Review by Selma Carvalho
The crown of ‘regional writer’ is a thorny one to wear. It carries with it a certain snideness which insinuates the writer does not enjoy a universal appeal. Yet, some of the world’s greatest writers are regional writers, among them J. A. Baker has to rate spectacularly high for his book ‘The Peregrine’, little known beyond a circle of aficionados who love nature writing. Based entirely on his observations of the bird in his beloved pastoral of Essex, it is a deeply moving advocacy on behalf of a species faced with near-extinction in 1960s England. Jose Lourenco too, I consider to be a regional writer. His stories, a collection of which materialised late 2020, titled The Fever and Other Stories, rarely, if ever explore characters outside of Goa. Nor do his characters bare their interiority, instead they emerge with an intense geographical specificity through a unique hybridity of reportage, observation, and advocacy for a certain way of life which, much like Baker’s peregrine, is also on the brink of extinction.
The collection of twelve stories comprises the slim volume, which can be read in one sitting. The first story titled, ‘Zemanuel’ is an exquisite example of the writer’s observations of Goan village life, which emerge with almost every sentence. In fact, several times I had to stop reading and go back to a sentence to absorb better its import. A few lines are worth reproducing here: ‘Zemanuel lived in the house with Esmeralda. The pigs and hens lived in the backyard, grunting and clucking in a symphony completed by the cawing of the crows who also partook of the leftover food that Esmeralda poured into a hollowed-out stone trough.’ I wondered briefly, if perhaps someone who had not lived through these parochial (in the kindest sense of the word) times, would be able to fully appreciate this rendering. Would they, for instance, be able to appreciate how animals and humans shared space in those houses of old, without much thought to the living arrangement, and beyond the house the backyard yielded space to hens and pigs, perhaps even a goat and cow, not subjected to the inhumanity of factory farming, but a short symbiotic life of greater regard. Good fiction, like Lourenco’s, is that rare thing which transcends the boundaries of time and space, and imbues with immortality the transient nature of memory. And it is precisely, the shapeless form of ‘memory’ that Lourenco tackles in ‘Zemanuel,’ through Aunt Emma’s inability to remember her own life. Lourenco uses memory as mirror to bring into sharp relief the intrusion of shifting priorities in a modernising Goa which commodifies emotional attachment, erasing it from every sentient being save for an old, loyal dog.
Being an engineer, a leitmotif of houses runs through Lourenco’s writing. There is deep anguish over houses falling into disrepair, or within their vertebrae of dead walls, the furniture being covered with dust, or there are mud compound walls perched on which cocks crow, but also as in the story ‘Mapusa Bound,’ ‘the barren rocks of Porvorim with its ugly nouveau riche buildings streamed past her window, with an occasional old house putting up a defiant show of dignity.’ Everywhere the old vanishes, transmogrified into an ugly and uncaring newness. ‘Mapusa Bound’ is one of Lourenco’s older stories. Having undergone a few iterations, the story is a good example of Lourenco’s own journey as a writer and how over the years, he has worked at his craft, achieving a supple mastery over the classic short story arc of taut tension and release. It is a story of two travelling companions, one unmindful of his fellow passenger, and the other full of conjecture, rendering the reader almost giddy with expectant possibility. It is a story where negative space has been used to great effect, as all short fiction or what is now more popularly called flash fiction, must do, where little is said and yet within its blankness, resides an entire world of repressed desires.
The story ‘Saibinn’ centres on a much-loved event in Goan villages, the month-long journey of ‘Our Lady’ moving from house to house, when neighbours gather as night falls, in the entrada of open homes, for an hour or so of collective devotional singing and prayer. It is an insightful exploration into working class aspiration, the emergence of a nouveau riche class, assuming the pretensions of old landed gentry, and creating exclusionary groups of their own, in a bid to gain acceptance. But Francis, the protagonist is inevitably cowed by the absurdity of his posturing, and as is often the case in human relationships, extends his hand in friendship to the ‘outsiders’. There is a tableau-like quality to this story, which seeks to capture still shots of a tradition at risk of succumbing to frenzied lifestyles which cannot accommodate its demands on time, and so, its descriptions take on the urgency of preservation: ‘At seven-thirty in the evening, singing “Pau Maie…io Maie..” his neighbour had escorted the Pilgrim Lady into his home. As the little procession went in through the front door, Francis had set off half the box of firecrackers he had bought for the occasion; he had then carefully placed the rest on the compound wall for the post-Saibinn celebration. Boiled gram, raisin cake, and soft drinks were all spread out ready on the kitchen table.’ A brief but important point has to be made about Lourenco’s use of an English language dialect peculiar to Goa. Although, I’m not fond of this technique, it works very well within the framework of Lourenco’s stories, settling in unobtrusively between the speech quotes, and capturing something authentic about the lives of his characters. In effect, it poses much less as an affected technique and more as yet another act of preservation.
Much has already been written about the titular story ‘Fever’. Suffice it to say, its popularity led to it being made into a short film which aired at the 2015 New York Film Festival. When ‘Fever’ debuted sometime in 2011, I reviewed Lourenco’s work, drawing parallels to Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s short stories, capturing all the indolent misery and betrayed lusts of a fading Luso world. Much of that potential which I saw in 2011 has now blossomed to produce a writer confident in the sort of stories he wants to pursue, in the sort of world he wants to preserve if only on paper, and confident of the space he wants to inhabit. This extraordinary collection should become part of Goa’s literary canon. Lourenco has confessed to writing most of his stories in Konkani and then translating them into English, an exercise which perhaps enables a portrayal of regional life, which escapes most Indo-Anglian writers, making his writing truly seminal.
Banner image of Goa is by Deepi Goyal and downloaded from unsplash.com
The Fever and Other Stories can be purchased from Broadways Book Store, Panjim, Goa. If you would like to read a story by Jose Lourenco previously published on the JRLJ, click here.
Cover illustration by Shawney Coutinho