There will be pain, drama, multiculturalism, unfulfilled desires, and the repercussions of love. Yes, reading this will be painful, but you will enjoy every page ... Bhuvaneswar is a talented storyteller who can take big topics like harassment and racism and illustrate their destructive power by pulling them into the lives of her characters and showing us the results. Although her dark themes can make reading an uncomfortable experience at times, our current political and cultural landscape means White Dancing Elephants is a necessary book — and one that introduces a gifted voice to contemporary literature.
Chaya Bhuvaneswar’s stories are brooding, precise, and painful indictments of patriarchal cultures ... Colorism, homophobia, and racism toward and among women of color are frequent, acid themes. The details here are realistic and sharp: observations of 'sausage-casing cleavage'; of books so fine that 'a good wind would blow away the words'; of gilt frames and expensive fabrics and baubles that never satisfy. Of vicious poison that chokes the lungs, and of storied forests that once knew better times. Radical and searing, the stories of White Dancing Elephants demand and warrant an attentive, listening audience.
Ms. Bhuvaneswar is not always in control of her volatile material and some of the stories seem more like explosions of grief or outrage than crafted dramas. But a pleasingly devious streak, at times reminiscent of Patricia Highsmith, winds through the collection, offsetting the latent melodrama. Shocking late twists and disclosures furnish a sense of unpredictability ... In this erratic but compulsively readable debut, the manipulations extend to the reader as well.
White Dancing Elephants, the debut short story collection from Chaya Bhuvaneswar, is a rich and lovely look at the diversity of love ... An insightful, provocative and thoughtful book, White Dancing Elephants gives readers much to ponder and much to savor.
Bhuvaneswar’s compelling stories portray diverse characters grappling with shifts in their lives ... Internal ruminations run deep, and Bhuvaneswar’s 17 tales give voice to a variety of characters, sorrows, and experiences, constituting a striking collection.
Written with a straightforward, refreshingly uncluttered voice, these stories center on the urgent human desire to heal and be healed ... Bhuvaneswar’s quiet, magical real style reveals a beauty that is constant and unflinching ... Throughout this collection, her fascination with Indian myths and poetic traditions is folded into the everyday lives of her characters. In many ways, these stories almost read like modern-day fairytales—timely and timeless, magical even as they haunt.
The collection is bursting with stories...in which characters’ complicated, multilayered emotions are laid uncomfortably bare ... Sometimes funny, always smart and honest, Chaya Bhuvaneswar’s stories hold the reader, even as the painful truths of human lives break through.
Like Bhuvaneswar, the identities of her characters deviate from the traditional figures we often see in celebrated American fiction ... impressively varied ... The pieces possess a dynamic range ... Bhuvaneswar is sure-handed as her stories toggle boldly between form. She is as deft at building tension...as she is at building a sort of hypnotic world.
There’s a slight unevenness to the collection, some stories being more fully realized than others. But it’ll be worth watching Bhuvaneswar’s future work, not least for future attempts to synthesize her evidently strongly held, though perhaps necessarily conflicting, convictions about choice.
Bhuvaneswar has the mastery of Jhumpa Lahiri and the lyricism of Sandra Cisneros. But the collection also has the bits of quiet joy and mischief reminiscent of Isaac Babel, along with an ability to embrace silent absence, as in Peter Orner’s fiction ... All the people in these pages have a strange, haunting quality that binds the stories into a cohesive collection ... this debut is sure to lead to more great writing from Chaya Bhuvaneswar. Step aside, Hemingway. These white elephants dance.
Bhuvaneswar’s characters—even the most 'minor' among them—share insuppressible desire and agency, electric and life-affirming in its unpredictability ... Each of Bhuvaneswar’s characters are writing their own stories, making space for themselves in their respective worlds. As a reader, it is tremendously satisfying to witness this agency, this insistent claiming of one’s own body and circumstances—particularly in the collection’s kaleidoscopic range of characters, settings, and time periods.
The book provocatively probes the aftermath—the aftermath of death, of grim diagnoses, of abandonment, of monumental errors in judgment. Passages jump back and forth in time to dissect how the consequences of a fraught event shape and unravel the lives of innocent casualties ... An exuberant collection.
The political charge of each relationship is reinforced by Bhuvaneswar’s articulation of the simmering drama created by them ... Though a few stories don’t feel as developed as others, the collection is sharp and provocative, and Bhuvaneswar’s voice rings true.
