Parini Shroff

Five years ago, Geeta's no-good husband disappeared, and most other people in their rural Indian village think she killed him. She didn't. But her reputation gets around, and some other women with terrible husbands start seeking her help with offing them, and shenanigans ensue.

There are things to like about Parini Shroff's The Bandit Queens—mostly the moments of somewhat dark humour, and the complicated and prickly female friendships—but this was a debut novel that needed not just one but probably at least two more drafts before it was published. The tone is wildly uneven and the dialogue often stilted.

I get there are always compromises to be made when you're writing a book in English but the characters are really "speaking" in another language (in this case, Gujarati). Not every concept will translate, capturing particular cadences might be difficult, and so on. But here Shroff repeatedly indulges in one of my pet hates, where a word that does have an equivalent in English is left in the "original" language for... coyness? Humour? Colour? I don't know. But I do know that every time a character goes to "make su-su" in this book (and it's a lot), I was gritting my teeth and saying "just say 'pee'!" Shroff's linguistic register is also all over the map—characters sprinkle their dialogue with as many "likes" as an American millennial and much of the prose is fairly informal, but occasionally we're told that a character has a "falcate back" or that one of the women has made an "aperçu". At one point, one woman refers to another as "zaftig." Encountering Yiddish slang in a rural west Indian context does break suspension of disbelief a little.

And that ties into the other major issue that I had with The Bandit Queens, which is that there was a lot about the framing and subtlety of approach (or lack thereof) which made it clear that Shroff is an American of Indian heritage rather than being born and raised in India. I had the sense that for an Indian to read this would probably be what it's like for me most of the time when I read a book by an Irish-American set in Ireland.

I think Shroff has potential as a writer and I wouldn't swear off her future work, but this was a bit of a disappointment.… (more)