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 ... At times, Vasudevan capably conveys the distinctiveness not only of Tamil but the language of a farming people — the insults (Ponna: 'Let her come. I will scoop the life out of her!') and the particular metaphors (Kali is a light sleeper — 'his was a chicken’s sleep'). But too often Vasudevan resorts to bland, anachronistic English clichés — 'testing the waters,' 'leaving no stone unturned.' To borrow a (stronger) expression from Murugan himself, it’s like coming across a small stone in rice ... I’m hoping for a whole shelf of books from this writer...
Mr. Murugan’s fictional villages are places full of quiet menace, where caste boundaries are protected with violence and social exclusion...When describing the farming communities of South India, Mr. Murugan is neither sentimental nor harsh; he describes it the way an entomologist might describe an insect....clean, clear prose.
Murugan brings a playful, fable-like quality to his tale of traditional values and their subversion...steeped in the rural prejudices of the past yet still managed to inflame the ire of Hindu chauvinists when first published in English in India in 2013.
At its core, this is a novel about loss – for something that has never existed. Murugan is a master of his setting, and the couple are surrounded by reminders of fertility, from the coconut trees growing in dry land to the leaping calf in the barnyard ... On occasion, the novel digresses to the various itches its author wishes to scratch: colonial oppression; caste tensions. But the scenes explicitly devoted to these themes often seem somewhat shoehorned in. Elsewhere, apparently significant threads are woven in, then left untied. The prose is unrestrained and lascivious, and aware of both: Murugan cuts no corners in writing of desire and sex for what they are – a function of bodies – in this case articulated through a predominantly male point of view ... One Part Woman is sometimes shocking, but always in a way that encourages understanding. Murugan – capably translated by Aniruddhan Vasudevan – writes with both empathy and compassion.
...intimate and affecting ... The plot of One Part Woman doesn’t move forward so much as circle around ... 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.
Poignant, funny, and painful...will expose readers of English to a region and class they likely haven’t seen represented in literature: South Indian farmers. 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.
... tells this tale while tenderly exploring one couple’s loving relationship and its limits ... written in deceptively gentle, flowing prose, but this ‘quiet’ novel by a respectable writer became the focus of violent protest by caste-based and religious Hindu groups ... an intriguing, challenging novel and one which it is no trial to read for oneself, and judge.
Beautiful...plunges readers into Tamil culture...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.
