'Swimmer Among the Stars' Infuses Relics With Resonance
Kanishk Tharoor's collection of short stories explores the complicated relationship between language and technology. Tharoor's rich voice and immaculate craftsmanship both comfort and unnerve.
"Swimmer Among the Stars," the title story of Kanishk Tharoor's debut collection, tackles one of the trickiest subjects for fiction writers: using language to discuss language itself. In it, a team of ethnographers track down an elderly woman in a remote village who's believed to be the last living speaker of a soon-to-be-extinct language. As they record her speech, hoping to capture enough of it to reconstitute and preserve it for archeological posterity, things go sideways. She begins to sing a narrative song in
