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Literary Review
Masala immortality
KALA KRISHNAN RAMESH
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Kardamom Kisses will cure you of any reservations about the merits of straightforward writing. Kardamom Kisses, Shinie Antony, Rupa and Co., 2005, price not stated.
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`Ms. Antony sends her words out into the bad, bad world of print accompanied by phalanges of relatives, attendants, and food enough to last a few droughts, famines and sieges.'
IF you were ever guilty of thinking that as far as stories go, three words are better than one, then read Shinie Antony's Kardamom Kisses: it will forever cure you of any reservations about the merits of straightforward writing.
Smothering profusion
Ms. Antony sends her words out into the bad, bad world of print accompanied by phalanges of relatives, attendants, and food enough to last a few droughts, famines and sieges. So she will have "turning his conscious hours into heavy viscosity of deceptive longevity" and a realisation that life may be meant to "please and be pleased in the physical realm". To call it overwriting is to ignore the sheer scale, the smothering profusion: each word is a feast, each sentence a festival, and each thought a season of feasts, festivals and fairs. After a while, one begins to long for lonesome single words, for lean and hungry sentences, for anorexic thoughts.
Throughout the reading, one does get a feeling that there's a story somewhere in there (not half bad as stories go) but it's lost in a lot of cumbersome detail, much of which makes you think that the author, too, like one of the characters, believes that "masalas are the key to immortality"?
The place doesn't feel right: where is it? Is it a city? A small town? A village? How does it accord its inhabitants the degree of sophistication that they supposedly possess to do the things they do? (Here one can't resist a comparison with Roy's Ayemenem and its people, which resounded so appropriately, drowning out the book's many other faults.)
The main characters seem to be out of a clumsy masquerade. Mangala and her relatives are supposedly Namboodiris (Kerala Brahmins), but namboodiriness sits very uneasily on them; the nominal Sanskrit usage may sound Brahmin-like, but their hyphenated "nei-appams" , "ada-payasam" and "poo-noolus" and their reference to "pookulam"( which would be flower pond) for "pookalam"( flower decoration), and "goododhuram" rather than koodothram (black magic), give them away.
Messy book
Kardamom Kisses is a messy book; a real s(l)ob story, from which the reader comes away with slobber all over. Ms. Antony may have learnt the trade from a crash course in a hurry, or, more probably, she seems overwhelmed by reading, by the idea of literariness that journalists seem to fall prey to.
Having said all that, one must also say that Shinie Antony could have done with a good editor, someone who might have trimmed and cut, thinned and strained and had her re-write rather than stand by and watch her stuff the dish too full, for, as I said earlier, there is story there, smothered. The author also has a rather nice sense of humour, and sometimes, a nice turn of phrase, all of which, one can only hope, with practice, will make her next book easier reading.
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