Bonus background: shawl my friend brought me back from his trip home to India.
Author: Amitava Kumar
Publication: 2018
Genre: Historical Fiction
This book is all over the place, but in a way that for whatever reason I rather enjoyed. I picked up Immigrant on a whim, expecting from the plot description that it would be a straightforward novel of the Indian immigrant experience in America. Instead it weaves the experience of immigrating to America in the 90s to attend grad school with the author’s literary studies and sexual exploits. There is a lot of sex.
AK (who is not necessarily the author although his nickname is the author’s initials) immigrates from India to the USA in the early 90’s. Though it’s never made explicitly clear, he’s attending graduate school at Columbia. He proceeds to try to write a thesis and screw several of his classmates. The protagonist/author clearly has no idea how to deal with women other than as sexual objects, but his ineptitude makes this somewhat sympathetic rather than threatening.
The title, for what it’s worth, is a corruption of the town of Emigrant, MT, a location the narrator visits with one of his love interests.
The book reads as part memoir, part novel. It remains unclear how much of each part is present, or which, at any given moment, is driving the train. Kumar juxtaposes history, scholarly musings, and the protagonists own life and throws in a smattering of uncaptioned images. Footnotes and asides abound. But despite the sometimes haphazard consctruction, Immigrant is a slim volume that’s an easy and diverting read.