FICTION

The Way Things Were

by Aatish Taseer
Farrar. Jul. 2015. 576p. ISBN 9780865478244. $28; ebk. ISBN 9780374712778. F
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Taseer's latest opens with a mother's call to her Manhattan-based son, asking him to ferry his just-deceased father's body from Geneva back to Delhi. Though a minor Indian prince, "Toby" G.M.P.R. Kalasuryaketu—half-actually Scottish, half-Indian—was more a foreign "novelty" in his ancestral homeland. A Sanskrit scholar with an "exaggerated reverence for the Indian past," he bequeathed his linguistic obsessions to his "collector of cognates" son, Skanda. Chapters alternate between Toby's abandoned India of decades past and the present, in which Skanda returns to India and unexpectedly remains. Amid a country in flux, Toby's gift of language offers Skanda the possibility of understanding "the way things were."
VERDICT Taseer, the son of an assassinated Muslim Pakistani politician and a Sikh Indian journalist, is undoubtedly a formidable storyteller (Temple-Goers; Noon), yet his constant, digressive displays of erudition—from Marcel Proust's Swann and Joseph Conrad's Kurtz to neglected vocabulary such as fissiparous and pleonastically—prove more distracting than enhancing. The result is an unnecessarily sprawling, nearly 600-page epic that should have been stunning. For more satisfying examples of what Things could have been, try Amitav Ghosh's "Ibis Trilogy," Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance, and M.G. Vassanji's The Assassin's Song.
Reviewed by Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC , Jun 01, 2015
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