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| June 26, 2000 | ||
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| Seeking
Susan From the literary galaxy of Kerala, a new star. Plus an early eclipse. By Ravi Shankar SOMETHING BARELY REMEMBERED LAMENT OF MOHINI The imagery, unlike Arundhati Roy's, is carefully crafted and meticulously executed, the style of writing economical yet beautiful. The overpowering scent of nostalgia is like pollen in the air: "Sometimes in the dark green Roman street, ancient cobbles under my feet, I would think of the old house where I grew up ... One day I would go back to my ancient village, where the wind brought to us the sound of the sea, and the hush of river water." It is difficult to be lyrical in prose without appearing florid and foolish mostly, unless you invent a completely new idiom like Joyce with his Ulysses or you are gifted with the genius of a Marquez. Ondaatje plays his violin of words. But Visvanathan seems to have somehow become a lepidopterist of prose, and her stories have the quality of butterflies dreaming in her net. The stories appear fragmented and transient, with no apparent connection other than a few common names that keep cropping up, a Syrian Christian legacy and the protagonist's inner self-indulgence. But as one reads on one becomes aware of an underlying superior cunning; this crafty Lady of Shallott has been sitting and spinning a pattern that overknits seemingly disconnected vignettes of narrative. The art of coincidence is worthy of a Calvino, and Visvanathan uses it with delightful control: Chacko who comes to the small village called Puthenkavu and meets the child Anna whose mother deserted her for Azor, who doesn't speak the language, but woos her with wordless romance. Stories later, Anna is a hausfrau in Puthenkavu and you enter the mind of a Syrian Christian housewife living within the value systems of cashew-rubber Kerala. Lukose Achen who was marked by God to be His own from childhood, Ivan who comes home to die and feels the trees dark and soft with rain, and the air cool on his body, and a last nostalgic wish to walk barefoot down the canal at the moment of his death. Visvanathan appears to have entered her candidature for being a major writer in the years to come. But there also exist authors who have leapt onto the Kerala bandwagon, authors like Shreekumar Varma, who write for the only purpose of falling on their face. His The Lament of Mohini is the most avoidable book I have come across in recent years. The novel deserves a better storyteller; it spans five generations of Kerala's Travancore aristocracy, across the medieval period to modern Madras. There is some fantastic sepia in the book: the elephants' graveyard, the falling father, the occult sigil and the neglected painting. Unfortunately in Varma's hands the book reads like disconnected articles in The Indian Express randomly stapled together. The characters are not even unidimensional, they seem to exist only by virtue of the printer's kindness. The imagery is appalling: "nails fallen like artificial dewdrops" and "bald head like a mud pot". Attempts at humour are pathetic, like the case of the Namboodiri who wore a woman's blue panties under his semi-transparent sarong. It was Roy who first opened the Pandora's box: of Kerala's rich and stormy landscape, and the stories that have collected in its ancient houses, depths of green village lakes, and the incessant mantra of the Arabian Sea. Visvanathan succeeds in becoming a worthy heir to that sea of stories. Unlike Varma, heir to the great Raja Ravi Varma but not to his genius. NEW RELEASES The Changing Times (Orient Longman, Rs
250) Indian Defence Yearbook: 2000 Just So Stories (I-IV) The Fish Cookbook Dalai Lama, My Son: A Mother's Story Ladakh Adventure Who Killed the Sunderbans? |
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Something
Barely Remembered is a title that shows the red rag to any bull of a
literary critic. But this delicate collection of 15 short stories written
by Susan Visvanathan is going to be remembered quite a lot. The stories
are set in Kerala -- suddenly spouting more English authors than monsoon
vegetation in Ayemenem -- and the rest of the world: Rome, Zurich,
Casablanca and back to Kottayam. Visvanathan's stories seem
autobiographical in snatches, the voice of each protagonist overlapping
like echoes in a shadowy play.