Author: Sundara Ramaswamy
Translator(s): A R Venkatachalapathy
Publisher: Katha
Year: 2003
Language: English
Pages: 192
ISBN/UPC (if available): 8187649984
Description
Structured as a biography of a fictional Malayalam writer, JJ: Some Jottings is at one level a critique of the world of Tamil letters and on another, a novel of ideas engaged with the burning questions of being and existence.
The Tamils, like the English, but unlike the French, have not the stomach for ideas dressed up as literature. J J: Sila Kurippugal [J J: Some Jottings] is a single sparrow in that Tamil literary-intellectual summer. Despite its literary brilliance, it is very much a novel of ideas. Its publication in 1981 created a literary sensation with its overt intellectualism.
J J: Sila Kurippugal was a major watershed, a rupture in the narrative tradition of Tamil fiction. Almost every reader remembers the shock and ecstasy the novel caused on its first reading. The clever way in which the novel is structured, almost a Kunstleorman, complete with footnotes and appendices of the fictional Malayalam writer, left readers gasping.
J J: Sila Kruippugal represents Sundara Ramaswamy at one of his peaks of writing prowess. And as such represents a phase of his writing career. The bilingual milieu in which the novel is set, consciously in the backdrop of other literatures of India and the world, makes it a fit candidate for translation.
Ever a stylist, employing a language that’s consciously crafted, shorn of rhetoric but brimming with satire, parody, humour and metaphor, Sundara Ramaswamy, popularly known as SuRaa, is arguably the finest writer writing in Tamil today. His novel JJ: Sila Kurippugal (JJ: Some Jottings) is seen as a major watershed, a rupture in the narrative tradition of Tamil fiction in its form and content, and the studied mastery and lapidary precision of its language.
It represents the best of Tamil writing even today, more than twenty years after its first appearance.