Anatolia and Other Stories (review)

Literature written by first-generation immigrants seems once again to have become fashionable. One need only to look at the countries of origin of many of the writers selected for the New Yorker's list of twenty writers under forty: Nigeria, Russia, Peru, Latvia, China, Ethiopia, and Yugoslavia. This emphasis on a more global American fiction may represent a purposeful nose-thumbing to Nobel Secretary Horace Engdahl's comment that Americans don't participate in the world's ongoing literary dialogue. Or perhaps this shift is a more organic result of the changing milieu and demographics of American society. Either way, Shivani's first short story collection stands out as an important contribution to the global literary conversation.

Anatolia and Other Stories is remarkable for both its global breadth and literary depth. Like the stories in Nam Le's The Boat, Shivani's tales span several continents and are set in global hotspots including India, Dubai, and Iran. However, Shivani raises the stakes further with the characters in these eleven stories, who are from different social and economic classes and who are living in key historical moments, which range from the waning Ottoman Empire to a dystopian America. Shivani's stories not only reflect the recent reach of globalization and colonial power struggles, but they also look both backward and forward to posit the implications for America and beyond. The stories are more often novelistic in scope (but not necessarily length) because they situate the quotidian within the broader sweep of history and politics. This is where the collection departs from the MFA fiction model, which often privileges individual experience at the expense of the historical, cultural, and class circumstances of the character's ignored world. In Anatolia, history, place, and culture largely influence individual decisions and in many senses are the main characters of the story.

Some readers might argue that such a diversity of stories does not allow for a consistent "voice" or "theme" to emerge from the collection, but such a claim would miss the collection's overall power to examine and portray the range of experience and possibilities in a global society. While the stories are satisfying individually, when they are considered as a whole a larger conversation emerges. This collection, then, offers a dynamic literary dialogue among diverse characters, cultures, classes, genders, and eras, a dialogue that makes visible the stories of the winners and (mostly) losers on the global stage.

The collection opens with "Dubai," which concerns an undocumented Indian worker whose life depends upon the whim of a rich sheikh he has protected. Then follows "Manzanar," which takes the form of the diary of a Japanese man in a California internment camp. The next three stories—"Conservation," "Profession," and "Go Sell It On the Mountain"—take place in the art and literary world of present-day America. For anyone who has read Shivani's essays (he writes regularly for the Huffington Post and other media outlets and literary journals), it is not surprising that several stories critique academia and its follies. Both "Profession" and "Go Sell It On the Mountain" spend much of their narrative energy mocking academia. However, these stories, while well-plotted and funny, feel the least fresh of the collection, perhaps because satires of MFA programs, writers' retreats, and academia in general are well-trodden fields and as such are probably too easy a target for Shivani's talents.

The title story, "Anatolia," set during the Ottoman Empire's decline, draws obvious parallels to America's current position in the world. Similarly, "Independence" in turn reveals the clear dissatisfaction already simmering in the midst of false optimism in a post-independent India. And "Repatriation" takes place in a perilously near future in which all "non-white" Americans are repatriated because of mass food contamination. Originally published in 2007, "Repatriation" is a striking early example of a recent uptick in dystopian literature. (Some other recent examples include Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story, Rick Moody's The Four Fingers of Death, and Sigred Nunez's...