Tania James. (2015). The Tusk That Did the Damage: A novel. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Tania James. 2015. The Tusk That Did the Damage: A Novel. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Tania James, The Tusk That Did the Damage: A Novel. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2015.

Tania James. The Tusk That Did the Damage: A Novel. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2015.

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1. • value: Animals
2. • value: family
3. • value: literary fiction
4. • value: Action
5. • value: culture
6. • value: Ancient History
7. • value: poacher
8. • value: Storytelling
9. • value: Fiction
10. • value: novels
11. • value: hunting
12. • value: animal
13. • value: Adventure
14. • value: Science Fiction
15. • value: Contemporary
16. • value: action adventure
17. • value: orphans
18. • value: Animal Rights
19. • value: survival
20. • value: danger
21. • value: India
22. • value: Terror
23. • value: calf
24. • value: literature
25. • value: fiction books
26. • value: freedom
27. • value: realistic fiction
28. • value: baby elephant
29. • value: adventure books
30. • value: survival fiction
31. • value: sad books
32. • value: Best books
33. • value: New York Times bestsellers
34. • value: ancient mythology
35. • value: gifts for artists
36. • value: elephant books
37. • value: gifts for animal lovers
38. • value: realistic fiction books
39. • value: books fiction
40. • value: elephant gifts

creators

1. • role: Author
   • fileAs: James, Tania
   • bioText: TANIA JAMES is the author of the novels The Tusk That Did the Damage and Atlas of Unknowns and the short story collection Aerogrammes. Her fiction has appeared in Boston Review, Granta, Guernica, One Story, A Public Space, and The Kenyon Review. She lives in Washington, D.C.
   • name: Tania James

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title

The Tusk That Did the Damage

fullDescription

A wrenching exploration of love and betrayal, duty and loyalty, and the vexed relationship between man and nature—from the acclaimed author of Atlas of Unknowns. • “Impressive … captivating.” —The New York Times Book Review

The Tusk That Did the Damage is an utterly contemporary story about an ancient and majestic elephant, and his dangerous connection to the land and the people around him. Orphaned by poachers as a calf and sold into a life of labor, Gravedigger has broken free of his chains and is terrorizing the South Indian countryside. Caught up in the violence are the studious younger son of a rice farmer drawn into the sordid world of poaching; and a young American documentary filmmaker engaged in a risky affair with the veterinarian who is her subject. In three intertwined storylines—one of them narrated by the elephant himself—Tania James crafts a heartbreaking tale of the ivory trade, exploring the porous boundary between conservation and corruption.

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: Jonathan Safran Foer, author of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
   • content:

     "Impressive...captivating...When the stories of the Gravedigger, the poacher and the filmmaker inevitably converge, the novel veers toward a fatalistic irony, but in James's assured and skillful treatment, the result is stark tragedy."--New York Times Book Review, Editor's Choice "The Tusk That Did the Damage is one of the most unusual and affecting books I've read in a long time. Narrated by a poacher, a filmmaker, and, most brilliantly, an elephant, this is a compulsively readable, devastating novel. "

2. • premium: False
   • source: Los Angeles Review of Books
   • content: "Although it has much insight and nuance to add to the [ivory] discourse, James's inventive new novel has a far broader vision, one that will likely outlast this iteration of the ivory conversation. With remarkable brevity, The Tusk That Did the Damage delves into India's mythic, troubled history with elephants -- a strange marriage of reverence and violence -- and asks readers to imagine the incomprehensible, to experience the world, for a few moments, through the eyes of a killer elephant called the Gravedigger."
3. • premium: False
   • source: Glamour Magazine
   • content: "This gorgeously written novel is unlike anything I've ever read, and unlike anything you've ever read too--unless you can tell me honestly you've read something with an elephant narrator. (There are a couple human ones too.)...thought-provoking but never feels like heavy lifting."
4. • premium: False
   • source: Karen Russell, author of Swamplandia
   • content: "The Tusk that Did the Damage is spectacular, a pinwheeling multi-perspectival novel with a cast that includes my favorite character of recent memory, 'the Gravedigger,' an orphaned homicidal elephant. Tania James is one of our best writers, and here she is at the height of her powers: brilliant, hilarious, capable of the most astonishing cross-cultural interspecies ventriloquies and acrobatic leaps of empathy. You will read this ravishing novel in an afternoon and immediately want to press it on your favorite people."
5. • premium: False
   • source: San Francisco Chronicle
   • content: "The Tusk That Did the Damage is a bighearted, morally complex novel... James skillfully blends the suspense of a thriller and the erotic tensions of two romantic triangles with mythical, mournful flashbacks to Gravedigger's life and ancestry...Tusk nimbly divulges virtues and vulnerabilities so readers come to empathize with everyone, especially with Gravedigger, the very soul of the novel."
6. • premium: False
   • source: National Geographic Traveler
   • content: "[H]eart-racingly paced, with each perspective taking a chapter in turn--three interwoven stories that converge with a devastating, compelling fatality...This is a story that moves between the humid intensity of southern India's jungles, the cool assurance of the American's editing studio, and the elephant's primordial internal landscape with grace and humour, as light-footed as a poacher."
7. • premium: False
   • source: Washington Post
   • content: "The rural India described by these spiraling voices seems haunted, seeded with gods, ghosts and myth...[James'] elephants loom larger than life."
8. • premium: False
   • source: Julie Otsuka, author of The Buddha in the Attic:
   • content: "The Tusk That Did the Damage is a novel of great moral intensity, with the pacing of a thriller. Everyone is implicated. Everyone is righteous. Tania James' gift, her genius, is to turn this scenario into an occasion for grace."
9. • premium: False
   • source: Washington City Paper
   • content: "Original and multi-layered ... captivating storylines and searing imagery...James conveys a palpable, infectious empathy for an animal that fascinates us from afar, even as she probes the mindset of the disadvantaged people driven to hunt it."
10. • premium: False
    • source: Time Out NYC
    • content: "TUSK...will leave you breathless as you follow three narrators across the wild plains of India...all illuminate the complexities of the country and culture, and you'll be stunned by the author's portrayal of the magnificent, tusked animals central to the characters' lives."
11. • premium: False
    • source: Bustle Magazine
    • content: "In The Tusk That Did the Damage, James grounds a moral investigation in fallible human (and animal) emotionality: her prose is simple and beautiful, and her characters, both human and pachyderm, are lovingly rendered. But mostly you'll come away with a dreadfully heightened awareness of our careless destruction of the natural world."
12. • premium: False
    • source: Suvudu
    • content: "Utterly enthralling...a story that is bound to leave marks
13. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      January 26, 2015
      This ambitious but uneven novel by James (Atlas of Unknowns) tells three intersecting stories involving a murderous elephant on the loose in an Indian jungle. Part of the novel follows the elephant, Gravedigger, and does a stunning job evoking an animal’s sensory world, as when he remembers “the bark of soft saplings, the saltlicks, the duckweed, the tang of river water, opening and closing around his feet.” These sections also heartbreakingly capture the elephant’s terror and confusion in the face of human cruelty: the scene of the murder of Gravedigger’s mother, and his subsequent mistreatment as part of a traveling show, are almost unbearable to read. This narrative is a tour de force, and the other sections in the book pale by comparison. The chapters dealing with a love triangle involving two American documentarians and their subject, an Indian elephant veterinarian, seem to be from a lesser moral universe and are ultimately forgettable after the life-or-death stakes of Gravedigger’s sections. The story line about Manu, a would-be poacher, fares better by evoking the crushing economic and social realities of rural life in India, but is diminished by heavy-handed plotting. Having already killed one member of Manu’s family, Gravedigger pounces from the shadows to maim a second in a misguided scene that comes off like grim parody. Still, the Gravedigger sections are so original and moving as to tower over the novel’s less successful elements.

14. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      February 1, 2015
      Wherever elephants roam, there are always opportunists ready to harm them for the perceived value of their tusks and tails. Most of the time, the animals are killed outright; sometimes they survive; and when they do, the wounds they carry transcend the physical. It is said that elephants never forget, and in James' (Aerogrammes, 2012) intense and unusual novel, one calf horribly wrenched from its mother is on a quest to avenge her death, a commitment that earns him the title of Gravedigger. When two American filmmakers arrive in South India to make a documentary about a charismatic veterinarian who works with these wounded giants, they find themselves immersed in the murky world of poachers and poverty, extortion and preservation. James establishes archetypes of the Poacher, the Filmmaker, and even the Elephant itself, then alternates among their various points of view, swaying ponderously between realms of lore, romance, and reality to create a heavily symbolic and achingly tragic work of fiction indicting the horrific ivory trade.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)

15. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      February 1, 2015
      

      In India, the elephant can be many things: a source of money, a god, a protected species, and a threat to life and livelihood. In alternating chapters, James (Aerogrammes) gives us three perspectives on this giant beast. There is the view from an elephant himself, the Gravedigger, who as a baby witnessed the killing of his mother, was captured and trained, tortured and loved, and ultimately escaped to become a source of fear and hate for the villagers. There is the poacher, Jayan, who cannot resist the money to be made from the elephants' ivory tusks but whose wife, mother, and younger brother struggle to keep him on their rice farm, leading an upstanding life. And there are filmmakers Emma and Teddy, Americans who have come to India to make a documentary about the work that a veterinarian named Ravi does caring for the elephants and find that even ostensibly noble work has its shadow side. VERDICT Fascinating facts and fiction about elephants are presented, and James's gift for the side-by-side portrayal of different cultures is evident here, as in her previous books. The complexity of the issues involved make this a perfect book club choice. [See Prepub Alert, 9/29/14.]--Joy Humphrey, Pepperdine Univ. Law Lib., Malibu, CA

      Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

16. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      October 15, 2014
      

      After her excellent first novel, Atlas of Unknowns, and short story collection, Aerogrammes, James takes on the ivory trade, where idealism, local needs, and animal suffering collide. Set in South India, the narrative fans out from the viewpoints of a poacher, an American documentary filmmaker, and an elephant called the Gravedigger that breaks from his chains and begins killing and gently burying humans. Being eyed by publishers worldwide.

      Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

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A wrenching exploration of love and betrayal, duty and loyalty, and the vexed relationship between man and nature—from the acclaimed author of Atlas of Unknowns. • “Impressive … captivating.” —The New York Times Book Review

The Tusk That Did the Damage is an utterly contemporary story about an ancient and majestic elephant, and his dangerous connection to the land and the people around him. Orphaned by poachers as a calf and sold into a life of labor, Gravedigger has broken free of his chains and is terrorizing the South Indian countryside. Caught up in the violence are the studious younger son of a rice farmer drawn into the sordid world of poaching; and a young American documentary filmmaker engaged in a risky affair with the veterinarian who is her subject. In three intertwined storylines—one of them narrated by the elephant himself—Tania James crafts a heartbreaking tale of the ivory trade,...

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