The current issue has thrown up some amazing insights into the pulsating creativity in the Indian languages. Among the books reviewed, the works of some of the greats in Indian literature like UR Ananthamurthy, Imayam and CN Annadurai are interspersed with debut novelists, short story writers and poets. Volumes of short stories, poems, novels and plays are reviewed in these pages, and the canvas is truly a wide one.
The first story ‘Over in a Moment’ offers a peek into the lives of a middle-aged couple. The wife, Kamatchi, feels her life has ‘everything but salt’ as she has an unsatisfactory sex life.
The anthology has a larger pedagogic purpose and is part of the Tamil Nadu Textbook and Educational Services Corporation’s initiative to identify and translate Tamil literary works into English to ‘enhance the reach of Tamil antiquity, tradition and contemporaneity and enrich world literature’.
The novel’s frame story unfolds as a personal investigation: did the narrator’s mother commit suicide by jumping into a lake in Kodaikanal as the police inquiry had concluded, or was she killed? If so, by whom and why? The main story is complex and compressed.
The narrative of Black Soil builds on the idea of the recognizability of lives and establishes its referentiality to the social and political atrocities of young, Independent India.
C N Annadurai (1909-1969), popularly known as ‘Anna’ (elder brother), is one of Tamil Nadu’s greatest icons. His charisma and ideology resonate in Tamil politics even today.