The first book in my journey to read the word is the short story collection, Mad Country, by Nepali author Samrat Upadhyay. Nepal is a country in South Asia and is surrounded by China and India. It’s capital city is Kathmandu, which is called the City of Temples. Kathmandu is featured in most of Upadhyay’s stories and it’s temples and religious features are portrayed heavily in the character’s lives.
This collection of short stories feature the intersections between Nepal and other cultures. Most stories take place in Nepal and feature Nepali protagonists. Upadhyay writes morally ambiguous characters and the main themes of the stories and the characters' struggles are identity and transformation.
My basis for judging these books is that if I was not reading them for this country challenge would I finish the book. For Mad Country the answer is no. I wouldn’t have given it up completely, but would have skipped the stories that did not strike my interest. Upadhyay’s problematic characters are difficult to root for initially and the short nature of each story meant that as soon as I began to understand one character and became attached, their story ended and I had to go through the cycle again.
Each story either subtlety or explicitly dealt with political struggles and there were a lot of throw away lines about the political climate of Nepal. I would have liked to have gone further into these topics, though I acknowledge that going in I had very little knowledge of Nepali government and politics. I enjoyed the descriptions of Nepali cities and temples and the characters often spoke in Nepali with no translations, which I actually found interesting. Upadhyay gave enough context surrounding the untranslated text that it was able to be understood to a certain level.
Overall I enjoyed the themes of identity and transformation that each character went through. They experienced almost a delusional idea of self that was disturbing in the best way. This is seen in the story “Beggar Boy” when one character takes on the persona of a poor boy going so far as to pay a beggar on the street to trade clothes with him. It is also seen in “Dreaming of Ghana” when a man has dreams of his alternate persona as a man in the desert of Africa.
When the stories were told from the perspective of women I enjoyed the female characters and stories like “Fast Forward” or “Mad Country” left me wanting the story to be longer or even be the whole book.
For me though, the book ended on a sour note with the last story. This was the only story taking place in the United States and began to tackle the relationships between Nepali immigrants and African Americans. The stories previous to this one mention race and colorism in Nepal, especially “Dreaming of Ghana”, but this one took a different turn.
The last story, “America the Great Equalizer”, features a Nepali man undergoing a political transformation during the time of the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. In my opinion Upadhyay did not have enough time to tackle this topic, as the story is only 35 pages long. He raises so many questions that don’t feel like they get answered and the heavy use of the N-word by non African American characters put me off from the story and did not allow me to connect with the main protagonist. While he is acknowledging the racism towards Black people by Nepali people, the delusional and mad identity crisis that is featured so many times in the novel came up with no conclusions or coherent discussion of race or racism in America. Without this last story I would say that this book overall was worth reading and that picking and choosing the stories that interest or stand out to you is the best way to enjoy Mad Country.
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