Tania James’s bold novel processes the complicated landscape of elephant poaching and conservation in southern India. Shifting among the perspectives of an American aspiring filmmaker, a poacher’s younger brother, and an elephant, The Tusk That Did the Damage examines the ivory and documentary film-making trades and those involved with them. Herself a former filmmaker and Fulbright recipient to India, James captures the complicated social position of two American graduates trying to create the documentary that will make their names.
The elephant whose name is “a sound only his kin could make in the hollows of their throats” carries what would otherwise be a thoughtful, but conventional narrative of a well-meaning, but not particularly well-doing American twenty-something and a hopeful, but doomed teenaged farmer. The novel begins with the Elephant’s roaming memories of duckweed, “the tang of river water,” a path pounded out by generations, and the touch of a mother’s trunk. Even the paragraphs are separated by spaces that visualize the giant spaces between steps and the thoughts unrepresentable by human words.
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