Temporary People

‘Unnikrishnan refuses to occupy a single style or register, as if to inoculate the reader against settling on any one idea of what the U.A.E. is, or of what it means… [It] works wonders, jolting the readerly brain away from abstraction and directing it toward the fine grain of life. Unnikrishnan isn’t papering over the frequent harshness of noncitizen life, or denying how degrading it can be. But he is insisting that there is more to the story - that the people in the place have rich inter…