Stories
In the 1980s, Madhavan went through a decade-long period of writer's block, until the release of his story 'Higuita' in 1990. In this work, Madhavan models his protagonist, priest Father Geevarghese, on Higuita, the 1990 FIFA World Cup goalkeeper for Colombia. Higuita's unconventional playing style whereby he would often abandon his goal and try to score goals, occupies the priest's imagination. Likewise, he temporarily abandons his cassock and saves a tribal girl Lucie from the clutches of the trafficker Jabbar. The short story was adjudged the best in hundred years of Malayalam literature. Since then he has published four collections of stories, a novel and one collection of plays. Madhavan's works of short fiction are:
- Chulaimedile Savangal (Corpses of Chulaimed)
- Higuita
- Thiruth (Blue Pencil)
- Paryaya Kathakal (Stories about Names)
- Nilavili (The Cry)
Madhavan's contribution to the short story genre, which is dying in most parts of the world, is reckoned by critics to be unique and noteworthy. As a short-fiction writer, his art gives importance to minute details and exemplifies the manifest skill and compact craft that writing short fiction demands. In Madhavan's works the subtle connections of criss-crossing dialogs and interlacing plots ultimately reveal an integrated narrative continuum.
Read more about this topic: N. S. Madhavan
Famous quotes containing the word stories:
“I tell it stories now and then
and feed it images like honey.
I will not speculate today
with poems that think they’re money.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)
“Television programming for children need not be saccharine or insipid in order to give to violence its proper balance in the scheme of things.... But as an endless diet for the sake of excitement and sensation in stories whose plots are vehicles for killing and torture and little more, it is not healthy for young children. Unfamiliar as yet with the full story of human response, they are being misled when they are offered perversion before they have fully learned what is sound.”
—Dorothy H. Cohen (20th century)
“Though Margery is stricken dumb
If thrown in Madge’s way,
We three make up a solitude;
For none alive to-day
Can know the stories that we know
Or say the things we say....”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)