another subcontinent presents our latest feature: "the man with no name", short fiction by harpreet singh soorae. this feature is now live on our home site. we invite your thoughts and feedback on it here.

Very funny. I really enjoyed it.

Man gets thrown into jail for guarding TV, man gets out of jail, man goes to solicitor's office to change name, man meets girl, man gets hated by girl, man sits on park bench drinking beer and contemplating the nature of existence. All great stuff!

You have it nailed, my man! It takes real talent to execute the tideless, 'seep and drift' of life with finesse and this has got it.

Btw was wondering how long in terms of word length is 'the Man with No name'?

And congratulation to Arnab too for the cover illustration - do say how you achieved this effect - it complements so exactly the mood of the story. I'm guessing this was digitally altered in some way.

Jai Malhar & Ashima

Thanks for reading it. I am glad you enjoyed it. Thanks for the kind words of appreciation.

Really enjoyed the mellow mood here...important social issues spelled out with all the time in the world like a dog scratching its fleas before it attacks the dog running away with its bone.
Especially liked 'burn all toast'.

one of the things i am most impressed by is the difference in "voice" between this story and the reviews harpreet/zoobee has written for another subcontinent.

the story itself is a perfect evocation of psycho-social mood--and i can literally "see" it as i read. a cycle of stories about clint and sati and gang would be great--and very filmable...

Yes, there is a very cinematic quality to this - and achieved with minimal descriptive detail.

Zoobee

I enjoyed reading the story.

Just curious - the word "burglarised" stood out for me, being an Americanism in a story about British Indians... wouldn't "burgled" be more appropriate?

I loved the rapping "chaff around the grain" paragraph!

Cheers,

Sue

This post has been edited by Sue Darlow: Apr 24 2005, 04:50 AM

Also the difference in voice between the spoken word and the interior monologue is handled nicely. Well done!

cj

sue & seajay

Thanks for liking my story.

Sue

Jamaican patois, words absorbed from American movies, plain old Brummie slang and Punjabi, thats the way some British-Indian people talk.

cheers

Great story--plain style, hip style, ordinary-extraordinary. Curiously, in style as well as subject, it reminds me of one of my favorite American Indian (rather than Indian American) authors, Sherman Alexi. He's very good, and well celebrated, company.

When I first read the story, I was intrigued by the idea of a simple youth drawn to trouble, who wanted to be anonymous, but also wanted to be known (as a man with no name)!

Loved this excerpt

". . . and that sometimes it would be better to negate yourself and bleach away all difference, because the struggle to preserve any kind of individual notion of difference is too strong and too heavy a burden to pay, given that the alternative is to preserve an ossified, communalist social paradigm, what is called the Indian community. . . "

which I'll be thinking about for a long while.

Good work, Zoobee! I hope we get to read more of your fiction.

Roshna

This post has been edited by roshna: Apr 25 2005, 04:51 AM

i especially like the way in which this passage is both seriously stated and yet undercut by the response to the long question: "no".

dave, i was struggling to remember what was echoing in my head while reading this story--"the lone ranger and tonto fist-fight in heaven" it is. harpreet, have you ever read alexie? if not, i think you'll like him a lot.

I also thought it read like a film. I was reminded of Trainspotting and some other Brit movies.

Roshna

Thank you.

davegg

Thanks for taking the time to read my story and thanks for your generous appreciation. And thanks for the tip about Sherman Alexie, I had never heard of his work before.

arnab

I will definitely check out this writer.

cheers

I enjoyed the story quite a bit. Reminded me of my 17 year old son and his buddies. Hopefully they are not out planning to rob any local stores. I agree with those who say it had a cinematic-visual quality. Would make a nice short film.

Kristin

Zoobee,

I am a latecomer here-- but just wanted to say that I loved the story. I loved the laconic tone of the ending of the story-- very classy-- and especially this:

The irony-- and the futility-- of this act is beautifuly expressed.

For some reason I cannot fathom, I kept thinking of Dostoevsky's underground man as I was reading this. would you count that as an influence on your writing?

Anjali

Kristin

Thank you

Anjali

Thanks for your comments.

I can see where you are coming from when you mention Dostoevsky’s underground man. I read Knut Hamsun’s Hunger shortly after writing this story and realised that almost everything has been written before. You just have to try and make it new and fresh and pertinent, try to make it a living and inquisitive voice.

Zoobee,

I did not mean to say it has been done before. I apologise if that is how my comment sounded.

I meant to say rather that your story, in its very matter-of-fact manner of talking about life shattering things, is stylistically in the lineage of Dostoevsky. Please take it as a compliment-- for I love Dosteovsky's underground man and just wanted to tell you that your writing is very good and that it spoke to me.

Anjali

I wanted to add my appreciation for the story. It is what everyone else is saying: funny, spare, filmic, existential, and political. Sharp!

I did have one particular thing to note. When I reached this bit:

On first sight, it suddenly felt out of voice. But you made it work by completing it with this:

Similary in the other spot where your narrator makes an academic sounding social comment, similarly out of voice:

This is in dialogue with the woman at the lawyer's office and you follow the rant with this:

Sweet. What felt out of place works for me because it punctures its own self-importance.

Actually, more than Sherman Alexie, the story reminded me of Montreal-based Haitian-Canadian writer Danny Laferriere ("How to Make Love to a Negro" and "Dancing with the Dictator")

zoobee, great story, I really enjoyed reading it.

Going through the comments, I see Arnab's

I have to agree. In fact I found myself reminded of Damon Runyon's writing when reading this. It's not the trampagne-quaffing characters themselves so much as the spirit your writing evokes. It'd make a great story cycle and then movie or musical, I'm sure.

Anjali

I really do appreciate your appreciation of the story. I suppose I just feel a little shy to be compared to Dostoevsky, even in a minimal way. And I was trying to say that some writers loom so large that you can’t avoid their influence.


Mahmud

Thank you for reading my story, and thanks for the close reading you applied to it, it’s a real honour that you enjoyed it. And thanks for the tip on Danny Laferriere too, another writer for me to investigate.

cheers

Armagod

Thanks for reading my story and liking it too. Damon Runyan is another writer whose work I have to check out now.

cheers

Hi Zoobee/Harpreet,

I really liked this story as well as your piece on pulp.net. The opening reminded me instantly of Naipaul's opening in Miguel Street which he talks about in "Finding the Center." In Miguel Street there is a character called Hat who opens the cycle of stories about the street by saying something of the order of "What happenin' there Bogart."

I also thought of the opening from "A Bend in The River": The world is what it is. Men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.

It was intriguing to find that one of my favourite writers, Ha Jin, who seems to be very different from Naipaul,
cited A Bend in The River as a book which influenced him greatly. But thinking about it a I realized that the protagonist in War Trash, Ha Jin's latest novel about a Chinese "volunteer" in the Korean War who goes through untold suffering, is also about men who are nothing. But Ha Jin's character, as well as perhaps your characters, resist the world's efforts to make them nothing. And by resist I don't mean they succeed in resisting, but they do put up a fight. Do you think that's a fair reading?

I ran a find for the word "Naipaul" on this discussion and found it missing. So, Harpreet, please do tell us how you relate to his writing.

And, again, this is really good stuff. I am looking forward to reading your novel when its out.

Best,
Amitabha

This is what I was referring to in my remark about the narrator's different voices -- thanks for explaining it so well.

I also thought it really worked because it adds such a different layer of consciousness to the public face of the character -- dimensions of interiority we don't see in one another. Self-importance, perhaps, but groping for meaning underneath the in-your-face nameless face of the no name street cowboy -- in the way of boys wandering in the no mans land between child ways and adulthood. Girls wander too, of course, but this seems very 'boy' to me.

And, welcome Kristin!

Interesting that this sounds like your son and his buddies -- except for the burgling! That's a good example of how much space for the reader's own world is left in this telling, even though it is so well located in a particular place.

cj

Amitabha

Thanks for liking this story, and for liking Stepping Razor too.

I feel like a bit of a fraud talking about my influences because without a novel published I am just an amateur and it seems presumptuous to speak of this writer and that writer when I have no achievement to my name, when I am just an aspirant, and there are many people whose work turns me on and fires me up and delights and inspires, too many to mention. But since you brought Miguel Street up and ask specifically about his influence, I don’t mind speaking of him.

When I read VS Naipaul’s first four novels they hotwired my soul and had a very strange effect on me that I haven’t been able to fully understand since. I think it was the jokes and the characters that drove me crazy, the dialogues and sensibility; it felt that he was writing about the world I came from. I suppose it was the shock of recognition in those Trinidad novels. Some writers and novels inspire you deeply with admiration and respect, Naipaul’s first four novels were something more intimate than that; they were like a call to me. So all I can really say about those first four novels is that they agitated my imagination in a profound way, and made clear how I could enter my world, and that I should try to become a writer. So I am in the debt of those early Trinidad novels.

Thanks for thinking on my work Amitabha

cheers

Seajay

Your comments are really interesting to me and nice too

Thanks

i love hearing you talk about naipaul, zoobee! his work touches me that way too. his advice to writers is always to keep it simple which i think is excellent advice.
i liked you story. the voice is fresh, it is experimental. the dialogs snap and there is a nice rhythm to it. the concept works and we can understand the characters and they are fully realized.
the girl - at one point he says something nasty about her looks and then he's happy to have her phone number and a possible date.
i must say the large pragraphs of inner thoughts did not quite do it for me. yes the contrast is nice and i can see the effect. but it weighs the story down some. many parts of it we already feel through the character's being.
but i am the lone voice. so many have liked it precisely for that. good luck with your work and thank for sharing it with us.

Wonderful story Zoobee. I was wondering about the reasons for employing the "second voice"-- would the story be as funny if it was told in one voice?

Harpreet,

Great story! Don't lose that distinctive voice. Hope to see a collection of your stories in book form.