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Friday 8 March 2019

Cosmopolitan by Akhil Sharma Review


Recently retired Gopal is abandoned by his wife, who’s gone to seek enlightenment in an Indian ashram, and his twentysomething daughter, who’s moved to be with her boyfriend in Germany. Alone in New Jersey and unsure how to fill his days, he unexpectedly finds himself in a relationship with his neighbour and fellow retiree Mrs Shaw and begins to read magazines like Cosmopolitan to brush up on courtship after many years of being married.

Charming is how I’d describe Akhil Sharma’s short story. I’m not gonna say it’s a great read or even something remotely impressive but nor is it a bad fiction. It’s a convincing, even cute, portrayal of a latter-day relationship made interesting by the difference in the degrees of love felt between the two: Gopal is quite young at heart and still shoots for sweeping romance while Mrs Shaw is much more grounded and unable at her age to get carried away. 

It’s well-written and lightly entertaining in a very lo-fi way but “pleasant” isn’t the style of story that I’d say I love. Sharma’s narrative voice is competent if unremarkable, nothing much happens, the ending is very flat and I’m not really sure what the point was. Cosmopolitan is the inoffensive type of short story you’d find in any halfway decent anthology of contemporary fiction that won’t annoy or grip any reader but is unlikely to be remembered in the slightest.

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