A House Is a Body: Stories

This is Shruti Swamy’s debut collection of stories. She is not a debut author. She writes with sureness and grace. Her writing is more poetry than prose. Swamy does not write the kind of short stories you are used to reading. Few feature a classic plot line or create memorable characters. Rather, the stories put you in a mood, leave you with a new feeling about the situations and people she has created. The stories are rewarding for the elegance and lilt of the writing. Swamy takes you on an easy, well-articulated rides set in India, Germany, and the United States.

The collection contains several strong pieces. “The Laughter Artist” is about a woman who takes a class on laughter. It is less a story than an essay on laughs, the different kinds, their uses. Swamy describes how her character, Janaki, develops a divorcee laugh. “I started with the pure laugh of a baby and the made it dirty, roughed up the edges.” And Janaki talks about how she uses her laugh. “When I started to laugh in company, I felt like I was constructing the sound, I was choosing between sounds, to give my listener pleasure or deny him it.” Notice how Swamy has constructed the last clause: “Deny him it.” You will find many other examples of artful phrasing in this collection.

The title story “A House Is a Body” hews most closely to the classic story form. It is set in a house in rural California and features a mother and her child. There are two intertwining tales, a child’s fever and a wildfire approaching the family’s home. The fever and fire are initially dormant, not threatening, but both slowly build to crisis proportions that lead to an unspoken, albeit, certain conclusion. The mother and her daughter Ani are on the deck of their house. They can see the flame edging onto their property and waves of black air blowing toward the house. “She felt their bodies acutely in air, in air that had the harsh, milky quality of evening. Lit. She was nearly gasping. Look, Ani, she said again, lifting her daughter’s head. Look how beautiful.” Notice the using of phrasing and punctuation to create effect.

Stories that do not follow a traditional plot structure are quite pleasurable for their language and descriptions. In “Mourners” and “Krishna,” Swamy shows fine skill describing couples making love. The author blends the physical acts with emotional feeling in a most satisfying way.

“The Wedding Season” is the tale of a gay couple attending a wedding in India. It is a description of a gentle love. As the ceremony started, “She shifted in her seat. She wiped at her eye, there was something in it. Then she took up Teja’s hand and kissed it, quick, when nobody was looking.”

Swamy can imbue simple acts like crying, walking, or taking a shower with a level of detail that creates a new understanding of it. From “Earthly Pleasures:” “I had never seen myself cry and I was curious what I looked like. . . . the formation of the tear, the heat building, the breath becoming ragged. I wanted the face covered in the gloss of tears and mucus, like a kind of oil.”

If you love words, the way they can be used to describe objects and actions, the ways they can be assembled for effect, buy A House Is a Body. You will be rewarded.

This is Shruti Swamy’s debut collection of stories. She is not a debut author. She writes with sureness and grace. Her writing is more poetry than prose. Swamy does not write the kind of short stories you are used to reading. Few feature a classic plot line or create memorable characters. Rather, the stories put you in a mood, leave you with a new feeling about the situations and people she has created. The stories are rewarding for the elegance and lilt of the writing. Swamy takes you on an easy, well-articulated rides set in India, Germany, and the United States.

The collection contains several strong pieces. “The Laughter Artist” is about a woman who takes a class on laughter. It is less a story than an essay on laughs, the different kinds, their uses. Swamy describes how her character, Janaki, develops a divorcee laugh. “I started with the pure laugh of a baby and the made it dirty, roughed up the edges.” And Janaki talks about how she uses her laugh. “When I started to laugh in company, I felt like I was constructing the sound, I was choosing between sounds, to give my listener pleasure or deny him it.” Notice how Swamy has constructed the last clause: “Deny him it.” You will find many other examples of artful phrasing in this collection.

The title story “A House Is a Body” hews most closely to the classic story form. It is set in a house in rural California and features a mother and her child. There are two intertwining tales, a child’s fever and a wildfire approaching the family’s home. The fever and fire are initially dormant, not threatening, but both slowly build to crisis proportions that lead to an unspoken, albeit, certain conclusion. The mother and her daughter Ani are on the deck of their house. They can see the flame edging onto their property and waves of black air blowing toward the house. “She felt their bodies acutely in air, in air that had the harsh, milky quality of evening. Lit. She was nearly gasping. Look, Ani, she said again, lifting her daughter’s head. Look how beautiful.” Notice the using of phrasing and punctuation to create effect.

Stories that do not follow a traditional plot structure are quite pleasurable for their language and descriptions. In “Mourners” and “Krishna,” Swamy shows fine skill describing couples making love. The author blends the physical acts with emotional feeling in a most satisfying way.

“The Wedding Season” is the tale of a gay couple attending a wedding in India. It is a description of a gentle love. As the ceremony started, “She shifted in her seat. She wiped at her eye, there was something in it. Then she took up Teja’s hand and kissed it, quick, when nobody was looking.”

Swamy can imbue simple acts like crying, walking, or taking a shower with a level of detail that creates a new understanding of it. From “Earthly Pleasures:” “I had never seen myself cry and I was curious what I looked like. . . . the formation of the tear, the heat building, the breath becoming ragged. I wanted the face covered in the gloss of tears and mucus, like a kind of oil.”

If you love words, the way they can be used to describe objects and actions, the ways they can be assembled for effect, buy A House Is a Body. You will be rewarded.