Detective fiction in the West is often grouped with crime fiction and thrillers; but in detective fiction, the focus is on a puzzle and the process of solving it. It’s a game with the reader in which a mystery needs to be unraveled before the detective figures it out. In some places, the detective becomes a figure of interest in himself—detective figures have been, traditionally if less so at present, more often than not, men—a complex personality whose story is interesting and deserves an independent treatment of its own. It is a genre that solves problems, finds answers, holds the culprit accountable: all very attractive attributes for those who just like a good story.
Tamil
The Solitude of a Shadow is about revenge, and the road to it. Its publication marks Devibharathi’s first novel after decades of novellas, essays, and plays—one of which won last year’s Sahitya Akademi Award. It has now been translated from Tamil by N Kalyan Raman for a wider audience. The story is straightforward: a young boy watched his family suffer at the hands of one man, Karunakaran. As a child, he vowed to make Karunakaran pay, and as an adult, he finds himself in a position to fulfill his promise. But things are never that simple, and the unnamed narrator avoids revenge at all costs. But baser things like plot fall into the background in favor of exploring the transformation of one man, and the result is a puzzle of a novel that the reader must piece together.
Somewhere in Tamil Nadu, there is a small village with “a golden four-lane highway near it but not a single tamarind tree.” Here, the novel’s unnamed narrator spends his days loitering around town and smoking cigarettes. This routine—and everything about life as he knows it—changes with the arrival of Kamala, a widowed mother, a schoolteacher, and the future object of his obsession. She & I, written by Imayam in Tamil and translated by D Venkataramanan, follows these two characters over a decade to tell a powerful story about obsession, self-destruction, and the violence of unrequited desire through vignettes and spare prose.
The Grip of Change is the English translation of Pazhaiyana Kazhithalum, the first full-length novel by P Sivakami, an important Tamil writer. This translation also features Asiriyar Kurippu, the sequel in which Sivakami revisits her work.
Kurinjithen, literally honey of the kurinji flower, is a timeless poem in prose that transports you to the lush Nilgiris where this beautiful blue flower grows wild and to the land of the Badagas who inhabit these hills. It is also Rajam Krishnan’s eulogy to a vanished world and way of life. Once in twelve years when the kurinji blooms in these hills, bees store the honey of the kurinji in combs in rock crevices and on branches of trees. When the Kurinji Blooms narrates the family saga of three generations of Badagas who have for long remained untouched by modernity. Then, as the winds of commerce and change invade their tranquil and sheltered lives, innocence and harmony are replaced by conflict and tragedy that herald new beginnings.
The Man Who Walked Backwards and Other Stories is an anthology of eighteen short stories by S Ramakrishnan, the popular and critically acclaimed master of modern Tamil writing. The stories in this collection are a celebration of eccentricities: they feature characters who defy conventions, and who listen to their inner selves instead of conforming to familial and societal norms.
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