A Revenger’s Tragedy

The title of this translation (a faithful rendering of the original Tamil title) may give no indication of the novel’s motif, which is revenge. The protagonist unexpectedly encounters the man called Karunakaran who had molested his sister and abused him thirty years earlier, and resolves to wreak vengeance. While the plan of revenge is never executed (at least not in the way the victims of the original outrage had visualized it), the novel is permeated with the theme and images of vengeance and the psychological havoc that the idea itself works on the protagonist. It is a tale of ‘the fury and mire of human veins’ (to use a phrase from WB Yeats), but also of an individual’s existential angst and sense of futility.