The autobiography of a nomadic family

Jeet Thayil's new book, The Elsewhereans, has been published as fiction, but it defies neat generic classifications.

- Somak Ghoshal

Jeet Thayil's new book, The Elsewhereans, has been published as fiction, but it defies neat generic classifications. With its moorings in memoir, biography, travelogue, photography and history, it is at once an impulsive creature as well as recognizably part of an august literary tradition, heralded by writers like W.G. Sebald and J.M. Coetzee, among others, who dissolved the line between fact and fiction in their work. The style of these writers has inspired epithets like "facto-fiction" or "ficto-fact," both of which accurately describe the affinities of the story Thayil tells us in this book.

At its core, The Elsewhereans is Thayil's take on his parents' life: T.J.S. George, a distinguished journalist with multiple careers in India, Hong Kong and New York ("the first editor of independent India to be charged with sedition," as Thayil tells us) and Ammu George, a former school teacher who lived a peripatetic life with her husband before passing away in 2024. The story of their first encounter, love affair and marriage is the foundation of the book. It begins in 1957 and runs for over 60 years, interspersed with vignettes from Thayil's own life as well key moments in the social and political history of India.

The story is told through two voices, switching between the first and third person, though it is clear that the narrative consciousness is one. The occasional "I" voice belongs to a character named "Jeet," who has grown up between several places, though he is not entirely deracinated from his roots in Kerala. A poet with a nomadic life who has tragically lost his wife, he has fallen into a habit of using drugs and alcohol to excess. But these autobiographical details—which Thayil had explored in finer detail in his 2020 novel