I Am an Executioner

February 27, 2012
In the staggering title story, the awkward, love-starved narrator maneuvers between his day job finishing off convicted criminals and his home life, where he tries unsuccessfully to reassure his new wife that he’s not as bad as his profession would imply. His poetic, if exaggerated, Indian English creates its own cadence just as his compulsive justification creates its own logic: “I am an honest executioner. I take good care and I don’t tell lies, minimum of possible. And each time I pushed down that rock, and it landed with the bad sound, I thought myself: Truth!” Despite this accomplishment, however, the other stories in this admirably risky debut collection vary wildly in both scope and success. In “The Infamous Bengal Ming,” a story that feels like it parodies M.F.A. workshops, Parameswar­an writes from the perspective of a tiger. In “Demons,” a middle-aged Indian immigrant responds to the trauma of her husband’s sudden death by ignoring his corpse on the living room floor. But Parameswaran should be applauded for pushing the limits of the genre and for the occasional searing brilliance of his language. Agent: Nicole Aragi.

Starred review from May 1, 2012
A debut story collection from Parameswaran. The book opens with "The Infamous Bengal Ming," narrated by a tiger who expresses affection for his keeper in the only language available to him, a fatal combination of mauling and love-biting; he then escapes the zoo to commit other acts of mayhem, under which lies a misunderstood tenderness. This tour de force sets the tone and the stage for these dark, rollickingly imaginative stories in which the powers of love and savagery are loosed upon each other again and again. In the title story, a semi-literate (and also fancily semi-literary) hangman tries to seduce his new wife despite her disgust at discovering the way he makes his living. Meanwhile, he tries to negotiate between the equal and opposite forces in him of compassion and brutishness. In "The Strange Career of Dr. Raju Gopalarajan," a fired computer salesman, an Indian-born American who believes deeply--too deeply--in the immigrant dream of self-reinvention, checks out anatomy texts from the public library and sets up shop in an exurban strip mall, claiming to be a doctor. Other stories feature a panopticonic security state in which everyone seems to be a government agent spying on everyone else; an elephant composing a memoir (in "Englaphant, that strange tongue native to all places of elephant-human contact," we're told); an Indian woman soldiering on with Thanksgiving plans despite the fact that her husband lies dead on the floor. The stories--some published in journals like McSweeney's, Granta and Zoetrope--can sometimes be arch and tricksome, and they're not for everyone. But Parameswaran is a dazzlingly versatile stylist and the conceits and voices here are varied and evocative. An inventive, impressive and witty book.

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November 1, 2011

The characters in this first collection, including a frustrated Bengal tiger and a woman gamely managing Thanksgiving dinner with her husband sprawled dead on the floor, suggest an offbeat temperament at work. The venues where these stories have appeared--e.g., McSweeney's, Granta, and Zoetrope--suggest talent at work as well. Great expectations; I'm eager to read.

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from March 15, 2012
Although the executioner takes pride in doing his job well, he hid the true nature of his work from his new, now deeply depressed wife and is, therefore, exiled to the couch. As he attempts to mollify her, he also tries to comfort his new death-row inmate, a young girl. I am going to execution you. But don't worry your head. I am not a rough fellow. I treats my prisoners nicely, if only you could ask of them. And there it is, lethal innocence and the uncanny pairing of brutality and tenderness that shape Parameswaran's macabre love stories. A thoughtful zoo tiger is only trying to express love when he inadvertently goes on a killing spree. The thin line between freedom and imprisonment is traced to provocative effect in a story told by a captured elephant, though the footnotes written by her alleged translator, a curious sort of elephant man obsessed with suicide, take over her narrative. Venturing into Kafka and Borges territory, Parameswaran writes pristine, even serene prose that flows in disquieting counterpoint to the grotesqueness of most of his tales, with one sterling exception, a heartbreaking, Chekhovian story about an aging art director helplessly in love with the wife of a world-famous filmmaker. A potent, haunting, darkly sublime, and complexly compassionate debut collection.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)