A spell of magic realism

For Indians, magic realism - as shown in novels of Borges and Marquez - is an everyday affair.

By Shinie Antony

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For Indians, magic realism is an everyday affair. "They believe Lord Ganesha can sip milk and when confronted with a body in a bar shoot-out, see no killers," as an expert on Spanish literature put it.

"No, Indians have no trouble with magic realism," averred S.P. Ganguly, a professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University, even as imported myths and magic mesmerised at the Sahitya Akademi's annual Festival of Letters here.

The "Myth, Magic, History: Contemporary Fiction in Latin America and India" seminar bemused writers and scholars from Mexico, Chile, Venezuela, Peru and India as exotic names routinely appeared in the air - Jorge Luis Borges, Alejo Carpentier, Juan Jose Arreola, Miguel Angel Asturias and, of course, Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Mexican author Jorge Volpi, whose novel En Busca de Klingsor won the Biblioteca Breve Prize in 1999 and was translated into English as In Search of Klingsor, did inject a prosaic note by likening novels to parasites.

"A novel is a collection of ideas transmitted from one mind to another through reading. When someone decides to write a novel, he visits his personal library, rummages through the ideas that bubble in his mind and create his own personal story," said Volpi.

"Since the publication of the first part of Don Quijote in 1605, the novel has gone through a great evolution. Cervantes' masterpiece was not appreciated as such, but was seen merely as a parody of the novel of chivalry," said Volpi, who has written nine books of fiction.

He also warned against the plague of banal novels that "invades us on a daily basis" and raised his voice in the fight for complex novels - those that are not satisfied with simple imitation, that defy conventions and seek to rise above themselves.

While Akademi secretary K. Satchidanandan championed against the "monolithic, stereotypical concept of the Latin American novel", Chilean critic Jaime Collyer asserted: "The myth and the hoax, this magic-religious interpretation of the world are as much a part of Spanish America as its actual discovery."

The Sahitya Akademi, which is publishing Spanish-Hindi bilingual editions of Gabriela Mistral, Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz and contemporary poets, has sought help from other publishers in this mammoth task.

Earlier in the week, lovers of literature stopped fanning themselves with speech printouts and quickly began to read when this year's Sahitya Akademi award winners in Dogri, Bodo etc. started to speak in their mother tongues during a meet.

However, the audience let out a cheery murmur at Hindi award winner Manohar Shyam Joshi's confession that he had forgotten his glasses back home and therefore would not read from his prepared speech.

"I wanted to be a world famous scientist or a cricketer. Never did I dream or yearn to be a writer," Joshi admitted chattily in Hindi.

He recounted his disappointment at bagging a book Shekhar Ek Jeevani by Agyeya in school as prize. "That book is still safe in the house of a family friend who thankfully borrowed it."

"I stopped attempting poetry long ago. If only I had left off prose too, I would not have to see such days (of winning awards and making speeches) in my old age," he told an amused audience.