This Is Salvaged

April 1, 2023

A driven woman seeks to leave her drinking behind so that she can become a better aunt. Two teenagers work as phone-sex operators in a bid for intimacy. An artist seeks to reconstruct a full-size Noah's Ark, following biblical specifications. These and other characters seek meaning despite their rocky surroundings in a first collection that promises much after the success of The Immortal King Rao, Vara's multi-best-booked debut. Prepub Alert.

Copyright 2023 Library Journal

Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from July 10, 2023
The stories in this striking collection from Vara (The Immortal King Rao) depict protagonists yearning for connection. “The Irates,” the bracingly frank opener, follows Swati, 14, whose older brother has just died from cancer. She takes refuge from her grieving family with her friend Lydia at their favorite Chinese restaurant in Seattle. There, a man named Orlando recruits them to work as telemarketers (the girls tell him they’re 18). After they work for a while selling magazines, they compete to be selected for Orlando’s new phone sex venture. The girls’ fearlessness and yearning is palpable, and their dialogue is hilarious (“People don’t talk about labial sweat,” Swati says to Lydia, who responds, “that’s true”). In “You Are Not Alone,” an eight-year-old girl flies to Orlando from Seattle to stay with her father while her mother is hospitalized for a mental breakdown. He picks her up at the airport with a woman who says she’s the girl’s stepmother, and while the three are on a kayaking trip, the girl glimpses an alligator and allows the stepmother to paddle in its direction without telling her about it. The smart and playful title story follows a sculptor named Marlon who’s known for installations that aren’t meant to last. When a child topples Marlon’s large-scale sandcastle in a museum gallery, the parents are mortified, not realizing the work is meant to be about what happens following the end of the world, “after we had all been atomized and wind-scattered.” Vara invigorates with emotional insights, whimsy, and a precision with language. It’s a remarkable achievement.

Starred review from July 15, 2023
A haunting short story collection from the author of The Immortal King Rao (2022), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in fiction. In "The Irates," a girl grieving the death of her brother tries to work at a Seattle phone sex hotline. "I, Buffalo" follows a high-achieving woman, recently fired from her law firm and struggling with substance abuse, who tries to be a good aunt. The protagonist of "This Is Salvaged" is an experimental artist who attempts to construct a replica of Noah's Ark in Seattle with the help of a group of men from a Christian homeless shelter. In "You Are Not Alone," a girl celebrating her eighth birthday meets her father's new wife in the Orlando airport. The prose in this wide-ranging collection flows seamlessly, one rhythmic sentence after another. The stories range in perspective, going from an intimate first person to a distant third person that only identifies the protagonist as "the girl." Some stories are formally inventive. "Unknown Unknowns," the shortest inclusion, is a five-paragraph sketch of a woman's relationship with her son and a meditation on truths and untruths. "The Hormone Hypothesis" unfolds primarily as a conversation between two women. "The Eighteen Girls" tells a tragic story of sisterhood and loss through segments ostensibly about different girls ("the first girl," "the second girl," etc.). Motifs reemerge across the collection's pages: repellant parts of the body (sweat and dried up dead skin), girlhood, divorce, faith. If the collection could be said to have a theme, it would be human relationships: those between best friends, aunts and nieces, lovers, mothers and sons, sisters, daughters and fathers. Although many of the stories dwell in the realm of alienation, they generally end on a note of redemption, however small. The reader emerges from these stories contemplative but not pessimistic. A poignant collection of stories that glimpse the salvation of human connection in the midst of modern alienation.

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Starred review from September 1, 2023
How do you recalibrate after the loss of a loved one? This intensely personal question, which might mine deep loneliness, is a central theme in Vara's (The Immortal King Rao, 2022) impressive collection of short stories. In "The Irates," high-school student Swati, unmoored after the loss of her brother, tests the boundaries of her life as she works at a dubious telemarketing firm, trying to sell magazine subscriptions. Life's hard knocks have anesthetized the reactions of most of Vara's characters, many of whom are learning to pick themselves up and move along. Evidence of classism and racism manifests subtly. In the titular story, an out-of-work performance artist is unsure how to work with a group of homeless men, choosing eventually to exploit their situation to his advantage. In another story, a South Asian woman refuses to own up to her racism: "How can I be racist? I'm Indian," she says. Once again Vara demonstrates her unbound fearlessness; she does not shy away from the rawness of everyday life. But in teasing apart the knots that complicate our lives, she exhibits a remarkable empathy for humanity, especially for so-called ordinary people.

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Starred review from February 1, 2025

In 10 stories, Vara (The Immortal King Rao) describes the gamut of human predicaments and their corresponding emotional states: grief, isolation, obsession, shame, courage, and rage. Each story exists in isolation, but many mirror each other. For example, the unnamed narrator of "Hormone Hypothesis" is subconsciously looking for a sister figure and finds Fernanda. The stay-at-home mother seems to be the narrator's polar opposite, but the two bond and find strength in their shared grief. A complementary story, "Eighteen Girls," features two sisters, one of whom is slowly dying of cancer. The title of that story represents the same person: the healthy girl reacting to her sister's forceful personality. "The Irates" is about a teen who finds the world irretrievably altered after her much-loved brother dies. She works a job she detests (telemarketing) and becomes a person she hates--an irate. Meanwhile, Sheila, the protagonist of "I, Buffalo," has lost her high-stakes job after an embarrassing incident, and in the title story, "This Is Salvaged," a lonely man tries to build a replica of Noah's ark. Throughout, Vara brilliantly describes emotional states, especially isolation VERDICT A splendid and compelling collection that covers different aspects of the human condition with humor and nuance.--Chantal Walvoord

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