“But Nandini must have heard about the greatest Malayalam writer - Gabriel Garcia Marquez,” says a character in ‘Thousand and Two Nights’, a short story written by N S Madhavan.
There would not be a better telling of the consistent influence of the Colombian writer, who died on Friday, on a land thousands of miles away from his homeland.
A decade ago, as soon as a buzz hit the town that Marquez had been diagnosed with lymphatic cancer, a crowd of 200 people gathered at Alakapuri Hotel in Kozhikode to pray for him.
“The hall roared with loud applause when writer C V Sreeraman, one of the main speakers at the meeting, uttered Marquez’s name at the 13th minute of his speech,” recollects critic N Shashidharan, who was one of the participants.
It has ever been like this. Malayalees would hang on to every word if it was a fiction by Marquez. Ever since M T Vasudevan Nair introduced him to Kerala through his American travelogue in the 70s, there is hardly any bookstore that does not feature his books. “Even before his books hit the stores here, unauthorised translations of his work had started appearing in naxalite magazines like ‘Socialist Samvaadam’.
On most Saturdays, there would be a crowd thronging the AKG Centre in Thiruvananthapuram to read his columns in the Cuban newspaper Granma.
When the Malayalam translation of ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ came out in the 80s, a time when there was no electricity, telephones or piped water connection in the rural households of Kerala, both mass and critical audience tried to get a feel of the flimsy papers of the book with ripped bindings, which had ‘Marquez’ written on its title page.
The sensation continued for a long time. Even when one of the earlier editions of the IFFK screened six of Marquez’s inspired films in the late 90s, it unsurprisingly ran full house,” said N E Sudheer, writer and the Kerala head of Prism Books.The literary appreciation was followed by a surge in literature in Malayalam about the man and his work. In 1982, the year when Marquez won Nobel prize, two studies on him were published in Malayalam - by Asha Menon and M Krishnan Nair.
Though his friendship with Fidel Castro created a cult fascination for him in Kerala, Asha Menon opines that it was the quality of his storytelling that made his works etch in the minds of Malayalees.“Perhaps we were attuned by our own history to the way Marquez told his stories. We were fond of using myths to tell stories,” said Asha Menon.
M Krishnan Nair, considered to be a foremost harsh critic of writers, ironically became a reason for making Marquez a literary star. ‘Sahithya Varaphalam’, Krishnan Nair’s weekly literary column that received a huge following, brimmed with positive reviews each time Marquez published a book in English.
“A rotten past, a decaying present, a crumbling future. No other writer has portrayed all these in such a heartwarming way. I invite all readers to delve in this exquisitely beautiful great work of art,” reads Krishnan Nair’s review of Marquez’s ‘Love in the Time of Cholera.’
However, writer and MP Shashi Tharoor said that Keralites always had a penchant for magical realism.
“The Malayali penchant for magical realism was invented by O V Vijayan in ‘Khasakkinte Itihasam’, much before Garcia Marquez had published a word,” he said.
Thus, it would not surprise many that Facebook and twitter are inundated with Marquez memories from Kerala. One of those tribute-tweets got it right at the heart of the emotional chord: “Tributes to Gabo, the only Nobel Laureate in Malayalam literature! Bid Adieu to Kerala’s own Marquez.”