'This debut short story collection from an Australian author delves into the shifting boundaries and human displacement of our era. Of Indian-Malaysian background, Sreedhevi Iyer is adept at locating tensions within her own diaspora while also casting a forensic eye on Australian social and cultural attitudes. A teacher of creative writing at RMIT and the University of Melbourne, Iyer has a gift for radiant prose, but also an astonishing range of voices, from simple riffs on backyard suburbia to the magic realism of a narrative told by a “divine” coconut. Her sharp wit and sense of irony keep stories of refugees, inter-racial tension and human prejudice profoundly in our sights.'
Source: Publisher's blurb (Gazebo Books).
Dedication: for my parents
'The good things in this collection of short stories, Jungle Without Water, are very good indeed. But before talking about some of them in detail I want to briefly touch on the major theme of this book, which is the migrant experience in many of its different phases. In each of the stories mentioned in this review the main subject of the work is the way that people fit into society when they, or their antecedents, come from somewhere else. In some of the stories the main characters are people from India living in Malaysia but the title story, for example, takes as its subject an Indian student living in Brisbane, in Australia.' (Introduction)
''The title story ‘Jungle Without Water’ about a devout young Sikh newly migrated to Australia is perfectly placed at the beginning of this often humorous, but also heart rending, collection. It’s a story about navigation. Jogi needs to find a place to pray in Brisbane and is shown a refidex. It seemed ‘almost as big as the Holy Granth Sahib. Jogi imagined his mother’s surprize at the notion of a book that only existed to tell how to travel around a city’ (9).' (Introduction)
''The title story ‘Jungle Without Water’ about a devout young Sikh newly migrated to Australia is perfectly placed at the beginning of this often humorous, but also heart rending, collection. It’s a story about navigation. Jogi needs to find a place to pray in Brisbane and is shown a refidex. It seemed ‘almost as big as the Holy Granth Sahib. Jogi imagined his mother’s surprize at the notion of a book that only existed to tell how to travel around a city’ (9).' (Introduction)
'The good things in this collection of short stories, Jungle Without Water, are very good indeed. But before talking about some of them in detail I want to briefly touch on the major theme of this book, which is the migrant experience in many of its different phases. In each of the stories mentioned in this review the main subject of the work is the way that people fit into society when they, or their antecedents, come from somewhere else. In some of the stories the main characters are people from India living in Malaysia but the title story, for example, takes as its subject an Indian student living in Brisbane, in Australia.' (Introduction)
