Enchanting Magic

Right now, I’m reading O.V. Vijayan’s The Legends of Khasak. He recently died. But he was not so popularly alive in reader’s minds because of his self-chosen solitude and obscurity.

Most critics call him “our own Gabriel Garcia Marquez” as this novel’s genre is “Magic Realism.” I disagree with this kind of alibi-creation for a novelist - as Vijayan has his own special style of festooning his characters with the travails and joys of human life. Moreover, Marquez’s novels are translated by somebody else into English. Whereas Vijayan used to write in Malayalam and translate the same into English in a melodious smooth prose. I’m not trying to downplay the prolific narrative imagination of Marquez. As I believe in what the eminent French philosopher, Ronald Barthes once said discussing the merits of translation: “narrative is translatable…without any fundamental damage.”

A sparkling illustration of Vijayan’s style:

Ravi… sat alone on the veranda on the hilltop. The hill sloped down in flanks of shimmering yellow grass to the valley of coffee below. After the valley, it rose again to the skyline on which diminutive pines swayed in lucid mirage.

Magnificent prose that just glides through the mind like mercury. It’s indeed an honor to have such felicity with language with which such beautiful thoughts are panned before the reader.

A few paragraphs later, Vijayan describes how Ravi enjoyed watching the “noontide” resting on his mother’s pregnant belly. And suddenly, he tells the reader that Ravi never saw the baby:

…Mother took the little one with her on a strange palanquin. Many people moved in and out of the house that day…the palanquin was ready; Ravi remembered the dirge, the perfume, the flowers and incense. It was noontide, the husks were falling. Mother lay asleep in deep and wondrous sleep. As the palanquin rode out of the house, the nurses held him back, gentle hands turned his face away…

Through the deft use of metaphoric language, Vijayan swiftly takes the reader through the death of Ravi’s mother. I marveled at the way somebody’s death has been described - without ever divulging that there was a death.

More in the next post…

Source: Selected Fiction – O.V. Vijayan, Penguin, 1998