Temporary People

January 9, 2017
There is much to admire in Unnikrishnan’s fanciful and fervent debut, a collection of stories about the lives of guest workers in the United Arab Emirates. In one of the early pieces, the U.A.E.’s capital city, Abu Dhabi, is described as a “board game, labor its players, there to make buildings bigger, streets longer, the economy richer. Then to leave.” Unnikrishnan explores the depredations, sorrows, and longings of these foreign laborers, who are often treated as disposable, with a dark whimsy. The style varies widely; one tale consists simply of a list of professions and adjectives. Some of the longer allegorical stories—including one about a nurse who reassembles the bodies of injured construction workers “with duct tape or some good glue,” or another about a “master scavenger of the spoken word,” a cockroach who picks up the languages spoken by the diverse residents of an infested building—achieve the proper mix of absurdity and pathos. Others, however, force a flimsy conceit to bear too much weight. Interspersed throughout are briefer pieces, from one paragraph to several pages in length, concise meditations that offer up the book’s best expressions of what it means to be an outsider in a land far from home.

Starred review from December 1, 2016

Inaugural winner of the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, this debut novel employs its own brand of magical realism to propel readers into an understanding and appreciation of the experience of foreign workers in the Arab Gulf States (and beyond). Through a series of almost 30 loosely linked sections, grouped into three parts, we are thrust into a narrative alternating between visceral realism and fantastic satire. In the section "Birds," workers who have fallen off buildings patiently wait for repair like obedient robots. "Mussafah Grew People" describes a realm where extra workers are grown from seed in secret warehouses, underscoring the disposability and commodification of foreign workers everywhere. "Moonseepalty" depicts the effects of blatant racism against foreigners, while "Kloon" further delves into the degradation that foreign workers face at the hands of the wealthy elites. The alternation between satirical fantasy, depicting such things as intelligent cockroaches and evil elevators, and poignant realism, with regards to necessarily illicit sexuality, forms a contrast that gives rise to a broad critique of the plight of those known euphemistically as "guest workers." VERDICT This first novel challenges readers with a singular inventiveness expressed through a lyrical use of language and a laserlike focus that is at once charming and terrifying. Highly recommended.--Henry Bankhead, San Rafael P.L., CA

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from January 1, 2017
Guest workers of the United Arab Emirates embody multiple worlds and identities and long for home in a fantastical debut work of fiction, winner of the inaugural Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing.In 28 engrossing linked stories, Unnikrishnan blends Malayalam, Arabic, and English slang as well as South Asian and Persian Gulf cultures to capture the disjunction and dissociation of temporary foreign workers who live in the Arabian Peninsula but will never receive citizenship. In "Gulf Return," a laborer swallows his passport and turns into a passport, and his roommate swallows a suitcase and turns into a suitcase so that their third friend can dash away with them both to the airport. In "Birds," Anna Varghese tapes construction workers who fall from tall buildings back together. "Anna had a superb track record for finding fallen men....She found everything, including teeth, bits of skin." The tongue of an English-speaking teen escapes from his mouth, shedding words with every step in the agile "Glossary." "Verbs, adjectives, and adverbs died at the scene but the surviving nouns, tadpole-sized, see-through, fell like hail." A lonely renegade cockroach called The General mimics humanlike qualities in the ingenious "Blatella Germanica." "It was when he started picking up the language of the building's tenants, bits of Arabic from the Palestinians and the Sudanese, Tagalog from the Filipinos, modern variations of Dravidian languages, that he began crafting a custom-made patois from the many tongues he heard, then practicing it at night in the kitchen, as he foraged walking on two legs and in costume, that he startled the other Germanicas in his community, and they ostracized him." The author's crisp, imaginative prose packs a punch, and his whimsical depiction of characters who oscillate between two lands on either side of the Arabian Sea unspools the kind of immigrant narratives that are rarely told. An enchanting, unparalleled anthem of displacement and repatriation.

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February 1, 2017
Unnikrishnan's first book, a novel made up of 30 linked stories and the winner of Restless Books' inaugural Prize for Immigrant Writing, experiments with genre and form in documenting the lives of those imported to erect the skyline of the United Arab Emirates. Foreign nationals constitute over 80% of the population there, but they're considered expendable, temporary people. At best, they are ignored and deported when their work is completed; at worst, they're beaten, broken, and raped. Unnikrishnan tells their stories in experimental prose that moves from vignettes that read like mythical texts to transcribed interviews. The most compelling writing renders the characters' plights in the abstraction of magical realism: an English-speaking teen . . . was waiting to cross the street, when his tongue abandoned him by jumping out of his mouth and running away. And when a boy lies in wait to attack a roach infestation in his parents' apartment, a female would drop a copper-colored egg purse polished like a crystal in a crack somewhere. A careful, patient reader will love Unnikrishnan's inventive and caring connected tales.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)