I want to tell you about Body and Blood, but I also wanted to put off an extremely clichéd style of introduction for as long as I could. His new work, Body and Blood, translated by Swarup TK, is in fact his second of 2020 Al-Arabian Novel Factory, a sort-of sequel to a previous book called Jasmine Days, dropped just a few months earlier. He now has at least one novel a year translated into English. The experience of reading Goat Days was very original, but not, in fact, singular: Benyamin has now become the sort of writer who creates regular literary events not only in Malayalam, but also in English publishing. A short and desolate story about a poor Malayali man’s enslavement in the deserts of Arabia, it was both terrifyingly realistic and almost mystical in its view of suffering and dignity. I knew even less about contemporary Malayalam writing then than I do now, and Goat Days struck me as a singular novel. Eight monsoons ago I read and was thunderstruck by Goat Days, Joseph Koyipally’s translation of the Malayalam novelist Benyamin’s Aadujeevitham.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |