Where The Long Grass Bends |
Sarabande Books
2004-01-01
192 pages
9 x 6
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-889330-96-9
Neela Vaswani, Teacher in the Master of Fine Arts in Writing Program
Spalding University
Debut collection from a lyrical writer of Indian and Irish descent.
Fervent. Lyrical. Animistic. Incantatory… Where the Long Grass Bends succumbs to no summary. It is a debut collection of stories that is boundless, even boundary-less, because Neela Vaswani has, as David Garnett said of Virginia Woolf, a mind that sticks at nothing. In whirling, catch-me-if-you-can prose, Vaswani tells stories that subvert conventional narrative forms by employing Indian lore (from Hindu to Sufi), Gaelic fable, and historical legend. These are impossible tales, dreaming yet mired in the everyday grit of ordinary life, and told so beautifully that the beginnings and endings of reality and imagination disappear.
In “Possession at the Tomb of Sayyed Pir Hazrat Baba Bahadur Saheed Rah Aleh,” a tomb is opened on Thursdays to women possessed by spirits; a young boy, Nanak, helps his bewitched mother with her particular spirit’s demand by journeying across town to fetch a salty lassi with plenty of pepper and mint. In “Bolero,” Felix and his grandfather, Aitor, play violin and piano throughout a World War II air strike, and in “Twang (Release),” a young girl living in the woods amid wild fox and birch finds her way to the shore, ending up adrift for months in the ocean with the first (and only) man she sees.
Spare, fierce, and absolutely unpredictable, Where the Long Grass Bends is a delight of invention and language. Easy to hold onto but impossible to pin down, each story is an act of surrender, a folkloric revision similar to the achievements of Salman Rushdie, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Angela Carter, but unlike anything you’ve ever read.
Tags: Neela Vaswani, Sarabande Books