The Art of Wearing a Trench Coat

The Art of Wearing a Trench Coat by Sergi Pàmies, translated from the Catalan by Adrian Nathan West, is a collection of a baker dozen stories on relationships between strangers, spouses, parents and children. Loosely interconnected, these stories are meditative vignettes, more like essays. The first story 'Eclipse' exerts a mysterious pull and offers a good start and the second story is an intelligent discourse on marriages that are crumbling from within. 

On early signs of divorce, the author writes - "It’s not true that the erosion is imperceptible. Long before the point of festering, it makes itself known through details couples notice but refuse to acknowledge, because inertia has hobbled their capacity for decision-making or because they try to believe better days are on the way". (from the story - Outline of a Lecture for a Hypothetical Conference of Divorcees).

It is only as I read the third story, I realised that the collection is more or less autobiographical, one can actually equate it to a deconstructed memoir. In 'Mother-Son Christmas Carol', the author writes about his nonagenarian 'writer' mother who puts up a tough fight against delusional dementia in a geriatric residence before losing it and shifting to the care of her elder son and daughter-in-law who tend to her well unto her death. The author (the younger son) ensures his mother writes and edits till her final day.  He writes - "My mother liked to repeat that the advantage of being a writer was that everything that happened to you could be turned into literature, sooner or later. It wasn’t an original thought, and she tended to repeat it to encourage me to write when I was going through hard times". 

Most stories here have an unnamed narrator but there's a strong sense of intimacy in the text indicating that mostly everything written here is from the author's personal experiences - his tumultuous adolescence, little insecurities as his parents age, his failed marriage and divorce, his bouts of anxiety and his raising kids/trying to be a good father.

Little history unfolds in the backdrop, especially in the longest story in the collection - I'm No One to be Giving you Advice where we learn of the Catalan independence, the Francisco Franco's regime, about Rudolf Hess and his death in the Spandau prison and the French resistance to German occupation. Also, the title of the collection  is derived from this story where the author obsesses over the right way of wearing a trench coat, something he says he would never perfect like many men he knew did - his father and the men his mother liked, including his parents' friend, (the renowned author and a Buchenwald concentration camp survivor) Jorge Semprùn, whom he even fancied as his father during his adolescent days. 

The writing is mostly beautiful dealing with everything from serious to trivial with a certain levity. But it is also far from lucid, if not ornate, with really long sentences tying up the reader in knots at many places. 

The author says nostalgia is archaeology: it looks for vestiges and interprets them but as we dig into this collection, we feel a little overworked with these vestiges as there is nothing pathbreaking.

Echoes of the Veena and other Stories

 

"Each one’s experience is their truth. There are as many truths as there are people in this world. Can we deny this?” 

A world of difference exists between the minuscule truth we know and the larger, prevalent one. That the piece of land we stand on, as far as our eyes can see, is flat doesn’t mean the Earth is flat. The author, R Chudamani, points out this difference in her stories, waking us up from a deep slumber with her words that are a gentle but firm nudge. 

In her stories here, she focuses mainly on women - single, widowed at a very young age, abandoned by their husbands, ones who haven't given birth but brim with motherly love and ones forced to surrender their dreams at the sacrificial altar called ‘marriage’. She writes about men who treat women with empathy & men who choose to keep them under their firm diktat.

That children and the differently-abled get a vivid representation in this collection is noteworthy. The emotional turmoil & boredom of a 13 yr old girl who’s forced to quit school to take care of her infant brother, the loneliness that scars the life of a little girl who yearns for her parents, the relief of a maid’s young daughter on seeing a bathroom attached to her little quarters are palpable in stories here. 

The eponymous, visually-impaired character in 'My Name is Madhavan' clearly values his dignity more than feeling grateful for 'free' pity. Be it a 20-yr old young man whose disability confines him to bed or a 2-yr old child who hasn't fulfilled the normal growth and development milestones, the author elicits from us sincere empathy for these characters and not just shallow sympathy. 

Priests who serve the Lord but ruminate if he exists really, who bathe the Lord daily but realize it’s man who needs cleansing to remove the grime of caste-ist notions and social taboos, devout passion for language, literature and music make this collection wholesome.

The author's stories are set in simple times when plastic spoons strung together worked as a baby rattle and when neighbors in different 'portions' of a house set aside their differences to watch a Sunday movie together on the only TV available that belonged to their landlord. 

Could one attain fulfillment in life only as a wife, husband, mother or child? Could not one attain fulfillment as an Akka, elder sister? Is marriage the only reason for a woman to be happy? Why cant we say visually challenged, hearing disabled or speech disabled rather than deaf, blind and dumb?, these are some of the important questions the author raises in her stories. An article in The Hindu (titled Loss of a Crest Jewel published after the author's demise) penned by the author's close friend and eminent writer Ambai helps us understand more about her, why she chose to delve more on select themes in her stories.  

Simple pleasures, endless tragedies, ordinary lives of men, women and children are rendered with an extraordinary sensitivity in 18 stories in this collection. A keen eye for subtle differences between what the eyes express and the lips utter is evident in many stories. The pithy writing has grace and simplicity stamped all over it and Prabha Sridevan's brilliant translation enriches our reading experience. 

Each story here is of the 'right' length imparting a complete sense of satisfaction. Echoes of the Veena and other stories published by Ratna Books is a collection that's every bit beautiful, from a writer (true to her name) who's truly a bright jewel of Tamil literature.

Wooden Cow

 

Book Review 

‘Almost anything makes me laugh’, says Ammani, the protagonist of Wooden Cow written by T Janakiraman, translated from Tamil by Lakshmi Kannan. Her only laughter-free moments are those she spends in front of a mirror, moments of self-introspection.

Wooden Cow is Ammani’s life journey rendered from her POV. The book comprises of two sections and the first one delineates Ammani's growth from a sensitive, precocious child to a headstrong, confident young woman. She moves from her birthplace, Annavasal to her father’s elder brother’s (Periyappa's) house in Kumbakonam, then to Madras at Gopali’s behest, all in pursuit of higher education. Gopali, an immensely talented Carnatic singer from Ammani’s village, is a philanderer who cares a hoot for moral codes & Ammani is smitten by his extraordinary singing and child-like charm. 

In the 2nd section, Ammani, now well-trained in dance travels worldwide for concerts and leads a hedonistic, comfortable life in Madras under Gopali’s aegis. She flits in and out of many relationships including a serious one with Gopali’s nephew, Pattabhi and even spurns his marriage proposal. It’s baffling when she says, “Would he understand if I were to say that I wish to live with all men in the world like a wife, if only for a moment ?” 

What makes Ammani reject marriage as bourgeois? Why is she stubbornly irreverent, disdainful of social proprieties even in face of censure?  

As reasons unravel, we realize the author gives us a very powerful female protagonist in Ammani who defies every convention on which the edifice of society is built. From her childhood, she is intolerant to injustice and courts a few controversies for being vocal in her protests against it. She's an incarnation of contrasts as revealed beautifully in how she perceives sunlight scattered on the floor- ‘in dots like the hide of a dappled deer and at other times, it growled like the hide of a leopard’. 

Audience everywhere applaud her dance performances but she only wonders 'Why did she dance? Why did people get impressed and give her a standing ovation even when she found her performance jaded? She describes how mundane the art form (maybe life itself) gets over time saying - ''When you dance publicly for the first time it is fear, dancing the second time is courage, dancing the third time is habit , if there is anything new the fourth time , it's entirely one's imagination. The fifth time, it is boring. From then on it's just like an ox going round and round at the oil press. I hate it."

Though Ammani dons a tough exterior, is admired and derided equally by people around her for her life choices, the author reveals her vulnerabilities with sensitivity, portraying a sense of loneliness, a silent fear of ageing gnawing at her with this line - 'On records it is 38, face is 48 and white hair like 78'. The title of the book makes complete sense towards the end of the read through Ammani's ruminations. 

The prose brims with physicality, but is never obscene as the author explores man-woman relationships, both deliciously fleeting and long-lasting ones (the latter through Maragatham and Pachiappan, a married couple who work for Ammani but are like her friends). What's sacred and profane, he lets the readers analyze. He subtly mocks the war-waging rich and powerful nations and armchair communists. He bulldozes orthodox practices of the Tamil Brahmin community, especially ones related to widowhood.  

The narrative working like 'staccato beats' at places attempts to distract us but Ammani's complexity manages to hold our attention.

A brilliant classic from an iconoclastic writer!

About the Author 

T Janakiraman, popularly known as Thi Jaa, belonged to the Manikkodi group of writers that heralded modernist trends in Tamil literature. These writers laid more  emphasis on the psychological exploration of their characters and made mundane everyday existence engaging. 

Thi Jaa focused on everyday lives of middle-class families in small towns of Tamil Nadu, wrote about simple pleasures, tragedies, free-willed and resilient women, lives marked by difficult and uncommon choices, all with complete honesty.  

About the translator and this edition

Wooden Cow originally published as Marappasu was first serialized in the monthly Kanaiyazhi and later published as a book by Meenakshi Puthakalayam in the year 1975. Translated for the first time by Lakshmi Kannan in 1979, a second edition was released in 2021 to mark the author’s birth centenary. Lakshmi Kannan has reworked to ensure the translation in the second edition doesn't feel archaic. 

The edition available on Kindle is the 1979 edition. The second edition (as shown in pictures here) boasts of an introduction by Anita Balakrishnan that provides a astute analysis of the book, better savored at the end of the novel.

Thi Jaa hailed from Thanjavur and knowing many acquaintances from the region, I have to admit that the half spoken innuendos, cultural idioms, subtle mockery and linguistic devices used are pretty impossible to translate into English. Despite best efforts, a loss in translation is inevitable and it is evident too. That said, accolades to the translator who has taken up the daunting task not once but twice just for the sake of us readers, sincere thanks to her for her efforts!

Blue Eclipse

 

When I picked Blue Eclipse and other stories by Kakanadan from my library, I didn't know that the author is one of the best Malayalam litterateurs. 14 stories here present an interesting snapshot of his short story oeuvre. 

'Time-Worn', the author's first story published in Mathrubhumi in 1959 that earned him fame, is a sensitive portrayal on how things we use for decades hold a special place. 'The Glass House' poignantly depicts one man's loneliness when he's shunned as an outsider by his own village. These 2 stories, feel like breeze, different from others that rage like grade 1-5 cyclonic storms. 

'Harkishanlal Sood' and 'The Rogue' have protagonists who want absolute freedom without a shred of responsibility. 'Srichakram',  based on a Hindu tantric tradition and 'Babel' that opens with a passage from the Bible are potent dissections of sexuality, spiritual enlightenment and blind faith. The author obsesses over the color blue in 'Blue Eclipse' and 'Madness', showing how the color is both titillating and depressing. 'Siddhartha's Axe' describes what modern-day Buddha would do when frustrated at man's inability to break free from bondage. 

Not all stories here are set in Kerala as the author moves from Delhi to Trichy to Bombay and even to Leipzig. There's free flow of booze - cognac, vodka, toddy, local brew Salfotta made from a millipede and ammonium sulfate and foray into psychedelic dreamland in his stories. 

Kakanadan's portrayal of sex, violence, avarice and lust; of drug peddlers, prostitutes, drunkards and gamblers heralded a paradigm shift, modernism in Malayalam literature. He changed gears from platonic, sentimental love that writers glorified until then and stressed on physical love. 

The translation by Rishi Kakanadan, a son's tribute to his father, deserves accolades. An interview at the end helps us understand the author better, the rebel he was in life and in his writing. 

M Mukundan in the insights section writes 'it is impossible to read Kakanadan unless you are willing to give up the accumulated detritus of inhibition and conservatism in you', nothing else can sum up this collection better.