Praise for One Part Woman:
LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN TRANSLATED LITERATURE
“Murugan works his themes with a light hand; they always emanate from his characters, who are endowed with enough contradiction and mystery to keep from devolving into mouthpieces . . . It’s not just the physical world Murugan describes so vividly—the way a cow clears its throat, for example—but the rural community, a village of 20 huts and a thousand ancient resentments, where there is no privacy and your neighbor’s suffering can serve as your evening’s entertainment . . . I’m hoping for a whole shelf of books from this writer.”—Parul Sehgal, New York Times
“Intimate and affecting . . . Throughout the novel, Murugan pits the individual against the group. How far you willing to go, he asks, in order to belong? . . . Murugan’s descriptions of village life are evocative, but the true pleasure of this book lies in his adept explorations of male and female relationships, and in his unmistakable affection for people who find themselves pitted against the world.”—Laila Lalami, New York Times Book Review
“This subtly subversive novel examines the pang of childlessness experienced by Kali and Ponna, a couple living in rural southern India. In simple yet lyrical prose, Murugan shows how their standing in the world depends on offspring . . . The novel considers the constraints of tradition and beautifully articulates the couple’s intense connection, even without a child.”—New Yorker
“Murugan’s unsurpassed ability to capture Tamil speech lays bare the complex organism of the society he adeptly portrays . . . Aniruddhan Vasudevan’s idiomatic translation preserves the mood of the original, and serves as a constant linguistic reminder that, as readers in English, we are but visitors to this realistic pre-independence Tamil world. For a book that earned its author death threats and was burned by mobs, One Part Woman is a surprisingly tranquil, sensuous read.”—Guardian
“Perumal Murugan’s fifth novel (longlisted for the National Book Award) follows a young couple who is unable to conceive. The book, which recalls Nigerian author Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀’s Stay with Me, adds a new perspective to the still taboo subject of conception, and explores the intricacies of parenthood as well as the pressures of tradition and stigma.”—Vanity Fair
“Translated by Aniruddhan Vasudevan, this novel from the globally bestselling Murugan will give fans of South Asian fiction a new perspective and fans of excellent historical fiction a new read.”—Literary Hub
“Beautiful . . . Plunges readers into Tamil culture through a story of love within a caste system undergoing British colonization in the early 19th century . . . Murugan’s touching, harrowing love story captures the toll that infertility has on a marriage in a world where having a child is the greatest measure of one’s worth.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“With a backstory as fascinating as the narrative, this intriguing work, longlisted for the National Book Award, will undoubtedly be appreciated by internationally savvy Anglophone audiences.”—Library Journal
“Perumal Murugan brings a playful, fable-like quality to his tale of traditional values and their subversion.”—Vanity Fair, “Fall’s Best Books from Around the World”
“Perumal Murugan’s One Part Woman contains the sweetest, most substantial portrait of an Indian marriage in recent fiction. A touching and original novel.”—Karan Mahajan, author of The Association of Small Bombs
“Perumal Murugan’s Tamil is vivid and terse, an instrument he uses with great care and precision to cut through the dense meshes of rural Tamil social life. The result, in this novel, is a brutally elegant examination of caste, family, and sex in South India.”—Anuk Arudpragasam, author of The Story of a Brief Marriage
“The life of an innocent couple who are led to believe that the expectations of the system defines their own personal pursuit of happiness forms Perumal Murugan’s captivating story of love and desire. With his brilliant artistry, he captures the ups and downs of their lives. Works such as these have the power to subject contemporary value systems to intense introspection, it is for the same reason they are met with resistance. This work of art by Perumal Murugan can be acclaimed as modern mythology for its unusual access to cultural memories of the land and language, and the extraordinary courage with which it is dealt.”—Vivek Shanbhag, author of Ghachar Ghochar
“Murugan’s writing is locally-grown literature, not a canned object sold on a supermarket bookshelf. It is rare to come across a writer who enjoys such intimacy with a land and those who live in close contact with it. One Part Woman is so rooted in the soil of tradition that its rebellion against it is all the more unexpected and moving.”—Amitava Kumar, author of Immigrant, Montana
“A major Indian writer . . . Dark currents run through One Part Woman . . . Kali and Ponna, a couple who are erotically wrapped up in each other, withstand waves of derision because they have not conceived a child after a decade of marriage . . . When describing the farming communities of South India, Mr. Murugan is neither sentimental nor harsh.”—New York Times
“A fable about sexual passion and social norms, pleasure and the conventions of family and motherhood . . . A lovely rendering of the Tamil.”—Biblio (India)
“Perumal Murugan turns an intimate and crystalline gaze on a married couple in interior Tamil Nadu. It is a gaze that lays bare the intricacies of their story, culminating in a heart wrenching denouement that allows no room for apathy . . . One Part Woman is a powerful and insightful rendering of an entire milieu which is certainly still in existence. [Murugan] handles myriad complexities with an enviable sophistication, creating an evocative, even haunting, work . . . Murugan’s writing is taut and suspenseful . . . Aniruddhan Vasudevan’s translation deserves mention—the language is crisp, retaining local flavor without jarring, and often lyrical.”—The Hindu Business Line (India)
“An evocative novel about a childless couple reminds us of the excellence of writing in Indian languages . . . This is a novel of many layers; of richly textured relationships; of raw and resonant dialogues and characters . . . Perumal Murugan’s voice is distinct; it is the voice of writing in the Indian languages rich in characters, dialogues and locales that are unerringly drawn and intensely evocative. As the novel moves towards its inevitable climax, tragic yet redemptive, the reader shares in the anguish of the characters caught in a fate beyond their control. It is because a superb writer has drawn us adroitly into the lives of those far removed from our acquaintance.”—Indian Express
“Murugan imbues the simple story of a young couple, deeply in love and anxious to have a child, with the complexities of convention, obligation and, ultimately, conviction . . . An engaging story.”—Time Out (India)
“One Part Woman has the distant romanticism of a gentler, slower, prettier world, but it is infused with a sense of immediacy . . . Murugan intricately examines the effect the pressure to have a child has on [the couple’s] relationship . . . One Part Woman is beautifully rooted in its setting . . . Murugan delights in description and Aniraddhan translates it ably.”—Open (India)
“A superb book in which tenderness, love and desire kindle each other into a conflagration of sexual rapture.”—Bapsi Sidhwa, author of Water
“Perumal Murugan opens up the layers of desire, longing, loss and fulfillment in a relationship with extraordinary sensitivity and surgical precision.”—Ambai, author of In a Forest, A Deer
Praise for Perumal Murugan:
“Versatile, sensitive to history and conscious of his responsibilities as a writer, Murugan is . . . the most accomplished of his generation of Tamil writers.”—Caravan
“The Tamil Irvine Welsh.”—Guardian
“Powerful . . . lyrical.”—The Hindu
2018-09-18
A South Indian couple struggles to conceive a child.
Kali and Ponna have been married for 12 years, but they can't seem to have a child. They've tried everything: They've been to see palmists and astrologers, made offerings at various temples, and made all sorts of promises to all sorts of gods. Their families have even begun to urge Kali to marry another woman. He and Ponna are tired of the whisperings of their neighbors, tired of the isolation that the childless are reduced to. This is the first novel by Murugan, a celebrated writer of Tamil in India, to be translated into English. It's poignant, funny, and painful and will expose readers of English to a region and class they likely haven't seen represented in literature: South Indian farmers. Kali and Ponna's last hope seems to be the festival for the god Maadhorubaagan, who is half male and half female (hence the book's title). On the 18th night of the festival, sex between unmarried men and women is permitted. But the prospect of losing Ponna, for one night, to another man—even though, by the rules of the festival, that man will be considered a god—is horrible to Kali. When, instead of refusing, Ponna tells Kali, "If you want me to go for the sake of this wretched child, I will," their relationship becomes strained. Murugan has an ear for the gentle absurdities of marriage as well as sympathy for his characters' woes. Still, the prose can be awkward, though it isn't clear how much of that awkwardness can be attributed to the translator, Vasudevan. Sprinkled throughout the novel are certain idioms, like "he was merely testing the waters," that seem unlikely given the setting.
Poignant and sweet, the novel suffers only from a certain roughness in the prose; something, it seems, has been lost in translation.
