It happens, now and then, that you come across a short story you love so much that you turn back to its beginning and start to read it again. In One Hell of a Lover, a collection of 19 stories by Unni R (translated from Malayalam by J Devika), it is almost impossible to choose just one.
The stories are all set in the author’s village, Kudamalloor, in the district of Kottayam in Kerala. While the close connection between the writer, his material and his primary audience (of Malayalam readers) is evident in the unselfconscious storytelling style, what is rare and remarkable is the ease with which the English translation draws in the reader. For this, credit must go to the translator who has conveyed both the nuances of a multi-cultural region as well as the beautiful linguistic rhythms of the original work.
A galaxy of characters—children, college students, shop assistants, lesbians and gays, Dalit workers, Jesus Christ and the ghost of Karl Marx—appear on the pages. Several of the tales involve a male narrator speaking from the margins. Frequently, it is the meek and ineffectual husband (One Hell of a Lover, That Thing, Leela), through whose eyes we witness the predatorymasculinism of upper-class men. One such tale, Holiday Fun (made into an award-winning film) is about four middle-aged men, friends, who have a booze session and play a harmless game from childhood that breaches homosocial boundaries and turns violent. Weirdness and cruelty come together chillingly in Leela, where Kuttiappan, old, rich, impish and totally amoral, seeks to fulfil a bizarre sexual whim involving an elephant. Thus, while rural life forms the backdrop, these stories offer a wider social commentary on toxic masculinity.
The author’s inventiveness in creating characters, and piquant situations in the lives of these characters, often comes from giving them off beat wishes. In the title story, for instance, there is Matha Mappila, (about whom it is said that he, “Once a year, every year, deflowers three virgins on the same day.”) This man asks the narrator, a sculptor, to recreate the Pieta with the face and body of his former lover. In Calling to Prayer, a Muslim girl, Raziya, who never forgets hearing the azaan being called for the first time—“the music of the azaan was dangling on her earlobes invisibly like an ornament”—dreams of calling it herself.
An eye for cinematic detail, combined with exquisite diction, succeeds in achieving both compression and intensity. This unusual feeling for words smudges the boundaries between the real and the illusory, the ordinary and the wacky, making the story world very original. “A couple of huge pigs came hurtling across the path. On their curly tails big butterflies rode, their wings flung wide open. The shrubbery was green and dense on both sides of the path, and as we passed, a million tongues, bluish and forked, leapt out of it to lick the car’s ferrous body.” Finally, it is the sense of timing, of knowing exactly where to end, that gives each of the stories its heft. Browse through these stories, think about them. Celebrate them. This is not just one of the best reads of 2019, but one of the best short story collections in a long, long time.