‘The Book of Exodus’: A rare novel about the meaning and meaninglessness of everyday living
VJ James steers the story adroitly, untangles it bit by bit, and gives it a complexity that’s rarely seen in storytelling these days.
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In his 1981 Booker Prize-winning novel Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie’s protagonist and narrator Saleem Sinai reflects: “I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I’ve gone which would not have happened if I had not come. Nor am I particularly exceptional in this matter; each ‘I’, every one of the now-six-hundred-million-plus of us, contains a similar multitude. I repeat for the last time: to understand me, you’ll have to swallow a world.”
The fire bird
What Sinai notes of his life holds true for the principal character Kunjootty of VJ James’ debut novel Purappadinte Pustakam (DC Books), too. The book, which is much more than Kunjootty’s coming-of-age, was adjudged the winner among 161 entries in a novel-writing competition DC Books organised in 1999 to commemorate its silver jubilee. James was worked at the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre when he began writing this book. It took him more than a decade to finish writing it. For the first time, it has been translated from Malayalam to English, by Ministhy S, an IAS officer working in the Uttar Pradesh cadre.
