In other rooms, other worlds: Jeet Thayil’s The Elsewhereans and Vauhini Vara’s Searches Blur Lines

From the very first glance, Jeet Thayil’s The Elsewhereans promises to be full of contradictions — the subtitle, “documentary novel,” hints at what’s to come. In its first few pages, we encounter the dedication to his mother, “who preferred the fictional over the real”, and 10 different epigraphs, which range from Virginia Woolf to the Upanishads, Taylor Swift to his mother herself. Visual reproductions of photographs, letters, and signs populate the pages of the book, giving the category of “documentary” some heft. And yet, right at the outset, Thayil playfully warns us: “The real names and photographs in these pages are fictions. The fictional names and events are documentary. The truth, as we know, lies in between.” 

The in-between — the elsewhere — is at the heart of this book, which moves across continents and cities, from Kerala to Hanoi to Bengaluru and back, and flits back and forth in time. This isn’t a linear narrative — there is no one protagonist and no one story, and the lines between categories like “fact” and “fiction” are porous and malleable. Thayil builds speculative history around a photograph of his parents. He writes of the ghosts that haunt him in Vietnam. In some stories, he is entirely absent, an omniscient narrator; in others, he appears in third-person, a character of his own invention; in still others, his is the first-person perspective we inhabit. We’re reminded that all of this is a work of careful construction. It’s impossible to tease out what’s fact and what’s fiction — simply put, that’s not the point. Working in a form of his own, Thayil constructs and reconstructs a personal past that feels universal. The Elsewhereans is a moving and elegiac novel, an exploration of memory, movement, and what it means to create a history. 

The interplay between fact and fiction is also at the forefront of tech journalist and novelist Vauhini Vara’s Searches, although for very different reasons. The book, a collection of essays, is a nonfiction and experimental interrogation of technological capitalism and how personhood and language are affected by the internet age. Searches draws from years of Vara’s experience and expertise as a tech journalist, but also as someone who grew up with the internet — something that feels deeply relatable to this reader, at least. 

The experimental parts of Searches are some of the most interesting. One chapter consists solely of Vara’s Google searches, collected together: “Why do wolves howl at the moon? Who do children hurt insects? Why are Americans unhappy?” Another takes the form of an essay about language that Vara wrote in Spanish, then fed through Google Translate. But the most impactful piece is a chapter titled “Ghosts”, about Vara’s late sister, that she co-writes with ChatGPT. We see multiple iterations of this story —Vara writes a line, and GPT continues, inventing a fictional grief that starts from a real one. 

That tension between the real and the unreal — Vara’s own memory versus GPT’s inventions, our digital personalities versus our real ones, the data composites that companies use to determine their ad targets versus our multifaceted, complicated selves — is something Vara considers carefully and thoughtfully. In Searches, Vara illuminates the ways in which language and rhetoric have created the world we live in today. And she offers us the other side of the coin: language — stories, inventions, possibilities — is also how we can imagine a future we want.

I thought of these books in relation to each other, although I read them months apart. It’s easy and natural to rely on categories and labels. But what The Elsewhereans and Searches both offer me is the reminder that, on a micro level, your past, and your self— and on a macro level, that means a collective history, a collective idea of nationhood— are stories, spun with intention and power. Who’s telling the story, though?

The reviewer is a writer and illustrator. 

Piqued is a monthly column in which the staff of Champaca Bookstore bring us unheard voices and stories from their shelves.