The Vanishing act stories

by Prawin Adhikari

In the title story, a young, out-of-work Nepali man meets a circus clown and a giant in a park in Santa Rosa, California, and in their strange predicaments finds unexpected resonances of the lives of fellow Nepali immigrants. ‘Fortune’ tells the story of an old man who watches his village transform into a teeming basti of migrants brought there to dam the Marshyangdi River, and finds himself thrown into a struggle against oblivion. In ‘The Boy from Banauti’, the river joins for one afternoon the divergent fates of two young boys playing truant and inventing stories. And in ‘The Messiah’, a wounded man remembers a martyr and worries about their place in his nation's turbulent history.

240 pages, Kindle Edition

Published January 8, 2014

About the author

Prawin Adhikari lives in Kathmandu where he teaches and writes fiction and screenplays. He has translated A Land of Our Own by Suvash Darnal, and Chapters, a collection of short stories by Amod Bhattarai, and has written a couple of feature films in Nepali. He is an assistant editor at La.Lit, the literary magazine.

Reviews

[Ankita · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nine short stories traversing the global domain, they explore various subjects: a young boy longing for a married lady to existential crises. Each story has its own enigma moving along the trajectory of a Maxwell-Boltzmann curve.
As a huge Murakami fan, I was in for a surprise when I read the last two stories- The Face of Carolynn Flint and The Condolence Picture. The former story is about a woman whose face has undergone innumerable changes that now it has a life of its own, transfiguring randomly. The latter is about the protagonist finding about the death of his friend, whom he had bullied, and connecting with his wife (got really weird in the middle, probably because of lesser details). As for every collection, this also had some weaklings.
His prose flows, is poetic and engulfs you. The character and the settings build up is really strong, vivid at times.