A beetle sitting in contemplation on the water cooler.
I. Love. This. Book.
Insects are just like you and me except some of them have wings is a brilliantly surreal book of short, short (often shorter than flash) fiction by Tamil author, Kuzhali Manickavel. It’s dark, it’s funny, it’s bizarre and alienating. The style of her conversations is distinct; every conversation is sparse with words and permeated with a palpable sense of distance. There’s an evident disconnect between her characters and between them and their world.
Sometimes however, the stories can be so utterly bizarre that it is nearly impossible to find meaning, let alone reason, in them. (“Welcome to Barium,” for example, takes place in the heaviest place on Earth, in a sanatorium for exploding women and surrounded by courageous trees). The stories are often too short for you to get into the narrator’s head and make sense of what’s happening and why. It doesn’t help that Manickavel filters the stories out so well of any unnecessary fluff that the explanatory details get flushed out as well.
Whatever it is, though, you really have to respect the sheer creativity of this woman. This little book of short stories is the true definition of giving your imagination free rein. Manickavel is not bound by literary conventions and regulations. She does not feel compelled to expand or explain her stories for the sake of the reader.
