I found his story easily the weakest of anything in the rest of the anthology Mumbai Noir. The writing was generally stilted and he mismanaged pacing in ways that mean he probably should not be a writer of short fiction. It didn't help that his story played into the gay stereotype concerning the man who never grows up but sleeps around until he's too old to be pretty and thematically felt a little more like the product of the gay liberation movement of the 1970s than something published within the past year.
As for the "queer writer" bit his biography in the text was the following:
"R. Raj Rao calls himself a queer writer, not because much of his work explores the theme of homosexual love in a way that no Indian writer has done before, but because his overall literary output is queer - he has written and published poetry, plays, short stories, novels, and a biography."
Overall, it seemed self-parodic and reduced "queer" to a meaningless term. That and his insistence on writing a supposedly queer story that played into mainstream ideas of gay culture made "queer writer" seem more appropriate than anything not in scare quotes.
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2012-10-03 04:51 am (UTC)As for the "queer writer" bit his biography in the text was the following:
"R. Raj Rao calls himself a queer writer, not because much of his work explores the theme of homosexual love in a way that no Indian writer has done before, but because his overall literary output is queer - he has written and published poetry, plays, short stories, novels, and a biography."
Overall, it seemed self-parodic and reduced "queer" to a meaningless term. That and his insistence on writing a supposedly queer story that played into mainstream ideas of gay culture made "queer writer" seem more appropriate than anything not in scare quotes.