Requirements: ePUB Reader | 781 kB | Version: Retail
Overview: The Grddha Mullick family bursts with marvellous tales of hangmen and hangings in which they figure as eyewitnesses to the momentous events that have shaped the history of the subcontinent. When twenty-two-year-old Chetna Grddha Mullick is appointed the first woman executioner in India, assistant and successor to her father, her life explodes under the harsh lights of television cameras. When the day of the execution arrives, will she bring herself to take a life? Meera’s spectacular imagination turns the story of Chetna’s life into an epic and perverse coming-of-age tale. The lurid pleasures of voyeurism and the punishing ironies of violence are kept in agile balance as the drama hurtles to its inevitable climax.
Genre: Fiction > General Fiction/Classics | Cultural
Praise for the Book
- —‘Meera is at her best when she examines the lives of her women characters. . . . The writing is strong . . . An epic novel’—Outlook
—‘A daring book, for the panoramic sweep of its canvas, for the sheer audacity of its narrative logic . . . for its irreverent play with the paradoxes of life—Love and Death’—The Hindu
—‘This striking novel includes within its majestic sweep the enigmas of the human condition. . . . Stunning images bring out the depth and intensity of Chetna’s spiritual development, and stand testimony to the author’s consummate writing style’—Deccan Herald
—‘Meera achieves a vision of [Kolkata] that is both acutely observed, almost anthropological, in its minute detailing and, at the same time, mythic in its evocation of the city’s decaying, decrepit majesty . . . . One of the most extraordinary accomplishments in recent Indian fiction’—Indian Express
—‘An absorbing novel’—New Indian Express
—‘One of the strongest voices in contemporary Malayalam literature . . . . Meera plays with the reader’s anticipation masterfully . . . The novel is extremely atmospheric . . . Meera turns the entire city into a haunted house’—Open
—‘The book heaves with violence, is lush with metaphor and shocks with details. The reader can only gasp at the surgical precision with which Meera describes the act of hanging’—The Hindu Business Line
—‘An immense, intense coiled rope of a no novel . . . There are chillingly clear-eyed vignettes and moments of razor-sharp dark humour . . . . If Aarachar, the original, was—plot, stock and barrel—“Malayalam’s ultimate gift of love to Bengal,” as its translator J. Devika puts it, its English translation is no less a bonus for showing us, its non-Malayali, non-Bengali readership, the dazzling interstices of her story, instantly recognisable across time and space’—India Today
—‘An incisive critique of the barbarism of the death penalty . . . [The book] gives us a glimpse into the inner lives of those who have been deputed to execute it through generations . . . A vast and riveting sweep of time, locked into the gritty interstices of the contemporary—a pastiche made of fact and fiction, news bulletins and nightmares’—Mint
—‘Stunning . . . Meera weaves history, romance and the politics of the present together into a narrative of incredible complexity . . . . J. Devika’s translation is superb, and she captures the rich detail of Meera’s Malayalam: descriptive, textured and evocative . . . Reading Meera, in Devika’s meticulous and inspired translation, we experience the author’s spectacular ventriloquism. And we are also reminded of the tradition that Meera comes from, which she has burnished and transcended with her epic novel’—Caravan
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