason Rice, Three Guys One Book
""To claim that an author has written inventive stories about love conjures up many possibilities, but none will compare to the fertile imaginings of Rajesh Parameswaran. His debut collection, I Am an Executioner, is filled with the voices of astonishing characters - a misunderstood tiger, a strip mall con man who opens a medical clinic with only library texts to guide him, an executioner, a surveillance agent, a pompous railway manager, and more - whose pitch-perfect stories recalibrate the notion of love and power with dark humor and unbearable tenderness."" - Walter Mosley
""I Am an Executioner gets the pulse racing from word one. I love Rajesh because his last name is even more impossible than my own, and because he has redefined the American short story for me. Bravo!"" - Gary Shteyngart, author of Super Sad True Love Story
""This collection fizzes with a mesmeric, restless energy. Rajesh Parameswaran makes us believe the unbelievable - in his hands the fantastic becomes intimate and human."" - Tash Aw, author of The Harmony Silk Factory
""I Am an Executioner is intelligent and hilarious and wildly imaginative. Parameswaran explores with great delicacy that fraught line between provincial life and modern times. There are traces of Chekhov in his writing. These stories have the power to endure."" - Said Sayrafiezadeh, author of When Skateboards Will Be Free
""Stories that are savagely funny, stories that haunt and sear and stun, stories so original they defy categorization - above all, stories generously laden with sheer reading pleasure: I Am an Executioner is a brilliant and spellbinding collection."" - Manil Suri, author of The Death of Vishnu
""Brilliantly unnerving, wickedly funny, and deeply satisfying. These are ferocious stories about the power of love both to save and destroy, and what can happen to us when we succumb to our true animal natures. Rajesh Parameswaran writes with elegance and style and a fiendishly seductive wit that will take your breath away. An astonishingly original debut by a writer to reckon with."" - Julie Otsuka, ""Brilliantly unnerving, wickedly funny, and deeply satisfying. These are ferocious stories about the power of love both to save and destroy, and what can happen to us when we succumb to our true animal natures. Rajesh Parameswaran writes with elegance and style and a fiendishly seductive wit that will take your breath away. An astonishingly original debut by a writer to reckon with."" - Julie Otsuka, author of The Buddha in the Attic
""Wonderful stories - like small, deft carnivals entering our desert cities and cranky towns to, for a while, muster us into feeling, resolution, and happiness, before they go on their way. We can't help but be grateful for them."" - Charlie Smith, author of Word Comix
About the Author
Rajesh Parameswaran is a graduate of Yale Law School. His stories have appeared in McSweeney's, Granta, Zoetrope: All-Story, Fiction, and Book. 'The Strange Career of Doctor Raju Gopalarajan' earned McSweeney's a National Magazine Award and was anthologized in Best American Magazine Writing 2007. He has had residencies at Yaddo, the Ucross Foundation, and the MacDowell Colony.
READER BIO
Neil Shah is a classically trained actor whose credits range from off-Broadway and regional stages to television and film appearances. Past audiobooks include the recently released House of Stone and The Black Banners (both with Blackstone Audio), among several others. He holds an MFA from the University of San Diego/Old Globe Program.
Lina Patel is a performer and writer based in Los Angeles. A critically acclaimed actor and voice-over artist Lina has performed on stage in New York, Los Angeles and regionally, and guest-starred on several television shows.Titles Lina has narrated for Penguin and Random House include Faulkner’s, As I Lay Dying, Rani Manicka’s Rice Mother, and Arturo Perez-Reverte’s, The Queen of the South.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
THE INFAMOUS BENGAL MING
The one clear thing I can say about Wednesday, the worst and most amazing day of my life, is this: it started out beautifully. I woke up with the summer dawn, when the sky goes indigo-gray, and the air's empty coolness begins to fill with a tacky, enveloping warmth. I could hear Saskia and Maharaj purring to each other at the far end of my compound. I'd had to listen to their cooing and screeching sex noises all night, but it didn't bother me. I didn't know why yet, but I realized: I was over it. Saskia could sleep with every tiger in the world but me, and I wouldn't mind.
I stretched and smacked my mouth and licked my lips, tasting the familiar odors of the day. Already, I somehow sensed that this morning would be different from all the other mornings of my life. On the far side of the wall, hippos mucked and splashed, and off in the distance the monkeys and birds who had been up since predawn darkness started their morning chorus in earnest, their caws and kee-kees and caroo- caroo-caroos echoing out over the breadth of our little kingdom. These were the same sounds I heard morning after morning, but this morning, it was all more beautiful than ever; yes, this morning was different. It took me a little while to puzzle out the reason, but once I did, it was unmistakable:
I was in love.
It wasn't with one of the tigers in my compound-no, I had exhausted the possibilities of our small society long ago, and other than Saskia, there hadn't been any new arrivals in years. In fact, the object of my love wasn't another tiger at all. I was in love with my keeper, Kitch.
I know it sounds strange. It kind of caught me by surprise, too, but there really wasn't any avoiding the conclusion.
And it was all the stranger because I had known Kitch for years. When I was a cub, he had been something like an assistant to my first keepers. He wore wire-frame glasses then, and he was skinny and nervous. It was amusing to see him struggle to keep a clear path between himself and the compound door, in case he needed to make a quick escape. It's true what they say about us: we can smell fear, and that's why I noticed him. I was nervous around people then, too, and his manner piqued my particular interest.
Over the years, other keepers came and went, tigers disappeared and new ones arrived, but Kitch was always there. He grew a moustache. His cheeks got round and his belly filled out. His hair went thinner and thinner every time he took off his cap. He shaved his moustache. He lost the wariness that I had once found so intriguing.
His manner changed, his appearance changed, but he was always the same sweet Kitch. And that Wednesday I had woken up and realized: Kitch. Kitch! I love Kitch. Realizing I loved Kitch was like realizing that a bone you have enjoyed chewing for months is actually the bone of your worst enemy. The bone hasn't changed, nor your enjoyment of it, but suddenly things are seen with a whole new perspective. Actually, that's a very negative example, but the point is this: I had just discovered a deep and endless love for the best friend I had ever had in my life.
I should probably clarify. This wasn't the sort of love like when you see a hot new cat and can't keep your claws off her. I didn't love Kitch like I had loved Saskia, not with the same, shall we say, roaring passion. This love wasn't as agitating.
This was a different love. Every morning, when the big metal doors opened in the fiberglass rock, and pound after pound of cow meat and fresh organs came slithering down the passageway, whose face was there in the dark distance, shovel in hand? Kitch's. When Maharaj growled and got restless and came looking for a fight, who was the first to hear his shrieky howls, to fire a water hose and scare him off me? Kitch. I was inexhaustibly interesting to him, and he was an inexhaustible curiosity and a comfort and joy to me.
I think I'd call that love.
And once I realized I loved Kitch, everything else in the world seemed to make so much perfect indescribable nonsensical sense. Saskia rejecting me; fiberglass walls; lonely, zoo-wandering old ladies; little children eating caramel corn; cockatoos and monkeys; and everything under the sun, so funny and strange, and I just loved it all. I had food and water and friends and Kitch. I really didn't need much more than this, did I?
It's a little embarrassing even to think back on it. That was Wednesday morning.
It didn't take long for things to take a turn for the worse. The first sign was when I walked to the fiberglass rock down which my food usually came slithering, leaving a trail of red, wet glisten. This morning I walked to the rock, looked up, and waited. Nothing came. I sniffed and I waited. I closed my eyes and opened them.
No food.
I waited some more. And I waited and I waited. I started to play a game: I would shut my eyes for a few moments at a time, and while my eyes were closed I would convince myself that as soon as I opened them, the food would be there. I kept them closed for longer periods each time, but the food never arrived.
Now I was very hungry, and when I'm hungry my head hurts. In fact, it pounds. I shut my eyes firmly and tried to sleep it away, but the sun was quickly becoming unbearably hot-this was the middle of August-and I didn't want to go in search of shade lest I miss the food when it finally came, and Maharaj, finished with his own meal but greedy still, would come and pilfer it.
So I lay down right there, under the sun, and tried to quiet the pounding in my head. By this time the people had started to arrive-not just a few early morning walkers, but thick hordes of people, huge summer-vacation swarms, three or four deep, five or six herds of summer campers alone, plus tourists and regulars.
Normally, I don't mind the people who visit the zoo. They have their business, I have mine. They come, watch for a few minutes, point and stare, talk about me, eat their ice creams, whatever, I don't care. But today there were so many of them, and they were so loud, and I was so hungry. My head was pounding and I was just trying to relax, to stay calm and wait for my food, but they kept talking; and some little kid started to scream, "Wake up! Wake up, tiger! Wake up!" And then a whole chorus of kids joined him. "Wake up, tiger! Wake up!"
I might have been able eventually to block them out and fall asleep, but right then I smelled Saskia, and that smell made me perk up. She was walking directly toward me, with that little sashay, that little walk of hers. I loved to contemplate the fluffy patch of white fur right beneath her tail, and the way her tail brushed over it lightly as she swayed from side to side to side. As I said, I was over her. I was totally fine with the idea of her together with Maharaj, fucking Maharaj. But that didn't mean I had to stop appreciating her walk, that didn't mean I was prohibited from inhaling a deep whiff of her gorgeous aroma as she ambled toward me.
I purred to her, very casually. Just a "Hello there, Saskia" kind of purr. I waited for her to return the greeting, but she didn't even look at me. She walked past me like I wasn't even there.
Now, this annoyed me. It's one thing for her to sleep with Maharaj. That's her business and her prerogative. But to ignore me like that, as if we were no one to each other-that was too much. I felt a little stupid for having let myself get carried away with admiring her walk and everything, and just to show her that she had put me out of sorts, I snarled. It was a small snarl, accompanied by a little swat of my paw: a warning swat. There was no way I could have made contact. But when she saw me lift my paw, she jumped around and roared so loudly that I swear to God I almost pissed right where I stood. All right, I actually did piss. Then she walked away as cool as could be.
I could hear the schoolkids laughing at me now, but I ignored them and curled around and lay down again. Then I heard a familiar noise in the bushes, and I started to get nervous because it was the sound of Maharaj. Maharaj is a massive beast of a cat. He has almost three times my bulk, so he makes a lot of noise when he moves. He must have heard Saskia's growl and was coming to check out the situation.
Maharaj took his time, moving real slow, hefting his huge body through the brush, and I could smell him now-it was definitely Maharaj, so the fear and the pressure were kind of building up inside me. I was debating: should I try to get away, and risk attracting his attention; or should I sit still and stay as quiet as possible and hope he'd ignore me?
I decided to make a move for it, but this turned out to be the wrong decision. As soon as I got up and started to walk, I heard Maharaj break into a run, and in three quick bounds-boom, boom, boom-his heavy body was on top of mine and his claws were in my back and his teeth were sunk deep into my ass.
I screamed and writhed, but he kept me pinned down for thirty seconds or a minute, during which time I heard him fart, casual, loud and stinky, as if to demonstrate how relaxed he was, how little effort it took him to keep me locked down and in pain. Finally, he released me, as calmly as you please. He got up and started to walk away. (He didn't even look at me-just like Saskia.) He paused in front of the metal door in the fiberglass rock where I usually got my food. He crouched down and sent out a fat stream of piss. That smell would stick to that rock for days, and he knew it.
At this point I was thinking: Kitch. I just want Kitch. I just want him to show up and salvage this day and restore it to its original promise. I want Kitch to bring me my food and wash my rock. I want Kitch to hang around for a few minutes and keep Maharaj away from me. I want to hear Kitch's voice flattering me and telling me what a good cat I was, and telling me what to do. Actually, it would have been fine if Kitch didn't do any of these things. He could have forgotten the food and said not a word to me, for all I ...
Most helpful customer reviews
23 of 24 people found the following review helpful.
The author is a fine executor!
By Anna Clare
This book is seriously good. It knows what it's doing and does it with finesse. The author is also a fine executioner, just like the character who provides the title of the book. This author can do a lot with 30 or so pages. The stories reminded me of Roald Dahl's adult short stories...morbid and witty, always with a hint at the sinister and unsettling, and usually with a twist at the end. You can also see that a huge inspiration for this book has been Vladimir Nabokov, as all the stories display some form of unreliable narrator ala Charles Kinbote from Nabokov's 'Pale Fire' (who even gets a mention near the end of the book!) I enjoyed every story (there are nine of them) and each was different and surprising. I will go through each story and describe what really struck me about them, or, in a couple what didn't really work for me.
1. The Infamous Bengal Ming
The Story: This story is told by the tiger of the cover, who resides in captivity- a life he was born into. His main concerns are his mating partner's aloofness and his intimidation by the alpha male of the cage. Oh, and his unconditional love for the zookeeper who feeds him.
My Thoughts: I found the narrative voice of the tiger really effective. It sounds strange to say that a tiger could pull off a believable character you care about, but it works. The story is simple and heartbreaking and there are moments when the tiger's reckless actions take your breath away and really kick-start your maternal instincts! There is an innocence and naivety about the tiger, who loves his captor unquestioningly and everything he does, although disastrous consequences ensue, was done for the right reasons and out of care or love or fear. What he does after he escapes the zoo is often bloody, brutal and horrifying but you still worry about him and want to protect him because what he does is instinctual not evil, and, to him, beautiful because it equates with his life and his survival.
2. The Strange Career of Dr Raju Gopalarajan
The Story: Gopi Kumar moves himself, and his reluctant wife Manju, from India to the USA. Gopi is a confirmed trickster and fraudster, having previously impersonated a police officer to move on some traffic outside their window. Having always wanted to be a doctor, Gopi decides to fulfill the ultimate American Dream and make himself one...
My Thoughts: This was a really interesting story which sees Gopi's self-awarded doctorate put to some grotesque, and harmful, uses. The narrative describing how he collects his patients (largely immigrants who can't afford the American health-care system) in bus stops and happily cuts them is gripping. The story is underpinned by Gopi's relationship with his wife which is very moving. They rarely communicate or have sex. She describes him as flaring up with passion and enthusiasm when he's excited about something but it soon dies down when he's bored. I think most couples can relate. Gopi's hopes, dreams and aspirations are built on shoddy foundations and he drags his wife along for the ride...resulting in sorrow for them both.
3. Four Rajeshes
The Story: This story is written as though a man is looking at an old photograph of an unknown man, and it is inspiring him to write a story about him. However, the imaginary photo-man interjects in the narrative too! The photo-man/narrator is the manager of a train station and employs a strange youth who proves to be more sinister and trouble-making than he ever expected.
My Thoughts: This story had me less gripped than the first two but I still really enjoyed it. I really liked the way the imaginary man from the photo, who provided the muse for this story, kept butting in to claim the author had got things wrong and was making him look stupid or perverted! The author portrays him as committing homosexual affairs behind his fiance's back...which he highly disapproves of. The man he employs (named R) is a really fascinating character too- you're never quite sure if he is a sinister and creepy boy on the verge of madness (as the narrator paints him) or if he is a misunderstood genius and it is the narrator who is the strange one. The ending surprised me!
4. I Am An Executioner
The Story: This one is about a man whose occupation as an executioner becomes a barrier between himself and his new wife. Particularly when a young girl arrives at Death Row.
My Thoughts: I ADORED this story. It was so gorgeously written and had so many layers. The executioner hangs and stones people to death with such a detached manner that it becomes horribly disturbing to read. He befriends the people who find themselves on Death Row and can't understand why they cry and plead and beg him for their lives when their time comes. It's not his concern. He just wants a light-hearted chat and to maybe share a beer. We get flashes of his insanity; the way he disregards these pleas of the friends he has made, his evaluation by a psychologist as deeply disturbed, the strange and unexplained horrible event that happened to his first wife at his hand. He has acquired his new wife through a dating website, where it becomes apparent he has lied about his job, age, looks and height to secure her. She sits all day in filthy clothes and abject depression. His unwanted physical advances made my skin crawl. The ending had me in tears.
5. Demons
The Story: An wife in surburbia sits in her living room with her husband's dead body at her feet. She continues as normal, until the guilt of 'did she/ didn't she' leads her to remember her past.
My Thoughts: This was another story which didn't hold my interest as well as the others. I found it a little tedious. Again, it is narrated by the wife who is an unreliable narrator, and we get flashes of her not-so rational behaviour towards her daughter and her daughter's roommate. It's like Henry James's 'The Turn of the Screw'...did she kill him or is she mad? You want to find out, but I found the explanation unsatisfactory.
6. Narrative of Agent 97-4702
The Story: The narrator is part of the Agency which, from what I could gather, is a kind of surveillance organisation which enrols people secretly and then gets them to spy on other people who are subject to investigation. It's a Fight Club thing; no one talks about the Agency and no one knows who else is in it. I'm pretty sure that this takes place in a dystopian future too. The story takes the form of a confession that te narrator is submitting, admitting to accessing unauthorized information on the person she has been surveying.
My Thoughts: This story was very interesting in the way that the narrator was so cold and detached towards the people she was meticulouly following and writing reports on all day long. The notes she makes are so detailed, down to the tiniest gestures he makes, to what he says to his wife each morning and in what tone. It seems as though the narrator has been trained to be emotionless and not become emotionally involved with the subjects of the investigations, to the point where she even stages a four year relationship with one just to spy on him more thoroughly. I read it aloud to my boyfriend and I think that made the narrative seem even more stilted and unnatural, which I loved because it fit the character so perfectly. I found it gripping and, as the story went on and she becomes more and more disallusioned about the Agency and its implications and wanting to find out more about it, I felt the same.
7. Bibhutibhushan Mallik's Final Storyboard
The Story: Bibhutibhushan Mallik is the production designer for famous film director Jogesh Sen. And he is also having an affair with Sen's wife. His dream is to direct his own film and move with Sen's wife to NYC, but things start to unravel AFTER he gets his big break.
My Thoughts: I liked this story, but didn't love it. The narrative is from Mallik's perspective and you become aware that you're not entirely sure why Sen's wife is having this affair. She seems reluctant to return his advances and you're fairly sure she never really wants to leave her husband. Why then? The ending also really confused me. I liked the story of how Sen became a renowned film director and the descriptions of the film sets etc because imagining these two young guys in India filming boys in trees and tying cameras to the backs of wagons was really cool. It was quite obvious that Sen was the real genius of the operation and Mallik only thought he was...and it is always compelling to hear the point of view of a seriously deluded character!
8. Elephants in Captivity (Part One)
The Story: A difficult one to explain, but basically the narrator is watching some elephants in a circus and imagining how they came to be there, which he can do easily as he believes he can communicate with them. The elephant who tells him the story (through her written autobiography) is called Shanti, who was the daughter of the old herd leader Amuta. However, to make things even more complicated there are extensive footnotes on every page of Shinta's narrative, with backstory about how Amuta came to be the pack leader and her betrayal of the previous leader Ania told in a Shakespearean or Revenge Tragedy style. There are also footnotes relating to the narrator's own life and his family's history of suicide, and his own resemblance to an elephant and how that may have occurred.
My Thoughts: This was my favourite story of all- it is just brilliant. At first I was a bit put off by the footnotes; I usually love footnotes and unusually shaped narratives but there were so many of them and so long! However, as soon as I got to the dialogue between Amuta and Ania I was absolutely hooked. I loved the way it was in the style of a Revenge Tragedy and how the elephants had these huge soliloquies and Aside's, as that is really how I imagine elephants talking! They are very wise and regal animals, with a hint of ancientness about them too, which the dialogue reflected nicely. The narrator's story is also interesting; his parents died in a car accident... in that they accidentally sat in their car in a closed garage with the motor running, clasping hands. Hmm! He is obviously a very deluded and quite deranged narrator, and I was so excited when he referred to Charles Kinbote from Nabokov's 'Pale Fire' as I had long been thinking whilst reading the other stories that Parameswaran must have been influenced by Naokov. Charles Kinbote is an incredibly strange and complicated narrator, who is both a literary creation and not, which is the same with the narrator of this story. Both stories are brilliant and I highly recommend reading this if you like unusually structured stories with questionable narrators! Metafiction at its best!
9. On the Banks of Table River (Planet Lucina, Andromeda Galaxy, AD 2319)
The Story: As the title suggests, this story is set on another planet in the future. Humans have occupied it and live alongside the native 'beings' who have many legs and feelers. The narrator, Thoren, is one of the beings, and he has a daughter, Nippima. He has a fraught relationship with her due to her interest in humans and her recent job of giving them tours of the planet. However, her actions may be a lot worse than even he thought possible.
My Thoughts: I was dubious about the title as I am not really into Sci-Fi but this story is so brilliant that I quickly forgot all that! I loved the characters and the way the aliens had such a distinctive voice and customs. There are parallels with humans, such as Thoren's teenage daughter, insead of shrugging at him constantly, 'twitched her feelers indifferently- an irritating gesture'. I loved this as it not only showed familiar gestures in a new light but also showed how human customs and gestures were perhaps infiltrating the new planet. Humans seem to treat the planet either as a holiday camp or a science experiment, which makes you sympathise more with the aliens than the humans...in an Avatar kinda way! The main part that will stick in your head is the mating ritual of the aliens. I imagined it as two praying mantis's fighting to the death...it is a horrific and brilliant description and was my favourite part of the story.
Overall, I loved this book of short stories. Most of them were fantastic and even the stories I found less interesting had amazing ideas behind them. I know I will definitely be re-reading some of them in the future; particularly the last two as Parameswaran's writing is beautiful and his ideas are flawless. I am a huge fan of an unreliable narrator, and if you are too you really need to read this book.
Other Thoughts
This Book has Inspired me to Read: Re-read 'Pale Fire' by Vladimir Nabokov.
Three Words to Describe this Book: Gripping. Moving. Thought-Provoking.
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful.
Delicious!
By Sylvia
What an amazing new talent. These stories are so imaginative and each one leaves you wanting more. I cannot wait until this author publishes a full-blown book. Highly recommended.
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful.
Fascinating collection
By Amazon Customer
This is a review of the book I am an Executioner, by Rajesh Parameswaran, a series of short stories purporting to be about love. I say "purporting" because, while they are indeed love stories - even if you stretch the definition somewhat - I found the title of the book very revealing, because most of them seemed to be as much about death as they did love. In addition, while love did feature heavily as a theme, romantic love did not, so using the term "love stories" on the front cover could be interpreted as being misleading.
The stories are in many ways disturbing. As a mother with a baby, I had trouble reading the first story from the POV of an escaped tiger and its treatment of the "human cub" it comes across. The story of the repressed wife who goes to Thanksgiving dinner with her husband dead on the living room floor is, again, something out of my comfort zone. But then again, this isn't a bad thing, and I find it helpful to leave my comfort zone occasionally. The tone was helped by the liberal helpings of humour, often black and certainly always dark, but nonetheless there, which was a welcome distraction. There is perhaps an over-reliance of the experiences of Asian migrants living in the United States, which is part of Parameswaran's own story, but then again if one does not write what one knows - to some extent at least - then the work can come off feeling contrived and unbelievable. These stories, even those from the perspective of animals, are neither of those.
My one criticism is that some of the stories felt unfinished. Four Rajeshes I thought was too open at the end, and Elephants in Captivity (Part One) did feel like it would have benefited from Part Two and perhaps even Part Three. Even the final tale, On the Banks of the Table River, left a little too much unanswered for my taste. Perhaps Parameswaran's writing is too subtle for my palate, which is certainly possible, but it did leave a sense of vague dissatisfaction upon completion of the book.
That said, however, it is an exceptional first collection of short stories. They are well written, original, inventive and ultimately believable, if occasionally unnerving, and are certainly not the bland tales which one may expect from a debut author. Ultimately, if you are looking for a collection which will stay with you long after you finished the last word, then I am an Executioner is a book for you.
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