When it comes to ‘Can You Hear Me Running’ - Lal Medawattegedara’s new collection of short stories - you never quite know what to expect next: a coffin maker engages in an almost surreal hunt among the bodies of tsunami victims for a woman in a red sari; a PTSS soldier is destined to forever relive a single, chilling event; a woman surprises her interrogator and a somewhat sceptical journalist interviews an up and coming pop star.
Through the 15 short stories that comprise the book, Lal writes almost entirely in the first person...a technique that, happily, only serves to draw attention to the diversity of perspectives his book offers - from grass cutter to student activist. His is also a universe built around an intrinsically Sri Lankan reality, one in which the events of many individual lives combine to offer a collage-like insight into a nation’s spirit. Grim for most part, these are stories best categorized as “modern parables”, observes Prof. Jayadeva Uyangoda in the book’s blurb, and it is an assessment that it is difficult to disagree with. Not least because intrinsic to Lal’s style of storytelling is the desire to place events and people firmly in their social context – resulting in an unobtrusive, though easily perceived critique of society at large.
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Lal’s stories are also built on the kind of characters that one would find particularly easy to stereotype and thereby dismiss. A grass cutter’s wages, a school’s two cricket teams, a grave digger at work - all prove to be rich in inspiration; and in this storyteller’s hands their intrinsic worth is immediately recognized, their stories are startling, stirring and true. Lal himself has taken great pains to make the language and dialogue in the book flow naturally – peppered with Sinhala words and phrases, and a distinctly Sri Lankan turn of phrase, ‘Can You Hear Me Running’ is entirely unpretentious and all the more readable for it.
As an artist, Lal has obviously enjoyed experimenting with his style in this collection, and succeeds for most part in presenting a range of human experience and emotion. He seems to delight in playing with form, as is evident in the number of styles he has adopted through the collection. Ranging from an interview format to short post cards, they are the result of many hours of playing and experimenting with prose. Lal’s characters are layered, and his attempt is to always present us with some facet of their personality that makes extraordinary even the most stereotypical of characters. Case in point, the terrorist in his story ‘The Maker’ is also a street artist deeply absorbed in his painting of a god.
‘Can You Hear Me Running’ is Lal’s second collection of short stories. His debut collection was shortlisted for the Gratiaen Prize in 2002. Fans of Lal’s work may have already read the first story in the collection – ‘The Grass Cutters Caricature’ - as a slightly different version was published in Channels Magazine. Another story, ‘Tears of a Coffin’, was featured on BBC Radio 4 and BBC World Service. The title story was also published in Channels and won the first place in the English Writers’ Cooperative Short Story Competition in 2006.
As hinted at in the title story, Lal weaves in the metaphor of running through all the other 14 pieces. Some of his characters desire escape from place, time and even thought and memory, while others - fuelled by desperate purpose - sprint towards a forever distant horizon. As the book declares “these stories offer no solutions, but they do track the runners in their nakedness and give us rare glimpses of ourselves.” |
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