Chrysalis, Anuja Varghese’s absorbing debut collection of short fiction, provides a mind-bending journey through surreal and distorted urban, rural and suburban landscapes. Varghese writes primarily about people trying to fit in and be accepted, who lack agency, who feel left out and passed by, or are being harassed because of their differences. “Bhupati” is the story of the title character, a recent immigrant, who has built a shrine to the Hindu god Lakshmi (goddess of fertility and prosperity) in the back yard of his home in unfashionable Parkdale. When the shrine is struck by lightning, he rebuilds, only to have it struck a second and then third time. By now the wife he brought with him to Canada has left him to his delusions, seeking her own prosperity elsewhere. But despite these setbacks, Bhupati persists in his efforts to replicate the old country in the new. In “Dreams of Drowning Girls,” Meena’s recurring nightmare is of drowning and watching helplessly as her flesh is consumed by underwater creatures and her bones disintegrate, leaving nothing behind. To compensate for feelings of powerlessness in her daily life and a sense of not belonging, she seeks acceptance by engaging in sex with interchangeable partners. Then, unexpectedly, Meena (whose name means fish) finds solace in the arms of Mwani, whose name means seaweed. And in the spellbinding title story, Rashika is living a double life, telling her husband Michael, in Toronto, that her frequent jaunts to Montreal are for work when she’s really going there to visit her lover Milo and her mother’s grave. Radhika is another of Varghese’s characters who stumbles through her days questioning who she is, constantly wondering what she wants and where she belongs. Raised in Montreal, she moved to Toronto with the hope that “the city would transform her into who she was meant to be.” But it hasn’t worked out, though in the end the reader learns that a covert transformation has been taking place all along, one that even Rashika wasn’t aware of. Anuja Varghese’s limpid prose is perfectly suited to these contemporary stories of otherness, isolation, and longing, and though a couple of very short pieces don’t leave much of an impression, we’re still left with a sense of a writer whose wellspring of material is deep and rich and whose potential has few apparent limits. ( )

Chrysalis is a short story collection by Anuja Varghese that is fresh, evocative, poetic, scary, affirming, weird, and just about any other adjective you can think of. It’s a book that makes you want to talk about it. For example, a friend came over and I handed her my kindle and told her to pick a story, any story. I knew she would find it thrilling and disturbing. She happened to pick one of the more horrific stories, but still loved it because how can you not?

Varghese’s prose has a spare, but descriptive, quality that is poetic, not in the flowery poetry of Wordsworth, but more like Fernando Pessoa. Reading Chrysalis made me think of these lines, “The poet is a man who feigns / And feigns so thoroughly, at last / He manages to feign as pain / The pain he really feels.” These stories are fantastical, true magic realism, but she succeeds where many fail in making us feel the pain.

One of the first stories, The Vetala’s Song, lets everyone know this book is going to be weird in the sense of Lovecraft, though an anti-racist subversion of Lovecraft. It is perhaps my favorite story in the collection. Chitra is a very tongue-in-cheek and not the least bit subtle retelling of Cinderella’s story, but it escapes the predictability of most Cinderella stories. Stories in the Language of the Fist could perhaps be a seminar in microaggressions. Midnight at the Oasis was both heartbreaking and affirming.

Chrysalis is my favorite book of 2023. The language is lovely. The emotions, the pain and the joy, feel authentic. The people are more complex than one expects in a short story. There is this authentic weight to the stories, of alienation, pain, love, grief, all blended into a beautiful whole.

I received a copy of Chrysalis from the publisher through Edelweiss.

Chrysalis at House of Anansi / Groundwood Books
Anuja Varghese web site

https://tonstantweaderreviews.wordpress.com/2023/04/27/chrysalis-by-anuja-varghe... ( )

Chrysalis by Anuja Varghese is a collection of short stories that offers an active reader a multitude of ways to engage with each character's situation.

Admittedly, some readers may feel there isn't enough closure to some of the stories, but that is the nature of life. Even when we start moving through one thing, whether a crisis or just the daily grind, we haven't usually completely "solved" it, and even the solution we found might seem temporary at best. So a story that leaves me wanting more isn't an incomplete or surface-level story but one that leaves me with things to ponder and think about. Some people prefer the pretty bow at the end of a story, I'm fine with a loose twine knot that could come undone at any moment.

Because so many of these stories deal with issues that confront society as well as these individuals, the collection lends itself very well to my preferred way to read such a collection: slowly. I like to read one story and not immediately go on to the next. Whether because I don't have time or because I choose not to, this allows me to let the events in the story ferment for a while. Sometimes I have to come back when I realize a small point (so I thought while reading) could play a larger role in, if not the story itself, my understanding of the story. No writing can have an impact entirely on its own, it is a dynamic process, and if you read passively and expect the story to simply tell you about some societal illness, then you aren't really very involved, you're just an observer.

This collection rewards active open-minded reading with glimpses into situations many of us will never experience but that we all can try to understand. I would recommend this collection for any readers of short stories, especially those readers who don't simply want the story to stick with you but to also broaden your perspective of the world.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley. ( )