A Night with a Black Spider - Softcover

Ambai

Softcover

ISBN 10: 9386582260 ISBN 13: 9789386582263

Publisher: Speaking Tiger Books, 2017

Synopsis

'Since she was valorous, she said she was a man, and since Mahishan was speaking of love, he was feminine... If she was a combination of feminine and masculine qualities, why could he too not be a combination of the masculine and feminine?'

Setting the stage with the Asura Mahishan's doomed love for the beautiful Devi, Ambai deftly combines myth and tradition with contemporary situations. In the title story, the woman who is mother, daughter, solver of all problems for her family, finds that it is only a black spider on a wall in a deserted guesthouse with whom she can share her own pain and suffering; in Burdensome Days, Bhramara enters a world of politics that turns her music into a commodity; while in A Moon to Devour, it is through her lover's mother that Sagu learns that marriage is not a necessity for motherhood.

Like the strains of the veena that play again and again in this masterful concert of stories, journeys too weave in and out. By train or bus or autorickshaws, each journey takes one into a different facet of human nature: the power of caste over the most basic of bodily needs like thirst; the simple generosity of a mentally afflicted child who loves the colour blue; the loneliness of dying amongst strangers, and the final journey of a veena whose owner herself had gone before it into another world. As in most of her writing, women are central to Ambai's stories, but so too is her deep understanding of, as she puts it, 'the pulls and tensions' between the many different things that make up life and ultimately, create a story.

About this title

About the Author

'Ambai' is the pseudonym of Dr C.S. Lakshmi, one of the foremost writers of Tamil fiction. Her stories have been translated in three volumes entitled 'A Purple Sea'; 'In a Forest, a Deer' and 'Fish in a Dwindling Lake'. The second book shared the Hutch-Crossword award for translated fiction in 2007. Ambai has also won the Pudumaipiththan Memorial Lifetime Achievement Award for her contribution to literature from the US Tamil cultural organization Vilakku in 2005 and the Lifetime Literary Achievement Award of Tamil Literary Garden, University of Toronto, Canada, for 2008. In 2011, Ambai was awarded the Kalaignyar Mu. Karunanidhi Porkizi award for fiction by the Booksellers and Publishers' Association of South India. The University of Madras awarded her for excellence in literature in the centenary celebrations of International Women's Day in March 2011. She has been an independent researcher in Women's Studies for the last thirty-five years. She is currently the Director of SPARROW (Sound & Picture Archives for Research on Women).

'Aniruddhan Vasudevan' is a writer, translator and researcher from Chennai and currently a PhD student in Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin. He has been awarded the Sahitya Akademi's translation award for 'One Part Woman', his translation of Perumal Murugan's Tamil novel 'Madhorubagan'.

About this edition

• Publisher: Speaking Tiger Books
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 9386582260
• ISBN 13: 9789386582263
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 232