Kuzhali Manickavel - A centipede in a shoe, revelations in a shoebox, nosebleeds, exploding women, and a dead mouse named Miraculous

Kuzhali Manickavel, Insects Are Just Like You and Me Except Some of Them Have Wings (Blaft Publications, 2008)

"Not merely lyrical and strange, but also deadpan funny. I can't shake the feeling that I know this woman, personally - like we hung out at a party or something. But I don't, and we didn't. She's just that good." - Miranda July


«When reading a wonderfully crafted story, we are sometimes tempted to say that the line between prose and poetry has been blurred. We don’t really mean it, of course. It is simply our hyperbolic way of acknowledging the writer’s stylistic gifts. We cannot read Michael Ondaajte, for example, without marveling at the precision and emotional fullness of his writing; but our brains do not really struggle to ascertain whether we are in the midst of his fiction or his poems. The confidence we bring to the distinction belies its arbitrariness – at least since poetry was liberated from its formal constraints at the opening of the twentieth century – but we are usually confident nonetheless.
Kuzhali’s stories are like well-remembered dreams. They are frustratingly elliptical and playfully topsy-turvey in their abandonment of mundane reality, yet sufficiently vivid and subtle to provide that delicious moment of doubt about the dreaming/waking, imaginary/reportorial dichotomies which make us feel in control of our lives.
The book is so start-to-finish wonderful, it is hard to know from which story to give you a taste (or, really, just a nibble); so I’ll take it right off the top, from the opening “stanza” of the book’s first story, “The Godlet”:
The minute Malathi takes charge, the universe begins to sing her name like it is something holy. She cracks her knuckles and creates a new day that consists of Sunday morning, Saturday afternoon, and Thursday night. There will be no more Mondays. The universe applauds her decision.
Kuzhali’s is language in full play. It has the astonishing, unfettered, fantastical, pyrotechnic quality of a Stanly Elkin or a Tom Robbins. It succeeds so engrossingly because it is always deployed in the service of unerringly depicted and bitingly true vignettes and larger themes, not simply as a masturbatory exercise. Kuzhali’s stories depict the myriad of ways people communicate and miscommunicate with each other — one-on-one — verbally and through intuitive happenstance.
A recurring trope is what one of her characters calls “unphrases”, those magical bits of nonsense and almost-sense that so easily germinate in the mulch of our linguistic landscape. Though she writes from the South of India, Kuzhali does not rely exclusively, or even heavily, on the sometimes easy target of Indian English to harvest the ironically mangled expressions which crisscross the book like a convoy of purposeful ants (to use an insect metaphor). When she does explore the local idiom, she does so with the affection and warm humor of a Nizam Ezekiel. In both language and imagery, Kuzhali’s writing seems to pay tribute to Jean Paul Satre’s nearly-true aphorism that the more complicated the concept, the closer it is to its opposite. Only Kuzhali’s version would have it: the more confused the concept, the closer its misses are to their mark. Like the nutty college student in one of her stories – who reads the cursive inscription “I am that bread of life” beneath a cheesy picture of Jesus as the admonition: “Jam that bread of life!” – Kuzhali is constitutionally unable to render the world in the less joyful or less poignant of whatever might be the available interpretive options, even if it means fudging a little.
The endorsement blurb on the rear cover, by the California-based filmmaker, performance artist, and writer Miranda July, nicely sums up the fun and intimacy of Insects Are Just Like You and Me Except Some of Them Have Wings:
Not merely lyrical and strange, but also deadpan funny. I can’t shake the feeling that I know this woman, personally – like we hung out at a party or something. But I don’t, and we didn’t. She’s just that good.
She is, indeed, just-that-good. But unlike Ms. July, I do, and I have. We first met in early 2005, at what I then-called a “Pondy poetry slam”, convened by the also-gifted writer, Pavithra Krishnan. Just two weeks ago, I had the chance spend a little time with Kuzhali at her sister’s wedding in Chidambaram. In between, she has written stories for Book Box, the wonderful literacy project of another mutual friend, Brij Kothari. She is one of those people who, after meeting, you tell yourself to keep a close eye on – even if from a distance – because the promise of greatness glows from them.» - Memestream

«It is hard to define the twenty-first century short story; it has so many guises: traditional, flash, experimental, magic realist. There is no one firm definition that covers all the forms the story now has. It is even harder to define the surprising short fiction written by Kuzhali Manickavel – a writer born in Canada who has lived in India since the age of thirteen. Manickavel’s stories are a mixture of odd, disjointed flashes, surreal sketches, and more traditionally shaped tales which possess a rare freshness. She is not afraid of the darker corners of human experience and she uses a devilish humor which sits well with the strange goings-on in her work. She says of her own work that her themes are "isolation, dislocation, magic realism and surrealism."
Her stories are typically set in India and involve obscure happenings and cryptic conversations. In the one-page story Do You Know How to Twist With Girls Like This?, Mira is slimming and is possibly anorexic. Her friends "imagine her shaving down her shoulders and ankles, breaking off what was extra and hiding it in suitcases under her bed." This sort of observation is typical of Manickavel’s writing: she revels in the quirky, left-of-field and impossible.
She is a writer comfortable with exploring poverty and superstition, and many of her characters seem to live aimless, drifting existences that may or may not lead to trouble. In the fable-like story Ezekial Solomon’s Shoe, Seshadri is haunted by the missing Ezekial whose insect-infested shoe seems determined to stay and remind Seshadri of the absent man. Seshadri resists at first but finally quietly embraces the shoe’s presence as if it is Ezekial himself.
Manickavel’s building up of detail to paint a complete picture is extraordinary: she never chooses the pedestrian image, always the strange and wonderful, often from nature: "The afternoon settles in the corners like bundles of thick wool." "…her fists are perched on the table like tiny anxious birds." "The Entomologist’s smile is a tiny half moon, weak and incapable of casting any light." She is good, too, on the detail of Indian food and landscapes; this adds an instant shot of authenticity and an anchoring of her characters in real, believable places.
The book itself is beautifully produced by the Chennai-based publishers Blaft Publications; the text of the book is decorated with insects and even the story titles are done in a spidery hand.
Kuzhali Manickavel is an original, competently carving out a niche for herself in the short story genre. It is fortunate for the reading public that Blaft have recognized her unusual and exciting talents, so that we all might enjoy a trip into her surreal and wonderful worlds.» - Nuala Ní Chonchúir

«I HAD A great time reading Kuzhali Manickavel’s Insects Are Just Like You And Me Except Some Of Them Have Wings. The stories are well written, of course, but what really gets you is the variety, the sheer unpredictably of them. Some are about the oddest things, others about the most commonplace; the most peculiar things happen in some, while in others nothing happens at all. Some characters are “normal”; others may have wings coming out of their backs or will be pulling cats out of their mouths. You just can’t say which way a story will turn.
Be warned, though. You might get a bit unsettled if you bring maintrack reading habits into this semi-surreal, sometimes magical realistic, sometimes deadpanbizarre, sometimes nihilistic place, where nothing need do what it’s supposed to be doing.
These are the bylanes where middles are more likely to be not in the middle and no end comes, even after the action rises, falls and appears to be done. Here, style may take the place of character and narrative may not figure at all in the way that you mostly expect it to.
I thoroughly enjoyed several of the stories in this collection of 35, both the really short ones as well as the longer ones. However, there must be a reason that all three of my favourites — “The Dynamics of Windows”, “Suicide Letter is the Most Common Form of Letter”, “Flying and Falling” — are among the longest of the stories here.
Perhaps this is because with the longer stories, there is so much more room for the characters to move, and for the reader to actually get a sense of where they are and what is around them. There is so much more time to listen to the fall of the characters’ lives and to look at the possible turns they, and the story, might take.
The one and two-pagers are not bad reading at all: “Do You Know How to Twist with Girls Like This?”, “Cats and Fish”, “The Perimeter” are non-simplistic and intriguing. Each of these three stories takes you to where you either have a ringside view of the small dramas inherent in all kinds of little events, or you are in a world where someone has undone the seams of possibility.
In these stories, sometimes an event, sometimes a line, and sometimes just the way a character is, has this ability to insist that you see, without the anesthesia of description or logic. Consider these: “Everyone must keep a box of things they don’t understand and can’t throw away” or “Even Dalit Christian lesbians who write feminist manifestos are allowed to drown in wells” or “Sri Lankan Tamils. It’s like they are trying to sing but their voice never quite takes off” or “Selva and I are cursed. We have silhouettes that don’t fit anywhere”.
Kuzhali’s writing sends you shooting off into her stories with a crazy shove, after which you will find yourself rushing around on your own. The aftermath is a well-observed thoughtfulness that shows you stuff about stuff that you know is true, because it’s stuff you have seen and known. For example, in the story about Mira, who has “streamlined down to the shape of a pin”, the writer says, “Some girls naturally turn into pockets” and the lives of all the girls you ever knew that did turn into pockets, holding god-knows-what, will rush out of your knowing.
What is disappointing are the illustrations: they are forced and very forgettable, although they might make you smile.
If the reader thinks that these stories are there so briefly, like distant, exotic relatives who you unexpectedly share an intimate holiday with but who cannot stay, consider that on the other side, you have the staying pleasures of the family!
I look forward to whatever unexpected delights and revelations Kuzhali’s next book might bring with a sense of committed interest because I feel that I’ve been in an adventure that I would like to repeat.» - Kala Krishan Ramesh

«While you might not be able to judge a book by its cover, the title of this one by Kuzhali Manickavel, Insects Are Just Like You and Me Except Some of Them Have Wings, provides a clue to the sort of logic and world view that you’ll find between these covers. Imagine Chekhov with a comic streak. Now imagine that he wrote Magical Realism. Now transform him into a woman living in a Temple town in twenty-first century India. Then you’ll have some idea of what you’ll find in this collection. But it will be far more rewarding to read the book of short stories - flash fiction -and drawings.
Manickavel has a distinctive voice, and this collection brings the reader into her world in which the protagonists are caught by circumstance, and the tiniest event takes on great psychological significance. The title of the collection, is relevant not only in the drawings, but in the content of the stories, in which insects are either present in figures of speech or concerns of a character.
In “The Butterfly Assassin,” Malar is an assistant of an Entomologist, never named, who has been evicted. The opening sentence is typical of the imagery in this work: no mere decoration. “The Entomologist’s smile is a tiny half-moon, weak and incapable of casting any light.” In the midst of a rain-storm in the Entomologist’s room, Malar carries on conversations with butterflies about the move, about killing jars:
“It’s almost done you know,” says Malar. “All I have to do is get him out of the room.”
“You’ll never do it without a killing jar,” says the Cobweb Butterfly.
“I don’t need a killing jar. Besides he won’t fit.”
“It’s not that hard,” says the Shoebrush Butterfly. “Besides, everything in the world can fold, you know.”
Malar doesn’t think she will be able to fold the Entomologist that far.
Even if she does she has a feeling he will break the bottle.
“I really don’t think he will fit,” she says.
“Nobody fits into a killing jar,” says the Cobweb Butterfly.
“They have to be put.”...
This chilling conversation is followed by an appropriately weighty discovery.
Two of the other stories in which insects are featured are “The Perimeter” and “A Bottle of Wings and Other Things.” In the opening paragraph of the latter, a spider dies, “There was no extravagance in its death; just a gentle curl, a folding which no one had seen or heard.” ” Reflecting on the description of the spider’ s death, this reader thought of the butterfly’s “everything in the world can fold.”
Moreover, Manickavel is a mistress of figurative language, so nothing just falls into the road. Instead “postcards fell from the window in soft jagged pieces, scattering onto the road like flowers on a dirty river.” And pieces of paper fly, “fluttering onto the hot, sticky tar like a flock of dying birds.” These function not as decoration, but as effective communication of emotional states.
The stories also have a quirky humor. In “Cats and Fish” the narrator watches a man in the street “pulling small, white cats out of his mouth, each one twisting in his hands like a scorpion caught by the tail.” When the narrator asks him why he’s doing that, he responds with his own question, “Why, are you allergic?” And she simply answers “No.” And their conversation continues as though no magic or illusion.
These selections offer the reader far more than their brilliant prose style and off-beat humor, though if they offered nothing more than that they would be well worth reading. But instead, they offer a series of psychological portraits, the poignancy of attempted communication, and reflections on those attempts. Not only emotional resources are scarce: in “Monsoon Girls” water arrives rationed in buckets not from a tap.
The drawings adopt the style of scientific illustration from a textbook of entomology, but with captions and anatomical elements identified to fit the captions. For example, Fig. 2 The Progression of Insanity in Women as Represented by the Life Cycle of the Assassin Bug [p. 21] has four pictures, beginning with the larvae. Each stage is identified: I am the woman in the kitchen, I am the woman in the kitchen with the spider, I am in the kitchen with the spider, and I am the spider. These illustrations are interspersed with the stories. Another, Fig. 4 is Guide to Life in a Small Indian Town Represented by a Lateral View of a Locust with the Legs and Wings Removed. The subjects of these diagrams are connected to those of the stories, and, like the fiction they accompany are an expression of Manicakavel’s original wit and imaginative spirit, including the last, a meta indulgence: Fig. 7 The Rhinoceros Beetle Seen as a Decorative Element on the Endpaper of a Short Story Collection.» - Miriam N. Kotzin

«As for the stories, they may have been presented with dead pan humor, but make no mistake, the stories are much too layered to be read and laughed off just like that. Even the shortest ones, like “do you know how to twist with girls like this?” which is less than a page long is drizzled with images that tend to stick to you like Voodoo pins: ’our eyes click and hum inside our head,’ ‘cloud of halitosis’. “The Unviolence of Strangers.” another less than a page long piece has ‘dying like a freshly pinned dragonfly,’ and breasts that have ‘collected in sagging puddles of discontent’ and when the story ends you realize what the ‘pavement piece’ actually is. I have just picked two, but each of the thirty five stories in the book sparkles with metaphors and images; the stories simmer in your head long after you have read them. Some stories like “Suicide Letters Are The Most Common Form of Letter” (one of my favourites in this collection) convey a whole range and depth of emotions in tightly packed prose; the humorous tone is misleading, because we are treading on sad soil here. But Kuzhali’s dexterity is such that the sadness hits you only when you are done with the reading; the pace of the story is fast.
Sometimes a writer manages to write a few good stories and arouse the interest of readers and writers alike, but once compiled into a book, the whole thing somehow falls flat. This is definitely NOT the case with Insects Are Just Like You And Me…” Though to be fair, there are highs and lows in the book. That is only natural, it happens in all collections of short stories. The unique experience of Kuzhali’s writing is her pace, her seemingly fractured imagery and her often tongue in cheek references to serious things, all of which blend together to give you a reading experience that you can’t shake off. » - Rumjhum Biswas