Swimmer Among the Stars

In “Cultural Property,” one of the most intriguing and salient stories in Tharoor’s debut collection, a young Indian archeologist is waiting on a cold beach on the North Sea, having secretly uncovered a centuries-old sword of Anglo-Saxon iron. Having just called smugglers to bring the sword to a museum in Patna, India, he imagines the sword labeled there as an artifact of “Primitive Britain,” a thought that confirms for him that this act is far more than “revenge.” It’s these big themes—of history, war, invasion, and exploration—that Tharoor seeks to humanize. In the title story, an old, unnamed woman in an old, unnamed country is the “last speaker” of an old, unnamed language, and young academic ethnographers have arrived to record her, unintentionally raising all kinds of questions about the quest to capture what’s already been lost. In “Elephant at Sea,” a princess in Morocco requests an Indian elephant. But by the time one arrives, years later, the princess is studying abroad and everyone, including the elephant, is vexed by how one powerful person’s whim can create a mess no one knows how to fix. In “A United Nations of Space,” a future delegation of international ambassadors convenes in the cosmos to “rally the world around the memory of order.” Though the tendency to keep characters unnamed and their lives painted in broad strokes blends the stories together, Tharoor’s collection is imaginative and relevant. (Mar.)