Book Title: Marquez, EMS, Gulam & Others Author: Benyamin Translated by Swarup B.R. Publisher: Harper Perennial, 2023 Pages: 214 There is a kind of fiction that shows you life from an angle that you wouldn’t ever have thought of. An unexpectedly new way of looking at situations and people. Yet what you see is real life and real people. The usual human emotions are all there. There is a touch of humour too, though it tends to be of the dark kind mostly. Not too dark either. This is the kind of fiction that Benyamin offers us. Right now a Malayalam movie [ Goat Life ], based on a novel of the same title by Benyamin, is running full house in Kerala. I watched it too with intense emotional and aesthetic involvement. I had read the novel many years ago. It is a rather sombre work that tells the story of a man who went to a Gulf country to take up a job but ended as a slave who didn’t even have the comforts that his goats had. The work was so depressing that I never rea
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