Book: The Birth Lottery And Other Surprises

Author: Shehan Karunatilaka

Publisher: Hachette

Price: ₹599

To be a copywriter, a content developer, and a wannabe musician-cumcricketer is not unusual, at least not in our South Asian context; however, to also be a Booker and a Commonwealth Prize winner besides being an established writer of children’s books is a mark of the exceptional. But that’s not all. Sri Lanka’s Shehan Karunatilaka’s creative output is multifaceted as he’s recently pulled off a hat trick by publishing a set of short stories, The Birth Lottery and Other Surprises, a collection that lives up to its title, especially the ‘surprising’ bit. The title and its timing confer a rare distinction upon the writer and his work since the genre of the short story has a special and ‘surprising’ resonance in our heady, South Asian, postcolonial and conflict-ridden times.

In April 2022, when The Birth Lottery was nominated for the longlist for Sri Lanka’s 2021 Gratiaen Prize, Karunatilaka said that the compilation took him over two decades to complete and that the curious mix of odd stories bears witness to his eccentric writing habits as well as to the many “moods and voices” of “Sri Lanka and its absurdities”. One could add more: that Karunatilaka enmeshes his autobiographical interests in diverse ways: in the colloquial setting of a music band in “This Thing”, in the risqué copywriting world of “Small Miracles”, or in the cricketing vision of “The Ceylon Islands”, to name a few.

Notably, autobiography is but a departure as the stories seek to surprise the reader with unexpected and twisted endings as in “Easy Tiger” or in “The Prison Riot”, and through well-crafted acts of interiority, evident in the sepulchral edge in “Short Eats”, or in the memorable robotic thoughts of “A Self-Driving Car’s Thoughts As It Crashes”. Karunatilaka laces ‘surprise’ with contemporary themes, and one cannot forget the sharpness of class hatred in “My Name is Not Malini” or the absurdity underlying “The Losing Bet”. For the uninitiated, the book begins with a quirky guide on “how to” read or “what to” expect in the thirty elegantly illustrated stories.

If ‘surprise’ directs the chaotic turn of the dystopian, postcolonial contemporary, ‘birth lottery’ underscores the absurdity of inheritance of privileges and hierarchies. Notwithstanding the fact that social outcomes are written or marked in the womb, birth is a lottery, if not an accident, and Karunatilaka rewrites this motif in his titular piece through scattered reflections drawn from the island nation’s historical past and present. The aphoristic and terse jottings in “Birth Lottery” extend beyond the human world to include living creatures as well.

However, since the titular account is the only one which ruminates on the absurdity of the birth lottery, the organisation of the book creates confusions as “Other Surprises” clearly outweighs this episodic account foregrounded in the title. Probably, if ‘birth lottery’ is treated as an organising trope for the entire book as all the stories, in one way or the other, lend credence to the rise and the fall of the birth lottery, then it is possible to comprehend the title and its intuitive framing of the predetermined yet accidental nature of social relationships. The collection’s epigraph, “None get to choose where they are born. Many try to steal the credit”, reaffirms this message.

Despite the rich fare and witty turn of the tales in The Birth Lottery, the innovative canvas of the work leaves the reader wondering about the shortness of the short story. While Karunatilaka explores and explodes the form to write in diverse accounts, brevity and thematic topicality portend a problem. For instance, the depressing world in “No. One. Cares.” is generated by the ever spinning but equally static world of social media and the story shows that such an ecosystem cannot nourish a bitterly alienated man. But surely, the quickness and the quirkiness of the story beg a question: if social media is technologically characterised by changeability, can the interiority of such a story hold relevance for future readers?

The Birth Lottery reminds us that the contemporaneity of the short story can also lead to its confinement. However, givenKarunatilaka’s innovative and experimental use of the form, it canbe hoped that this new lease of life will enhance the rootedness and the relevance of the short story in English. In his Booker speech, Karunatilaka emphasised the significance of writing: of sharing stories. This is an immensely enabling vision of solidarity underlying the purpose of writing and reading, and it is hoped that Karunatilaka’s short stories will continue to reinvent the Sri Lankan, and, by extension, the South Asian literary cradle.