From the author of One Part Woman and The Story of a Goat, both longlisted for the National Book Award for Translation, comes a poignant and startling novel about love, caste, and intolerance
Profiled in both the New Yorker and the New York Times, Perumal Murugan is one of India's highest selling and most respected literary writers, and Pyre is perhaps his most beloved work. Saroja and Kumaresan are young and in love. After meeting in a small southern Indian town where Kumaresan works at a soda bottling shop, they quickly marry before returning to Kumaresan's family village, where they hope to build a happy life together. But they are harboring a terrible secret: Saroja is from a different caste than Kumaresan, and if the villagers find out, they will both be in grave danger. Faced with venom from her mother-in-law and questions from her new neighbors, Saroja tries to adjust to a new lonely and uncomfortable life, while Kumaresan struggles to scrape together enough money for them to start over somewhere new. Will their love keep them safe in a world filled with thorns? In evocative prose, Perumal Murugan masterfully conjures a moving tale of innocent young love pitted against chilling violence.
Autorentext
Aniruddhan Vasudevan writes and translates between Tamil and English. He is currently a Cotsen Postdoctoral Fellow in the Princeton Society of Fellows and Lecturer in Anthropology and the Humanities Council (2020-2023), Princeton University.
Klappentext
From the author of One Part Woman and The Story of a Goat, both longlisted for the National Book Award for Translation, comes a new novel about love, intolerance, and violence.
Saroja and Kumaresan are young and in love. Devoted to one another, they marry quickly before returning to Kumaresan's family village in rural India, where they hope to build a life together. However, even as they remain hopeful that the villagers will welcome them with open arms, they are harboring a secret: Saroja is from a different caste than Kumaresan, and if the villagers find out, they will both be in danger.
It is only a matter of time before the villagers' suspicions towards Saroja build to a boiling point. Faced with hostility from Kumaresan's mother and her new neighbors, and fearful that their intolerance will convince her beloved husband to leave her, Saroja tries to adjust to a new life of loneliness, deprivation, and insecurity, while Kumaresan struggles to scrape together enough money for them to start over somewhere else. With their former optimism and tenderness stretched thin, their marriage is threatened both internally and externally, as the villagers begin putting into place their own plans for revenge.
With spare, powerful prose, Perumal Murugan masterfully conjures a terrifying vision of intolerance in this devastating tale of innocent young love pitted against chilling violence.