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Unveiling a literary triptych: A discussion on Hola El Che

The greatest chef I have ever personally known once told me that the best meal need only three ingredients and that the mastery of making those three ingredients into the great experience of a meal is the balance and connection between themselves. Hola El Che!, a book in three parts by Dilshan Boange, connected by the improbable and sleight-of-hand that allows certain writers the ability to weave between the real and the magically real without upsetting the theatre of the mind upon which stage they have been given permission to speak, is comfortable at that dinner table, comfortable to nod knowingly at that mastery and its history, and to tell a story of its own (or three) to add to the proverbial p(L)ot.

The first ingredient: the title story

The first of these three ingredients/stories is the title story 'Hola El Che!'. A story in which Che Guevara finds his way to Stratford Avenue in Colombo 6 (a detail that does nothing to ruin the story by my revealing here). Improbable, perhaps, one would think, however I find the most improbable and therefore commendable thing about this story to be not that Che could have faked his death, continued to live and one day showed up in a Sri Lankan cafe, that is a believable as an conspiracy plot or even most of things we read in the news on a daily basis, instead it is how naturally Boange gives voice to an aging Che living in the world we call today. What I find so delightful about the reality of this voice is that, as a voice would, it speaks in its own time saying what it would feel inside of the moment it is sharing with you, not a resuscitated Che from the voice of his Diaries or such, but the real voice of the moment, a Che of today, one who had lived continuously stacking the days one on top of the other as we all do. An aging man of now and what that Red Starred Black Beret would mean today, wrinkles and all.

The Galle Face Literary Eve

The book moves along and introduces us to the Galle Face Literary Eve, which as you know, or will come to know, is a collegiate night of literary discussion. Dear reader, you should know that as a writer you have to be careful what you write about because not only do you have to tell a compelling story to you the reader, that story has to share its own truths in the unique voice of the context that you set up to tell those truths. Never an easy task, but definitely some voices are harder than others.

In this second story, I was reminded of Philip K. Dick's personal inspiration and hero, writer Thomas M. Disch and the incredible feat that set before himself in Camp Concentration to write a story of war prisoners given a super drug that accelerated their minds to the point of genius and beyond to insanity. The thoughts, actions, intentions and banter had to be that of an upward and hyper-accelerated drive towards wisdom that reflected itself in the reality of the words he laid one after the other in front of the reader. Not easy at all. Every bit as difficult is that of the overtly enamored yet been-there-done-that, back and forth of graduate students, let alone students of literature and mixed gender students at that! And Boange, like Disch, pulls it off with an ease that makes it seem as if it is journalistic reporting instead of the creation of the mind of an author (to me always one of the great signs of good writing).

Like the literature obsession of Peter Kien in Cannetti's Nobel Prize winning Auto-de-fé, who took great care to choose which books he would take with him on his daily walks so that they might have their own roundtable discussion inside his satchel, Boange takes this similar magic to another level and has characters walk right out of their own books as if conjured by the very literary discussions of their papayri-prisons and the rubbing of their hardback boundaries like Geni.

The craft at work

The very clever undercurrent to this story that shows not only the craft under which Boange works, but also his history of study and understanding of the greats of that craft is that these characters from One Hundred Years of Solitude do not step out of their own open books on the tabled discussion, but have struggled out of their own type-set trappings to be part and parcel of a discussion which tries to be inclusively broad, from Bushnell's unbridled spectrum of NYC's single 30 something strugglings of Sex and the City to Bronte's corset-constrained romanticism to Harry Potter adult escapism to the magic of childhood to the book mentioned that would have been best left unmentioned in an enjoyable evening, Camus' The Outsider.

But yet it is that very medium of French existentialism that conjured these fictional beings.

It's existential investigation and bleak look at the need for meaning (or absence thereof) was the very spell that opened the thin veil between our the physical world of toil and triumph and that of the literary world, Lewis' Looking Glass in action, the portal between realism and magic realism, to discuss over dinner the theme of: is there really only one idea of what can be called 'real'?

The discussion begins to go beyond that of academia to an aerial view of the question of what is real and what is reality between the three representing nations that of Camus' bleak depression era pre-war France, Marquez's light-hearted but brutality-tinged Colombia, and that of Sri Lankan present day Post and Undergrad Literary students, a three-way World Cup, with all three teams on the field at the same time. Quite a sport.

Football

I myself have never been a fan of spectator sports, I enjoy playing them on rare occasion, but not watching them, even five years living in Italy didn't make me a fan of watching football, however World Cup is another story altogether as that it is so much more than watching a sport, it is watching countries performing on a grassy field in the very same way they do in populace, politics and popular culture.

It is its own cultural looking-glass blender where you can see those peoples mixed together and reflected in a new cultural kaleidoscope, yet somehow each part still wholly their own. In the same way, the discussion begins to open the way to this discussion that is as interesting to an outsider as it must be to a member of the "home team" reading Boange's play-by-play narration of the debate.

The final story of the trio

Cannibals in the corner room, the third and final story of this literary triptych excels in revealing a window into the slow unraveling of a person's psyche towards madness, (no easy task at all) to come to believe that there in the back room of a friend's flat there is a room inhabited by a tribe of hollowed-eyed cannibals who pace the open-doored room without ever disturbing the threshold, creating a deeply scary and disconcerting image in the mind of the reader. Although it takes a bit of time for the reader to be drawn into the story it is partly that slow stirring of the waters into the tempest of this really fantastic and unique idea that allows Boange to create such a truly horrific and unforgettable image and impression of fear as this.

As with all literature, even that of contemporary (which soon becomes that of a historical period as time goes by), time and place of a story are often interchanged with the time and place in history in which they are published, and this story lends itself in our current and constant debate of commercial cannibalism taking place in our increasingly capitalistic world to be that other room down the hall, the corner office, where the tabloid popularised CEOs eat without hunger or realisation of flavour or taste devouring only for the sake of devouring like the ancient story of the snake and the turtle whom the snake bites while on the turtle's back who is giving him passage half way across the river, why? Because he was a snake. It was his nature.

Sri Lanka should be proud of their son Dilshan Boange for Hola El Che!, a book in three parts, as he should be of himself for showing his true nature, that of a writer.

The reviewer Jesse Poe is a singer, songwriter and musician based in New York -USA who can be contacted via his official website. http://www.jessepoe.is/

 

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