Set in South India during the British colonial, One Part Woman tells the story of a couple, Kali and Ponna, who are unable to conceive, much to the concern of their families―and the crowing amusement of Kali’s male friends. Kali and Ponna try anything to have a child, including making offerings at different temples, atoning for past misdeeds of dead family members, and even circumambulating a mountain supposed to cure barren women, but all to no avail.
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.
