A
beautifully written short story is one of the great pleasures of literature. It
can have the sudden impact of a thunderclap. Whether it's Tolstoy's "How
Much Land Does A Man Need?" or Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery"
or Annie Proulx's "Brokeback Mountain," a short story can create a
completely realized, fully populated world in just a few pages. For some
reason, short works are rarely reviewed on their own. Why not? Individual
paintings or sculptures often inspire reviews, and of course, movies are
reviewed as single entities, not as a connecting component to a writer or
director's overall body of work.
This is
our attempt to right a small wrong. We'll be reviewing short stories published
in a variety of print and online publications, and we thought we'd start with
the current story in The New Yorker.
Romesh Gunesekera's "Roadkill"
By Lars
Trodson
The
metaphor in the beginning of the story is all wrong. The name Kilinochchi does
not conjure up images of “a Clint Eastwood character striding in and notching
the stock of his rifle with yet another senseless killing.” Kilinochchi sounds
nothing like a town in the American west of the 19th century. It is, rather,
the setting of Romesh Gunesekera’s short story, “
Roadkill,” which appears in
the Dec. 2 issue of The New Yorker. It doesn't help that Gunesekera’s attempt
at continuing the western-fable terminology, “guns blazing” and “showdown” also
appears lazy and off-key.
The
plot of the story is simple: an unnamed taxi driver brings a couple into
Kilinochchi, the site of former rebel trouble that now may be on its way back
to stability, although that's not a given. The couple, the Arunachalams, make
their way up their room at the Spice Garden Inn, and the tax driver sits alone
at the hotel restaurant and eats a very poor meal that reminds him that
prosperity has not fully emerged in Kilinochchi. He encounters the hotel
manager, a Miss Saraswati, who is enigmatic and intriguing — to both the taxi
driver and the reader.