A House Is A Body - Shruti Swamy
I love short stories. As a genre they are notoriously hard to get right: you have to fit whole settings, plots, characters into just a few pages, bring the reader in rapidly while also leaving them with something to chew on once the story is over. Shruti Swamy does such a wonderful job in her collection of short stories, A House is a Body, that I couldn’t put it down. I literally read the entire collection in one sitting and wanted more.
Shruti Swamy’s prose is lyrical, lush, beautiful; she creates a world where the reader’s time is suspended, where the reader enters a world that is both familiar and different, magical and painfully real. The breakdown of a relationship; an alcoholic artist; a woman caught in a dream of another woman; a family mourning the loss of a partner, a sister, a friend; domestic violence; mental illness; a kingdom falling apart because of the violence of men against women, are all among many themes portrayed in the twelve stories, and each and every one of them struck me in deeply personal ways I find hard to describe on paper. The stories are set in both India and the US, sometimes in both countries, and read in a way like dreams. The reader looks into intimate and personal settings that we know we should not be part of, but we can’t seem to stop reading either.
The stories are all unique and different, but they flow so well into each other: I wanted more, but also felt satiated, satisfied even. I want to read more of Shruti Swamy’s work: she is so talented, and I adore her writing style. Highly, highly recommended read!
Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the advance copy in exchange for an honest review.