Swimmer Among the Stars by Kanishk Tharoor

Short stories have a tendency to titillate but ultimately disappoint; by their very nature, they seem designed to be unfinished fragments of another world. While Kanishk Tharoor’s debut collection Swimmer Among the Stars certainly submerges readers in environments that are at once strangely familiar but utterly alien, his charming style yields more satisfaction at their close than many of his cohorts.

Perhaps it’s the exquisite attention to detail which makes us feel so involved in these imagined snippets from a past or future existence; whether dealing with the siege of a city or an intergalactic UN convention, Tharoor succeeds in bringing everything back to a human level. At the same time, he’s also a master of imbuing his stories with a meaning and significance far beyond their clipped word count. Rather than feeling short-changed or cheated with a climax, there’s a real sense of resolution in almost all of the tales.

Tharoor is at his best, however, when he’s devising entirely new worlds of his own creation. The collection loses its way slightly in the middle section when he gets side-tracked in the historical fiction of Alexander the Great or the turbulent history of Europe, during which the short parables seem more intent on clichés than characterisation. Fortunately, the closing quintet rescue the collection convincingly and it’s an immersive, escapist treat for the casual reader.