Conversations Regarding the Fatalistic Outlook of the Common Man by Kuzhali Manickavel
Reviewed by Out of Print Editor Rahael Mathews
Kuzhali Manickavel’s newest offering Conversations Regarding the Fatalistic Outlook of the Common Man, Blaft, 2022, is brimming with the zany mirth one has come to expect from the writer. The book is a collection of around forty dialogues between the writer and interlocuters both real and imagined. She has impassioned exchanges about the oddities of Bollywood cinema, frustrating government offices, and gender-neutral clothing for children. Despite how varied the subject of these conversations are, they are united by their freedom of spirit. There is an intimacy in the nonsensical nature of the dialogue, emotions fly freely in Manickavel’s writing. Her speakers laugh, and scream, and are exasperated with each other liberally and without shame.
The friendship between the author’s persona ‘K’ and ‘S’, who she dedicates the book to, is colourful and easy to relate to. Irreverent insouciance colours their banter, undeterred by the subject matter of the conversations. For instance, in ‘Baby You Can Drive My Green Volvo Lol Jk No You Can’t Fuck Off’, they recount a conversation K has with an old schoolmate, a confusion over the words ‘volvo’ and ‘vulva’. Despite the overly sarcastic tone of the episode, it carries an interesting observation on censoring everyday speech. K and S debate why women’s elbows might be ‘obscene and arrogant’ and the impossibility of keeping track of what words to use :
S: Is ‘elbow’ an obscene and arrogant word too?
K: Not sure. It might be if it’s a woman’s elbow.
S: Uterus?
K: Oh definitely. That’s definitely obscene and arrogant.
S: Worse than fallopian tube? Way worse.
S: This is very confusing. How are we supposed to know what words are obscene and arrogant? Is there a guidebook or something?
Tone is something Manickavel has succeeded in crafting, her dialogues have almost an iconoclastic effect – they are unaffected by political correctness or guilt. Her speakers navigate somewhat flammable themes with the fatalism she alludes to in the absurd, and prolix title. On reading the book, this starts to make sense – her speakers move on from one revelation to the next without lingering too much. In ‘It’s Raining Babies in Bollywood Oh Wow!!!’, K consults several people on cinematic tropes and the elitism surrounding the appreciation of Bollywood cinema:
S: You HAVE to write about how some people in this one number country watch Bollywood ironically. Write about how that’s a thing.
K: That’s when you act like you like Bollywood but you actually don’t but you act like you do to prove how much you don’t. Right?
S: Kinda.
K: Why isn’t that called lying?
The book contains a uncommon kind of social commentary which is to a degree, journalistic in its intention. Manickavel retells the history of Facebook and the internet strikes in Kashmir in fairy-tale format. In her pieces on the Niira Radia tapes and Warren Anderson, she superimposes her own nonsensical disquisition onto archival material – the effect is comical, but in places leans towards histrionic. The author’s intention is clever, and a fascinating way to embody a narrative voice, but the ease of conversation that is present in her other dialogues feels slightly forced in these excerpts.
Offered to the reader as a charming counter are Manickavel’s many dialogues with her niece ‘N’. Published originally as a column titled ‘Small Talk’ for The Swaddle, these imagined interactions are funny, sweet, and demonstrates a heart-warming acceptance of the absurd. N is proof of Manickavel’s skill in bringing memorable characters to life – the young girl is witty, asks countless questions, has a strange fascination for shoe-racks, and a badly hidden bloodlust. She is blunt, and a calmer complement to K, despite the absurd proclamations that constantly leave her mouth. The following excerpt from ‘Paruppu Keerai’ explains this relationship well:
K: Still here I see.
N: Amma sat with me and had tea.
K: Your plate is all dried up and gross.
N: Ya.
K: You do realize that the longer you sit here the worse that’s going to taste.
N: When are you going to die?
K: What?
N: What time you’re going to die.
K: Why are you asking me that? Do you know something?
N: I’m never going to die.
In contrast to K’s dialogues with S at times, these interactions with N are not just nonsensical banter but feel rather astute. By embodying the voice of a child, Manickavel can address larger social issues and break them down in fascinating ways. In ‘The Dress’, she attempts to tackle genderfluid clothing for children:
K: Some people might not like him wearing a dress.
N: Why?
K: Because… well, some people might be like oh he’s a boy why is he wearing your dress?
N: Because he doesn’t have a dress.
K: Aadhi, you realize some people might say mean things to you? Or make fun of you? For wearing a dress?
N: Who people?
K: Like, I feel so many people. So so many people.
N: I thought you said boys could wear dresses. Your friend wears dresses you said.
There is no distance between the two in these dialogues, in fact in many places K assumes the more childlike position. Perhaps this is because the child’s persona is imagined, allowing for a compelling mix of whimsical chitchat and trenchant social criticism. In terms of form and language, it’s certainly a unique choice to make.
The vigour of Conversations certainly lies in its adroit manipulation of form. Manickavel’s work has previously been characterised as ‘anti-fiction’ for its intentional structural anarchy, and subversion of traditional fictional narrative, and Conversations is no different. The fragmentary, and to a degree, self-contained nature of each dialogue makes it possible for a reader to enter the narrative almost anywhere. George P Elliott in his essay for The American Scholar wrote that anti-fiction might contain an underlying story but will fracture it. He went on to write that anti-fiction 'forbids, ignores, or frustrates the reader's usual sympathies and antipathies' (1) and instead links the reader with the narrator’s mind, wholly perplexing as it may be. The reader is offered a voyeuristic position in Manickavel’s book, an interloper privy to raw, personal exchanges. As P Michael Campbell wrote for The New England Review, this kind of bricolage structure conflates the reader and writer, creating an interactive piece of fiction. He writes that as readers, 'we help create the work we're reading- by reading it in our own way and by remembering only what we (willfully or unintentionally) choose.'(2)
Memorable incidents are aplenty in this novel. Manickavel has somehow extracted both quiet communion and fierce advocacy from that simplest and most human of functions – talking. The singularity of her authorial voice and her irresistible glorification of the absurd ensures that Conversations is a book well worth stepping into again and again.
1. Elliott, George P ‘Fiction and Anti-Fiction’. The American Scholar 47, no. 3 (1978): 398–406.
2. Campbell, P Michael. ‘Interactive Fiction and Narrative Theory: Towards an Anti-Theory’. New England Review 10, no. 1 (1987): 76–84.
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Kuzhali Manickavel in Out of PrintThis Is Us and This Is Us Outside, Out of Print 1, September 2010Whore, Out of Print 18, March 2015The Dolphin King, Out of Print 4, June 2011
