M. MUKUNDAN is one of the most successful modernist authors in
Malayalam literature. He has acquired a considerable following
among the literati and the general populace of Kerala, a small
state of palm trees, trading ports, and paddy fields in
southwestern India. Mukundan is best known for his compelling
descriptions of life in the culturally heterogenoeous small former
French colony called Mahe in present-day Kerala. His most beloved
works are his novels--On the Banks of the Mayyazhi River, God's
Mischief, and The Lamentations of Kesavan. But for experiments with
language, images, and style, Malayalam literature is indebted to
Mukundan's short stories.
Donald R. DAVIS Jr. is Professor of Asian Studies at the University
of Texas at Austin.
"M. Mukundan is easily one of the finest story-tellers in India
today. He has learnt his narrative art as much from Salinger,
Calvino, Borges, and Marquez as from Panchatantra, Kathasaritsagar,
Vikramaditya Tales, and the Jatakas and combines the magic of both
in his short stories. This meticulous choice of stories from
Mukundan in a sensitive translation by Donald R. Davis Jr. reflects
the range and variety of this Malayalam author's thematic concerns
and philosophical preoccupations that have their roots in the moods
and moors of the 1960s and 1970s where existentialism and political
radicalism had their heyday in Indian life and letters, of
anonymity and identity, of claustrophobia and morbidity, of the
dehumanizing hegemony of the encounters of different worlds and
different states of being, of cruelty, sin, indifference, and
death. The stories are full of intense narrative moments, of the
dark drama of the soul, of emotions in the raw, of the irrational
that suddenly erupts into our otherwise drab and humdrum lives.
Mukundan's ways of transcending commonsense and breaking the
barrier of conventional realism are a fascinating as his racy
language and cryptic expressions, his translucent expositions and
polysemic denouements.
-K. Satchidanandan, Secretary of the Sahitya Akademi, poet, editor,
and author of Imperfect and Other New Poems.
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