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Something Barely Remembered
The stories are set in Kerala- suddenly spouting more English authours than monsoon vegetation in Ayemenem.
- GenresIndia
171 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2007
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
May 29, 2019
What a gem! If you get a hold of this, read it, please. They are all short stories...at first. However, they are all interconnected towards the end. What beautiful narrative and an unexpected find. There are so little reviews of this book!
August 8, 2024
This is a beautiful selection of short stories, which is both captivating and compelling. I loved it
August 1, 2017
There is just too much happening in this book for my liking. The short stories make perfect sense on their own and should have been kept that way. The way the stories connect feels a bit forced.
Susan does paint a very beautiful picture of Kerala and the rustic rural charm of the place. It transported me to a place far from the urban jungle I reside in and made for a great escape.
I would have loved the book if they were all short stories in their own independent way.
Susan does paint a very beautiful picture of Kerala and the rustic rural charm of the place. It transported me to a place far from the urban jungle I reside in and made for a great escape.
I would have loved the book if they were all short stories in their own independent way.
February 6, 2012
[NOTE: I wrote this review for SAWNET (South Asian Women's Network) around 2001. I've since learned a thing or two about Kerala's history so take some of the historical context in the first paragraph with a pinch of salt, please!]
Most of the short stories in this collection are set in Kerala, which is known to be a bit of an enigmatic place. On the one hand it has produced accomplished, worldly people (many of whom, admittedly, who would be at home anywhere in the world but Kerala) and is 100% literate in a country where the average literacy rate is about 25%. It is as socially (though not as economically) developed as some Scandinavian countries as seen in its birth rate, life expectancy, and so on. On the other hand, no one would describe Kerala as being a cosmopolitan place. True, Kerala has been one of the very few corners of the world where Hindus, Muslims, Christians and Jews have all historically co-existed peacefully, but only very recently have Punjabis, Gujaratis, and others from the rest of India started to consider Kerala a viable place to live and work. There is still much of Kerala that one might consider pre-modern, the old spice-trade Kerala that Marco Polo and Vasco da Gama saw. In those pre-modern, pre-colonial times, Kerala actually had been a cosmopolitan place, a hub of trade for Greeks, Romans, Syrians, Chinese and Arabs. It later attracted Dutch and Portuguese colonizers, and then the British (to some degree) over land. Yet, despite this history and the astounding development, a visitor to Kerala today would quickly notice that pace of life there is slow and that sometimes time stands still. They might also realize that the puzzle of Kerala is not so puzzling after all: there were no invaders that insisted history be forgotten and re-written, no bloodshed to restart time. Kerala has been an uninterrupted conflux of old and new, the old never quite going away.
Susan Visvanathan in her collection of short stories, "Something Barely Remembered" writes of this paradoxical Kerala. A Syrian Christian priest in a lamp-lit church by the river Pamba, whose mother calls him "Achen" (the Malayalam word for "Father"), a girl who goes to live with her uncle and Italian aunt in Rome and craves mangoes from her own ancient homeland, and a woman in an American university (writing a paper on Carson McCullers) who decides to go home to an arranged marriage only to discover a missed opportunity, are just some of the characters that Visvanathan writes about. Her stories fixate on the details of every day life, making them immediately universal and timeless, much like Sandra Cisneros does in "The House on Mango Street" and like Gabriel Garcia Marquez in "One Hundred Years of Solitude." They dart from Kerala to Zurich to Ireland, and back to Kerala in a very unhampered, natural fashion, and in so doing, expands the Malayali diaspora in literature to reflect what it is in reality today. In "Kidnapped in Casablanca," a story of a woman visiting Morocco with her boyfriend, there is not one hint of the narrator's ethnicity until a crisis hits. In an instant, explosive moment, Mariam reaches deep into her soul for strength and survival:
"I put my feet on the tarmac and I dragged it. I dragged with all the weight that I was capable of, and I was strong. All that brown unpolished rice, the different kinds of bananas, some a foot long which grew in father's yard, those flat white fish we ate at every meal, the raw green mangoes, those yellow ones with fibrous stones, those jackfruits with a drunken smell about them which attracted tiny honey bees, those sweet ant-run coconuts had given me strength which didn't show. I remembered the citrus fruit which fell and pounded the roof. They were deep red inside, every cell like a jewel. I would spend most mornings at my father's house knocking them down, and eating them alone sitting on a fallen log, spitting out the seeds, waiting for the rain. I wasn't going to lose my life on the Casablanca Corniche."
This character, a citizen of anywhere, any time, has an unforgotten history and an unforgotten geography, as it turns out. That seems to be the common link among the characters in this diverse collection of stories: the ties that they have to the soil, the rivers, to family, to the food, and even to the snakes of Kerala, all of which seem to preserve them in some way and allow life to go on.
It is difficult not to make a thematic comparison between Visvanathan and Arundhati Roy because both write of the turbulence in human relationships and of the "small things" that matter a great, great deal. Visvanathan's style is unique in that you can almost hear her speaking quietly and calmly, acknowledging these forces of family and land and history that turn the fate of her characters. This is certainly an exciting and absorbing book. Her characters have a fullness that is rarely achieved in short stories and it is almost something of a disappointment to leave them behind as you turn the page to a new story. I recommend this book highly for a tranquil read about the subtle intertwining of history, heritage, and personal choice.
Most of the short stories in this collection are set in Kerala, which is known to be a bit of an enigmatic place. On the one hand it has produced accomplished, worldly people (many of whom, admittedly, who would be at home anywhere in the world but Kerala) and is 100% literate in a country where the average literacy rate is about 25%. It is as socially (though not as economically) developed as some Scandinavian countries as seen in its birth rate, life expectancy, and so on. On the other hand, no one would describe Kerala as being a cosmopolitan place. True, Kerala has been one of the very few corners of the world where Hindus, Muslims, Christians and Jews have all historically co-existed peacefully, but only very recently have Punjabis, Gujaratis, and others from the rest of India started to consider Kerala a viable place to live and work. There is still much of Kerala that one might consider pre-modern, the old spice-trade Kerala that Marco Polo and Vasco da Gama saw. In those pre-modern, pre-colonial times, Kerala actually had been a cosmopolitan place, a hub of trade for Greeks, Romans, Syrians, Chinese and Arabs. It later attracted Dutch and Portuguese colonizers, and then the British (to some degree) over land. Yet, despite this history and the astounding development, a visitor to Kerala today would quickly notice that pace of life there is slow and that sometimes time stands still. They might also realize that the puzzle of Kerala is not so puzzling after all: there were no invaders that insisted history be forgotten and re-written, no bloodshed to restart time. Kerala has been an uninterrupted conflux of old and new, the old never quite going away.
Susan Visvanathan in her collection of short stories, "Something Barely Remembered" writes of this paradoxical Kerala. A Syrian Christian priest in a lamp-lit church by the river Pamba, whose mother calls him "Achen" (the Malayalam word for "Father"), a girl who goes to live with her uncle and Italian aunt in Rome and craves mangoes from her own ancient homeland, and a woman in an American university (writing a paper on Carson McCullers) who decides to go home to an arranged marriage only to discover a missed opportunity, are just some of the characters that Visvanathan writes about. Her stories fixate on the details of every day life, making them immediately universal and timeless, much like Sandra Cisneros does in "The House on Mango Street" and like Gabriel Garcia Marquez in "One Hundred Years of Solitude." They dart from Kerala to Zurich to Ireland, and back to Kerala in a very unhampered, natural fashion, and in so doing, expands the Malayali diaspora in literature to reflect what it is in reality today. In "Kidnapped in Casablanca," a story of a woman visiting Morocco with her boyfriend, there is not one hint of the narrator's ethnicity until a crisis hits. In an instant, explosive moment, Mariam reaches deep into her soul for strength and survival:
"I put my feet on the tarmac and I dragged it. I dragged with all the weight that I was capable of, and I was strong. All that brown unpolished rice, the different kinds of bananas, some a foot long which grew in father's yard, those flat white fish we ate at every meal, the raw green mangoes, those yellow ones with fibrous stones, those jackfruits with a drunken smell about them which attracted tiny honey bees, those sweet ant-run coconuts had given me strength which didn't show. I remembered the citrus fruit which fell and pounded the roof. They were deep red inside, every cell like a jewel. I would spend most mornings at my father's house knocking them down, and eating them alone sitting on a fallen log, spitting out the seeds, waiting for the rain. I wasn't going to lose my life on the Casablanca Corniche."
This character, a citizen of anywhere, any time, has an unforgotten history and an unforgotten geography, as it turns out. That seems to be the common link among the characters in this diverse collection of stories: the ties that they have to the soil, the rivers, to family, to the food, and even to the snakes of Kerala, all of which seem to preserve them in some way and allow life to go on.
It is difficult not to make a thematic comparison between Visvanathan and Arundhati Roy because both write of the turbulence in human relationships and of the "small things" that matter a great, great deal. Visvanathan's style is unique in that you can almost hear her speaking quietly and calmly, acknowledging these forces of family and land and history that turn the fate of her characters. This is certainly an exciting and absorbing book. Her characters have a fullness that is rarely achieved in short stories and it is almost something of a disappointment to leave them behind as you turn the page to a new story. I recommend this book highly for a tranquil read about the subtle intertwining of history, heritage, and personal choice.
January 10, 2011
A book in the lines of God of small things. An NRK story. Not a boring read. Thats all.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews