Ghachar Ghochar by Vivek Shanbhag6/26/2023 The Impossible Fairy Tale opens in 1998 in a city outside Seoul. Shanbhag has earned this lofty comparison. In Shanbhag's novel, translated from Kannada by Srinath Perur, the gender dynamic is ghachar ghochar – irredeemably tangled – hardly as benign as the narrator might initially suggest. "Superfluous men" might have an additional, far darker meaning in Bangalore, which has recently seen a spike in the number of missing women. Our unnamed narrator is a superfluous man of the type Chekhov might recognize: a sensitive being made redundant by his uncle's wild success. What does it mean to transplant "Chekhovian" from late 19th-century Russia to contemporary south India? Ghachar Ghochar is a domestic novel that seems almost timeless in its lack of "rising Asia" talk a few allusions suggest the era of economic liberalization, but the business by which the narrator's family has made its wealth hardly screams "new India." They sell spices – or, the narrator's uncle does they live off him. Suketu Mehta deems Vivek Shanbhag "an Indian Chekhov" – let's entertain this claim for a moment. By Vivek Shanbhag, translated by Srinath Perur, Penguin, 128 pages, $20
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