February 27, 2012
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: “I am an honest executioner. I take good care and I don’t tell lies, minimum of possible. And each time I pushed down that rock, and it landed with the bad sound, I thought myself: Truth!” Despite this accomplishment, however, the other stories in this admirably risky debut collection vary wildly in both scope and success. In “The Infamous Bengal Ming,” a story that feels like it parodies M.F.A. workshops, Parameswaran writes from the perspective of a tiger. In “Demons,” a middle-aged Indian immigrant responds to the trauma of her husband’s sudden death by ignoring his corpse on the living room floor. But Parameswaran should be applauded for pushing the limits of the genre and for the occasional searing brilliance of his language. Agent: Nicole Aragi.