Me, Myself, and India

With his debut short story collection, the award-winning novelist and playwright Anosh Irani could have simply presented seven stories about characters caught between two worlds and two identities. That would have delivered an adequate rendering of the complexities of the immigrant reality. As it is, his new work offers much more. Rife with satire and ironic humour, and roiling with diverse personalities and destructive passions, Translated from the Gibberish reveals an author ambitiously seeking to mix fiction with autofiction. Its character-driven stories, which move between India and Canada, are framed by the author’s reflections on his own experience of displacement, delivered through a first-person prologue and epilogue. He terms his approach a “half truth.”

Two decades ago, Irani immigrated to Vancouver from his native Mumbai, knowing little about his new country but hoping to reinvent himself as a writer. The existential difficulty of such a move is...