‘The Hippo Girl’: Each of these short stories has the potential to be a novel

Shah Tazrian Ashrafi’s debut short-story collection is one of those collections – and I haven’t read too many of them – in which every story could have been a novel. Naiyer Masud used to write like that; criminally under-translated Marathi great GA Kulkarni used to write like that; Lydia Davis, certainly, writes like that – write, that is, in a way that almost every character in these writers’ large and expansive oeuvre seems to have actually lived. You read their stories and you understand that these are men and women who, as Benjamin Kunkel wrote about Roberto Bolano’s The Last Evenings on Earth, had a life instead of a story. “The life was just a mess, and then it ended.”

True of The Hippo Girl and Other Stories too. These are stories in which people, instead of characters, exist, and they lead messy lives, and then sometimes, as it happens to people, their lives end; but sometimes their lives also continue on, though that is often behind the scenes, once the page has been turned and the story has, conventionally speaking, ended. But that’s what I mean when I say that every story here could have been a novel: these stories resonate beyond the pages because the people...

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