Home

          About Me

 Marquez Mania                                                          

“But Nandini must have heard about the greatest Malayalam writer; it is Gabriel Garcia Marquez.”

   Thousand and Two Nights, a story by N. S. Madhavan

It might sound rather surreal, but in God’s own country, the boundary between reality and fiction blurs quickly when it comes to Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The recent International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK) was only a testimony to this deathless affair between the Malayali and Marquez. For much before the global village came to India, the Malayalis had adopted the master of magic realism as their own.

This inexplicable love-love relationship surface once more at the IFFK when ‘Dangerous Loves’ a package of six films inspired by the Columbian Nobel Laureate’s works, was screened to packed theatres, with serpentine queues outside for the first time in India. So what is it that makes Marquez tick with the Malayali.’

According to Adoor Gopalakrishnan, Kerala’s best-known filmmaker, the principal reason for Marquez’s unprecedented popularity has been the many translations of his works, apart from the Statewide screening in the early Nineties of My Maconda, a documentary on the novelist, by the Odessa Film Society founded by the late John Abraham.

The publishing history of the translations of Marquez, in fact, throws up some interesting figures. One Hundred Years of Solitude, whose Malayalam translation was brought out in 1981, has sold more than 30,000 copies through 14 editions. And the Malayalam version of Love in the Time of Cholera was an instant sell-out, with the print order of the first edition being 5,000 copies. The second edition is on its way.

But a closer look reveals that the Marquez Mania has a historical background of translation and radicalism to it. As far back as 1925, Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables was translated into Malayalam by Nalapat Narayana Menon, grandfather of the celebrated poetess Kalama Das. IN the Thirties and Forties, Communist ideals and the Nationalist movement fired the imagination of the Progressive Literature Movement, of which Jnanpith Award winner Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai was a pioneer, and Maxim Gorky became a household fixture with the translation of The Mother, even as parents named their children after him and the French writer Guy de Maupassant.

The Malayali readership has always stayed abreast of international literary movements, courtesy James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and later, Franz Kafka, Albert Camus and jean Paul Sartre, who became icons for the reading public. Marquez was a late entrant in the Eighties.

Critic V. Rajakrishnan believes the sheer beauty and magic of Marquez‘s narratives is what keeps the love affair going. “Unlike others, he is non-intellectual and uncerebral,” says Rajakrishnan. “His art of characterisation and recurring strange situations strike a chord here. The predicament of the revolutionaries, both lost and triumphant, also endears Marquez to the Malayali.’

M. T. Vasudevan Nair concurs. Says the 1995 Jnanpith Award winner, who’s also a writer, editor, and filmmaker. “Marquez hasn’t acquired a fan following just because he won the Nobel Prize in 1982. It is his technique of mixing myth with history that is mesmerising. And for Marquez, the reader is a faithful friend. Naturally, he is their favourite writer.”

Filmmaker Shaji N. Karun, who recently had a chance encounter with Marquez at a Paris restaurant, is one such loyal reader. He sounds, in fact, like a classic case of pleasure through self-deprecation – Marquez apparently reminds him of his own limitations as well as the potential of unexplored options in cinema. “It is the quality of magic, the superlative of imagination that attracts me,” gushes Shaji. “Marquez uses the future language of cinema.”

Maythil Radhakrishnan, a pioneer of post-modern Malayalam literature, takes the middle road. “Most of Malayalam fiction is story-telling, and Marquez is very good at it,” he says. “But it also shows up the double standards of Malayalis. They are willing to accept magic realism because it’s from outside, it is exotic.”

This difference of opinion about Marquez was evident even in the reactions to the special film package. Adoor concedes that the films were “only okay, none was outstanding.” So does Rajakrishnan: “Marquez’s sudden leap in imagination is lost in cinema. It is difficult to find a visual equivalent for Marquez.” Literary critic V. C. Harris more or less echoes Sreeraman’s sentiment when he says that Tom Alea’s film in the package was a letdown. “Reading Marquez and viewing Marquez/Alea are two different experiences. In Alea, there is no love, no danger, no passion, only a preponderance of verse, untranslated into the visual language of cinema.” Only Sreeraman found the package to be the festival’s best.

The most telling reason for Marquez’s popularity, perhaps, lies in the State’s long dalliance with the Left. The Left is not noted for appropriating writers and artistes who it feels can use to serve its ideology. Not surprisingly then, the predominant image of Marquez in Kerala is that of Fidel Castro’s great friend. And though he has no overt political message, Marquez is the ever-bright Red Star.

So, is the love for Marquez just another burden of self-imposed ideology that drives literate Malayali? Or is it the Malayali fascination with a father figure narrating vivid tales that has led to the Marquez Mania? The answer lies somewhere in the fuzzy area between reality and fiction.  

The Indian Express

Sunday Magazine

3 May 1998