Rebellion and Magical Realism

Recommendations is a weekly column, in our Books section, where we invite a well-known author to recommend four books translated from an Indian language. These are not just recommendations, but books that have made an impact on their creative world. 

This month, we will feature author Saharu Nusaiba Kannanari's selections.

Moustache
By S. Hareesh
Translated by Jayasree Kalathil 

I have always jokingly referred to Gabriel Garcia Marquez as the greatest Malayalam writer because of the extraordinary influence of his works on Malayalam literature. In fact, “One Hundred Years of Solitude” (alongside perhaps Juan Rulfo’s “Pedro Paramo”) has come to achieve the status of a kind of secular scripture for the strongest of modernist writers in Malayalam.

S. Hareesh’s novel is a riveting odyssey of Vavachan of the untouchable Pulaya caste, through the watery jungle of Kuttanad, in the decades immediately preceding India’s independence from the British. The legend of Vavachan’s ever-growing moustache, in a land where wearing one is an upper caste privilege, must be one of the most spectacular odes to the magical realism Malayalam has ever produced. Hareesh’s rapture in endlessly inventing fresh contexts for the story to progress though is coupled with an audacious language that is both irreverent and humorous. He is erudite in Kerala’s history as he is in both its flora and fauna, many of whom make their way into the novel as characters themselves, endowed with a human-like consciousness, playful and mischievous. 

Jayasree Kalathil carries the work into English with the help of her own idiosyncrasies to deliver a translation that both preserves and sometimes heightens the author’s own idiosyncrasies, and the original language in which it is written.