Why is Gabriel Garcia Marquez so popular in Kerala? This was the question asked in a book club meeting which I attended.
This set me thinking. Because it's not only Gaby, but Latin America as a whole which holds a fascination for this small state in South India. We have rabid fans of Argentina and Brazil football teams. Long after his death, Che Guavera holds demi-god status among the left-wing youth. And Latin American literature and movies always have an audience here.
I can only explain this using the word "ethos": the sum total of the culture of a people. Kerala shares with Latin America a curious mix of left-wing activism, rebellious individualism, deep religiosity and aggressive atheism. In fact, our state is a bunch of contradictions just as Latin America is - a land on the verge of collective schizophrenia.
Maybe, magical realism is the only way to map the mind of such a place. We had our first tryst with the genre much before Marquez, by the way: O. V. Vijayan's Khasak (a fictitious land from "Khasakkinte Ithihasam", a Malayalam novel published in 1968, and later translated by the author himself as "The Legends of Khasak") was here much before Macondo. And our writers continue to explore landscapes of the mind.
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