|
Smell of an Evening by Suresh Menon is a collection
of 10 short stories based in Kerala, Singapore, New
York and other places around the world. “I have
written the stories by recreating images of my
childhood in Kerala, but I have done so without any
melodramatic nostalgia,” says author Menon, who is
based in Singapore and is the foreign editor of the
Business Times there.
The collection uses a cocktail of style from simple narrative to magical realism. Take the story titled Moulded Minds. “It’s a subconscious dialogue... HIM (the central character) is trying to explore his own psyche in the context of the milieu to justify his actions. Even as he rationalises the logic of the world immersed in fatalism, he doesn’t withdraw to his shell and say: ‘So be it.’ Even though that is his wish, he remains as active in the society as he was, which again strangely fits into the logic of things he has tried to unravel. the political backdrop and existential issues are peripheral, in that such coincidences surround everyone, but we remain the same, subscribing to a pattern, decided by the complex mechanism we call universe.”
The story Murder in the Memory is of the psychological realism genre. In the context of a village affair, involving love, urges, catastrophes, the writer throws in the air a multitude of characters, who all fall in place towards the close. The plan here is to explore the psyche of the characters that are sometimes alien to themselves.
Two stories from the present collection have been published by The New Yorker in its online edition. The author says his book is a collection of stories of different worlds, different areas and different flavours. “The characters in the book, despite the conflicts and ideological dogmas, move towards a predicted outcome,” he says, and insists that his book is for a serious audience and not for “popular reading”. He also says that writing about India from an “Indian’s point of view”, instead of an outsider’s is what sets him apart from the crowd.
And how does he think the West would react to his book? He feels Indian writers are popular in the West and there is an audience for them in western countries. “In fact, it is possible the response to the book might be better in the West than in India,” he says.
A sprinkling of stream of consciousness and a complex narrative that transcends a 15-year period produce movie-like visuals. At the end tragedy is treated with a certain indifference so as not to move the reader melodramatically but engage him/her intellectually.
—Rakesh Krishnan
|
