#anjali sachdeva

Anjali Sachdeva's All the Names They Used for God is an exciting short story collection that reminded me of some of my favorite author's short stories, including Anthony Doerr's collection The Shell Collector. Her stories focus on blindness, sun that hurts your eyes, things that are hard to look at directly, breaths you can't take too deeply; bodies that fade, flicker, slowly crumble; an independence, peace, silence, hard-won and finally found. Her characters seek freedom, but on their own terms. 

 The best stories included "The World By Night," in which an albino girl finds a cave system under the prairie and decides to investigate, and "Robert Greenman and the Mermaid," in which a fisherman sees a glimmering creature under the cold waves of the northern Atlantic. In "Pleaides," identical septuplets are born in a scientific miracle, only to start growing sick, one by one. In "Manus," aliens called the Masters are slowly rehanding humans, one by one, and it isn't clear why. The stories are surreal, eerie, touched with just a hint of unreal flavor, a dreaminess that unites them. I don't agree perhaps with the level of praise that has been heaped on this book, but that is no fault of the book itself, just of the hype. It's still really excellent, and I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. 

1). Ninety-Nine Stories of God (Joy Williams)

2). The Trojan War Museum (Ayşe Papatya Bucak)

3). All the Names They Used for God (Anjali Sachdeva)

4). Elementals (A.S. Byatt)

5). Red at the Bone (Jacqueline Woodson)

Image by Eslah Attar/NPR

Anjali Sachdeva stopped by to talk to All Things Considered’s Audie Cornish about her new story collection, All the Names They Used for God -- it’s a strange but captivating book that puts a gloss of magical realism on harrowing real-world events (okay, and the occasional alien invasion.) “To me, it's a question of: OK, these awful things are happening all around us in the world everyday, and if you are only looking at them in a purely realistic way, I think sometimes, it becomes impossible to keep looking at them,” Sachdeva says.

Check out the rest of the conversation here.

This is the second short story collection I’ve read this year, and of the two the only one that was really trying to be a coherent work in its own right and not just a grab bag of smaller pieces. I actually picked it up entirely off of a tumblr post, of all things – there was an excerpt from the story Killer of Kings that really got stuck in my head, and having read it I just needed to see the context and the rest of the work it was from. So, score one for viral word of mouth advertising I guess.

Killer of Kings – about the writing from Paradise Lost, from the perspective of Milton’s politically unreliable angelic muse – is absolutely the best story in the book, but there weren’t really any that struck me as bad. The overall tone is kind of dreaamlike – mythological, or in many cases the kind of story you’d expect to hear on a weird fiction podcast (if a very literary one). High on the uncanny and numinous, on weird situations and the touch of something transcendent, and just on people being put in situations. Low on high action, or really tension or plot at all – the narration usually feels like it’s at a bit of a remove, or if not then like one is observing the inevitable machinery of fate more than anything to really get excited about and caught up in. Dreams or fables, or something in between.

The writing is good enough to generally make the remove work, I think. Beautiful imagery in a lot of places, and very distinct (if occasionally pretty broad) voices for the points of view of all the different stories. Call prose lyrical is essentially just a buzzword at this point, but I think these mostly qualify.

There are nine stories in the book, and aside from the aforementioned fairy tale about regicide and mutinous angels, I’m afraid that I remember absolutely none of their titles. Or, no, that is a lie – the story about a pair of Nigerian girls abducted as brides by Boko Haram who escape after learning how to magically compel and dominate their husbands shares All The Names They Used For God with the whole collection, so I do remember that one. The other stories that really stuck in my head were of an albino homesteader in the Ozarks abandoning the farmhouse to explore and lose herself in the labyrinthine cave system she discovers, the modern day sailor in a dying fishing village becoming enraptured with the mermaid he glimpses as the ship he works gluts itself on the bounty of fishes she has called to feed the shark she’s become fascinated by herself, and the near-future story of identical septuplets created by their geneticist parents who are each struck by accident or disease as they go through adolescence and increasingly haunt their surviving, doomed siblings. (They’re all like that).

So clearly the plots and settings vary pretty wildly, but I do mean it when I say that the book was the most cohesive set of short stories on an artistic or thematic level I’ve read in quite a long time. Every story in the book (I’m pretty sure, at least) has a real sense of some vast and unseen mechanism of the universe brushing up against the mundane world, some intrusion of something grand and overwhelming and uncanny into the protagonist’s life. (It’s the title, after all – ‘God’ in a broad, rather pentheistic sense, but still, the glorious and uncaring clockwork behind the curtain.) And the culmination of each story is the protagonist (not always the point of view, but the character actually driving the plot) in one sense or another succumbing to the unknown, abandoning what they have and take a leap of faith into some transcendent self-destruction.