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sayakel's review against another edition
4.0
The narration is exquisite, simple and so down to earth. You follow the story of a couple, set in a rural area, somewhat out of touch of major happenings in the country, living a blissful farmer life with toddy and lush greenery, as they deal with the lack of children in their 12 years of married life. The description of the culture, festival, rituals along with the gods and the locations, paints a picture that stays in your mind for a long time. There is no exact plot, hence no exact resolution, except for the themes it deals with.
poojasinghco's review against another edition
4.0
"There is no female without the male and no male without the female. The world goes on only when they come together" - One part woman, Perumal Murugan
🌷
Kali and Poona, the married couple of 12 years, have a very loving and sexually satisfying relationship.
Their only qualm is that they are unable to conceive, and this calls for taunts from the whole village and the society, especially for Poona, who is constantly finding herself in embarrassing and humiliating situations because of this fact.
Over the years they have prayed to every god, offered alms to every deity, performed every odd ritual, but to no effect.
All of their hopes rest on a single night of the chariot festival, where the rules are relaxed and a consensual relationship between a man and a woman is allowed.
What will come out of the night of the union? How will it effect Poona's and Kali's relationship?
🌷
The story is a third person account of Poona and Kali's plight, the societal norms that look down upon a childless couple, and also touches on the topic of casteism in Indian society.
The characters are very well drawn, the story is really gripping and you feel one with the trauma of the two souls trying to fight the taunts of the society, all the while not losing their love for each other.
I would highly recommend this to people interested in Indian Literature.
🌷
Genre: #fiction #Indianliterature #cultural
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐/5
Reading difficulty: ⭐⭐/5
🌷
Kali and Poona, the married couple of 12 years, have a very loving and sexually satisfying relationship.
Their only qualm is that they are unable to conceive, and this calls for taunts from the whole village and the society, especially for Poona, who is constantly finding herself in embarrassing and humiliating situations because of this fact.
Over the years they have prayed to every god, offered alms to every deity, performed every odd ritual, but to no effect.
All of their hopes rest on a single night of the chariot festival, where the rules are relaxed and a consensual relationship between a man and a woman is allowed.
What will come out of the night of the union? How will it effect Poona's and Kali's relationship?
🌷
The story is a third person account of Poona and Kali's plight, the societal norms that look down upon a childless couple, and also touches on the topic of casteism in Indian society.
The characters are very well drawn, the story is really gripping and you feel one with the trauma of the two souls trying to fight the taunts of the society, all the while not losing their love for each other.
I would highly recommend this to people interested in Indian Literature.
🌷
Genre: #fiction #Indianliterature #cultural
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐/5
Reading difficulty: ⭐⭐/5
neethuraghavan676's review against another edition
5.0
An excellent read !!! I always loved Indian Stories and this one was one of the best I have read.
The concept of Ardhanaari, the one part woman, but where the man and woman cannot touch each other is well used throughout the book. Unlike many other stories where ladies take a side role, or even if the lady is the main character, authors picturise her not even fifty percent as this author had drawn Ponna. The depth of the character was well felt.
The concept of Ardhanaari, the one part woman, but where the man and woman cannot touch each other is well used throughout the book. Unlike many other stories where ladies take a side role, or even if the lady is the main character, authors picturise her not even fifty percent as this author had drawn Ponna. The depth of the character was well felt.
scarletohhara's review against another edition
3.0
I haven't been this disappointed in a story on a long time and that's because of how it ends. The plot dealing with the travails of a childless couple, very much still in love after more than a decade of marriage, in rural south India during British era touches your heart, for sure.
I felt myself getting angry at the village folks giving grief to Kali and Ponna about their childlessness and antsy hoping Ponna doesn't do what Kali doesn't want her to.
I can see where the controversy about this book could be from, but that's about it. It is a mediocre narration for an average plot with slightly above average treatment to some portrayals.
I felt myself getting angry at the village folks giving grief to Kali and Ponna about their childlessness and antsy hoping Ponna doesn't do what Kali doesn't want her to.
I can see where the controversy about this book could be from, but that's about it. It is a mediocre narration for an average plot with slightly above average treatment to some portrayals.
annetjeberg's review against another edition
4.0
I understand that the original version was much longer than the translation, but that knowledge never really bothered me. I tried to look out for signs that things might be missing, or that I was not getting the full picture, but I could not, and I really enjoyed the story. It was relatable, even though it is a situation that is so very alien to me, as a mother of four children living in Canada....
Recommended.
Recommended.
shreyas1599's review against another edition
4.0
This was the first of a kind I've read.
Set in the British Rule (?) of India, it deals with the social stigmatism of a couple not being able to have children and the various struggles and taunts they have to go through. Their entire life revolves around being able to conceive children by going through countless prayers, superstitions, and offerings to various gods. Every few paragraphs, one is met with one kind of taunt or the other that the couple have to face for their inability to have children and it's meant to drive home the point of how hard it is, after a point to not care about what others think about you, especially when you grow up in a culture and environment where you aren't able to do the one thing that everything else in your culture is able to, and you are repeatedly reminded of your inability to do it at every point and instance of your existence.
For an outsider, who has not lived in the environment where the story is set, it might be easy to pass judgments and comments to stop thinking about what everyone else is saying. The author touches upon this subject too, through one of the characters. But most people crave acceptance from their culture and it's close to impossible to go the other route when all you have around you are examples of people conforming to the culture's norms.
The couple is not trying to have children to force happiness in their otherwise unhappy married life, as is also the case with many families. The couple is happy with each other but the societal construct of children as being the ultimate goal of a family, and children being the centre of everything that their lives should be governed by is what drives them to covet it as much as they do.
It goes to the extent of a child being portrayed as a prized possession that one needs to "win" in life. Most people in the story who do have children, should in reality not be having children. This may be an easy comment to pass on for a person from a different generation and different cultural upbringing where the idea of children is more seen as a choice rather than a necessity of life, but nevertheless, I had to make this observation here.
The text also touches upon the caste system and how reluctant the couple is to adopt a child from a different caste. There is no shying away from the matter that even in the present generation, much of this has not changed and the writer is not trying to hide the reality of things.
There is no happy ending either when Kali is struck with the realization that everyone around him betrays him. When he realises that just to have children, the extent to which everyone around him conspired and made his wife conceive children through a random individual through the pretext of it being God's work, it just became too much to bear.
All in all, the book touches a very sensitive subject with a no holds barred approach.
Set in the British Rule (?) of India, it deals with the social stigmatism of a couple not being able to have children and the various struggles and taunts they have to go through. Their entire life revolves around being able to conceive children by going through countless prayers, superstitions, and offerings to various gods. Every few paragraphs, one is met with one kind of taunt or the other that the couple have to face for their inability to have children and it's meant to drive home the point of how hard it is, after a point to not care about what others think about you, especially when you grow up in a culture and environment where you aren't able to do the one thing that everything else in your culture is able to, and you are repeatedly reminded of your inability to do it at every point and instance of your existence.
For an outsider, who has not lived in the environment where the story is set, it might be easy to pass judgments and comments to stop thinking about what everyone else is saying. The author touches upon this subject too, through one of the characters. But most people crave acceptance from their culture and it's close to impossible to go the other route when all you have around you are examples of people conforming to the culture's norms.
The couple is not trying to have children to force happiness in their otherwise unhappy married life, as is also the case with many families. The couple is happy with each other but the societal construct of children as being the ultimate goal of a family, and children being the centre of everything that their lives should be governed by is what drives them to covet it as much as they do.
It goes to the extent of a child being portrayed as a prized possession that one needs to "win" in life. Most people in the story who do have children, should in reality not be having children. This may be an easy comment to pass on for a person from a different generation and different cultural upbringing where the idea of children is more seen as a choice rather than a necessity of life, but nevertheless, I had to make this observation here.
The text also touches upon the caste system and how reluctant the couple is to adopt a child from a different caste. There is no shying away from the matter that even in the present generation, much of this has not changed and the writer is not trying to hide the reality of things.
There is no happy ending either when Kali is struck with the realization that everyone around him betrays him. When he realises that just to have children, the extent to which everyone around him conspired and made his wife conceive children through a random individual through the pretext of it being God's work, it just became too much to bear.
All in all, the book touches a very sensitive subject with a no holds barred approach.
_askthebookbug's review against another edition
4.0
One Part Woman 🌸 .
.
“There is no female without the male, and no male without the female. The world goes on only when they come together”. - Perumal Murugan. .
.
Don't we all love a controversial book? It’s a significant quality that a reader will have in abundance. That’s what made me choose this book and I had my ‘Ooh’ and ‘Aah’ moments till the end. This novel created an uproar in the society because it pointed several issues with masculanity, rituals and gender.
.
.
Perumal talks about a couple (Kali and Ponna) who struggle with fertility issues. They hail from a village where it’s a woman’s duty to give birth to a child in their first year of marriage and when this doesn’t happen to them, they are shunned by the community. The couple then start praying to every known God with tremendous hope. They make sacrifices, offer food, climb mountains and even think of other shocking solutions.Their families force Ponna to head out to the festivities of Vaisaki Temple where as part of a ritual, any childless woman can have consesual sex with an unknown man to become pregnant. This story is so natural probably because of the fact that it refers to the author’s native. Or merely because of the wonderful skills of Perumal. Living in this era, we might not know the atrocities and struggles that the villagers put themselves through even today. This book was an eye opener.
.
.
I would rate it 4.5/5. I would have really loved to read the original script but it’s unfortunate that I cannot read Tamil. .
.
“There is no female without the male, and no male without the female. The world goes on only when they come together”. - Perumal Murugan. .
.
Don't we all love a controversial book? It’s a significant quality that a reader will have in abundance. That’s what made me choose this book and I had my ‘Ooh’ and ‘Aah’ moments till the end. This novel created an uproar in the society because it pointed several issues with masculanity, rituals and gender.
.
.
Perumal talks about a couple (Kali and Ponna) who struggle with fertility issues. They hail from a village where it’s a woman’s duty to give birth to a child in their first year of marriage and when this doesn’t happen to them, they are shunned by the community. The couple then start praying to every known God with tremendous hope. They make sacrifices, offer food, climb mountains and even think of other shocking solutions.Their families force Ponna to head out to the festivities of Vaisaki Temple where as part of a ritual, any childless woman can have consesual sex with an unknown man to become pregnant. This story is so natural probably because of the fact that it refers to the author’s native. Or merely because of the wonderful skills of Perumal. Living in this era, we might not know the atrocities and struggles that the villagers put themselves through even today. This book was an eye opener.
.
.
I would rate it 4.5/5. I would have really loved to read the original script but it’s unfortunate that I cannot read Tamil. .
chuck9997's review against another edition
3.0
Translated books, especially the ones dealing with the cultural factors lose some of their allure in translation. Maybe if I had read it in the original language it would have had more impact.
lidia7's review against another edition
challenging
sad
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
Interesting and thought provoking. I'm glad to have read this but I do feel like I would've enjoyed this more if I were able to read it in Tamil. (My edition isn't translated directly from Tamil so I think that changes things even more). The pacing is hard to determine, it's slow for the first half and then much faster for the second half.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Infertility, Misogyny, and Religious bigotry
Moderate: Animal death, Infidelity, Excrement, and Alcohol
Minor: Animal cruelty, Abortion, and Sexual harassment