Zero Degree Novel - By Charu Contents and Discription Overview

Description
	With its mad patchwork of phone sex conversations, nightmarish torture scenes, tender love poems, numerology, mythology, and compulsive name-dropping of Latin American intellectuals, Charu Nivedita's novel Zero Degree stands out as a groundbreaking work of South Indian transgressive fiction that unflinchingly probes the deepest psychic wounds of humanity. "Zero Degree takes you apart and allows you to rearrange yourself as you please." — Kala Krishnan Ramesh, New Sunday Express

Zero Degree - Novel by Charu Nivedita

Title	:	Zero Degree
Author	:	by Charu Nivedita translated by Pritham K. Chakravarthy and Rakesh Khanna
ISBN No	:	9788190605618
Price	:	Rs  315.00

Blaft Publications and Zero Degree

One translated book I recently had to add to the 2008 translation database is Zero Degree by Charu Nivedita (translated from the Tamil by Pritham K. Chakravarthy and Rakesh Khanna), which was published by Blaft Publications earlier this year.

I have to admit that until reading Rakesh Khanna’s comment on an earlier post, I had never heard of Blaft, but I really like their mission statement:

Blaft Publications is a new independent publishing house based in Chennai, India. Our releases so far include an anthology of Tamil pulp fiction, a translation of an experimental Tamil novel, a book of drawings, and a book of English short stories.

However, in the future, Blaft has much wider goals. We are planning to eventually branch out into translations of fiction from other regional languages of South Asia, English fiction, comic books, graphic novels, children’s books, non-fiction, textbooks, how-to-manuals, encyclopedias, and kitchen appliances.All of their titles are available in America, but apparently only through Amazon.com, which is  unfortunate. After reading the first half of Zero Degree, I’m pretty sure there are a number of booksellers out there who would be into this book—it’s the first Tamil title I’ve encountered that includes a dedication to Kathy Acker and a reference to the Oulipo. . . . Rather than summarize the book—I plan on writing a full review in the near future—I thought I’d share the translator’s introduction:

We would like to let Zero Degree speak for itself, after taking just a moment to disavow our personal support for any political agenda that this book or its characters may have, and also to point out two idiosyncratic difficulties the book posed for the translator.

First, in keeping with the numerological theme of Zero Degree, the only numbers expressed in either words or symbols are numerologically equivalent to nine (with the exception of two chapters). This Oulipian ban includes the very common Tamil word å¼, one, used very much like the English one (“one day”, “one of them”, etc.). The way Charu Nivedita works around this constraint in Tamil is a notable feature of the original text. However, Tamil has some better substitutes for this word than English does. For instance, there are two pronouns each for he and she: Üõ¡/Üõoe [Ed. Note: I can’t figure out how to get the script to appear correctly online—sorry about that.] (roughly “that man”/“that woman”) and Þõ¡/Þõoe (“this man”/“this woman”). The lack of single-word English equivalents sometimes results in less graceful constructions than Tamil makes possible. We have done our best to make these sentences easily readable without using the forbidden numbers.

Secondly, many sections of the book are written entirely without punctuation, or using only periods. This reminds the Tamil reader of an ancient style of writing, before Western punctuation marks were adopted into the script. However, in English, omitting punctuation, besides being confusing, would fail to give this effect. Therefore, we have inserted punctuation marks in many chapters, except where it seemed important to the meaning of the text to leave them out.

Zero Degree was first published in Chennai in 1998. It is the author’s second novel, and features many of the same characters that appeared in his first, Existentialism and Fancy Banyan. It did well enough for a second and third edition, and was also translated into Malayalam by Balasubramaniam and P. M. Girish. In Kerala, the book generated a great deal of . . .

Zero Degree Novel - Review On The New Ind press

Zero Degree
By Charu Nivedita
Translated by Pritham K Chakravarthy & Rakesh Khanna Blaft Publications
Pages: 232
Price: Rs 315

This book can be compared to a scream. A good, full-throated one for which you would ordinarily need the falling cliffs. And to say that Zero Degree cannot be brought home would be, ironically, a compliment to the author Charu Nivedita and its translators Pritham K Chakravarthy and Rakesh Khanna.

Charu writes about politics within the family, more accurately sexual politics within the family. Since he has done a good job of revealing the uncertainty and violence within families and contemporary personal relationships, it would indeed be a bad idea to bring it home. But for all those feel stifled within a family and a meaningless routine, please read it on your way to work.

Hide it in the deep recesses of your clothes cupboard or in the general chaos of your office desk, if you will, but read it. You should read it for the thoughts that ordinarily get edited out or words that get buried in symbols.

Zero Degree falls within the genre of trangressive fiction, in which authors try to break out of their societal confines by discussing taboo subjects. Anne Soukhanov, in The Atlantic Monthly (1996) described it as “A literary genre that graphically explores such topics as incest and other aberrant sexual practices, mutilation, the sprouting of sexual organs in various places on the human body, urban violence and violence against women, drug use, and highly dysfunctional family relationships, and that is based on the premise that knowledge is to be found at the edge of experience and that the body is the site for gaining knowledge.” Other popular authors in this genre could be Chuck Palanhiuk and Charles Bukowski.

Charu’s book, written originally in Tamil a decade ago, follows no linear narrative and the protagonist of the book is the insanity that confronts you every day. The narrative is so chaotic that it is a relief. And occasionally there is humour.

The first chapter is one of my favourites for its keen observations, pathos and good-humoured acceptance. In it the author addresses his readers, both ‘normal’ and ‘deviant’. There are chapters that layer personal battles with larger political ones; the sudden change in perspective can give you vertigo. There is a chapter that is a questionnaire, which includes subversive questions that ridicule the author, critics and readers, and then it asks you questions that serve no logical purpose.

There are letters and phone conversations and pages that imitate palm-leaf manuscripts. There are chapters and sentences the author refuses to complete. There is a poem on the primordial and powerful Shakthi who was forced to give away her powers to three men. After using her powers of creation, protection and destruction, they return tired and ask her … Well, I shall leave the sentence hanging too.

Occasionally the author drops names of Latin American writers and high-brow philosophers. Perhaps it is to assure the reader that he is not being taken for a ride. That the well-read, literate author is taking the reader on a well-planned tour. Zero Degree takes you apart and allows you to rearrange yourself as you please.

—ashasmenon@gmail.com

Courtesy : The New Ind press

Zero Degree - Words from Paul Zackaria

"Zero Degree"
is a famous Tamil novel
written by Charu Nivedita.
For the convenience of the Tamil readers, this is made available in the form of an E-book. This is a very novel attempt done by Charu to offer his books to the worldwide Tamil community.


Zero Degree speaks to us from the prisons of human conditions in varying voices. The self proclamatory statements it announces are the soundwaves of the gramophone which reads out from the dreams of these prison walls. Charu Nivedita's characters gain friendship, peace, health and mental balance from the tragic locations of historical and spiritual constructions of war, dictatorship, corruption, horror, atrocity, ruthlessness of history, poverty, diseases, boundless miseries of women and the intriguing sexual relationships.

Charu Nivedita is not afraid of castling sex with words. While he looks kicking away the conservative moral scriptures, he dares writing the documents hitherto unavailable in malayalam.

Zero Degree is an open laboratory. In its heat and in its smog and through the magical moments, I enjoyed an adventurous journey fully as a reader and a writer.

Paul Zackaria

Well known Malayalam writer and Media Critic.

Charu - Style As Substance Review on Tehelka

Charu Nivedita’s new novel is transgressive, non-linear and engaging

KALA KRISHNAN RAMESH

CHARU NIVEDITA’S Zero Degree  is difficult in the most interesting way: it appears to be teasing, confusing, pretending, mimicking, and sometimes even misleading, till you see the audacious design that makes this book one of the most interesting deliberations on the business of writing. The writer leaves clues hinting that this story is about literature and how the author relates to material: “There’s been a mistake. The chapters have become shuffled. I might have had some ulterior motive. Perhaps my hatred for Muniyandi and my love for Misra are responsible; perhaps I’ve subconsciously moved Misra ahead and shoved Muniyandi to the background”; “To understand my writing, forget my life. My life is separate and my writing is separate”; “Is this really a novel, or merely a bunch of notes thrown together into a book?”

The writing in Zero Degree appears to be asserting that even in a post-structuralist world, where aesthetic and formal parameters are elastic, style, form and content can still be shocking. Its subject matter is not unfamiliar, neither are its many styles or its use of language, but when it comes together, the reader is both surprised and shocked. Zero Degree insists on the importance of style even where it is an admission of dishonourable intentions.

ZERO DEGREE Charu Nivedita (tr. by Pritham K Chakravarthy and Rakesh Khanna) Blaft Publications 248 pp; Rs 315

Zero Degree’s “mad patchwork” takes the reader on a wildly curving, frequently detouring story made of phone sex, torture, love poetry, numerology, mythology, and what appears to be a decidedly Latin American thoughtscape, and interestingly, in this journey, the reader is both guided traveler and adventurer.

The book is a virtuoso performance by a writer doing voices he loves and hates, including Latin American, Sangam Tamil, meta-textual, magazinese, establishment Tamil, etc. While he dons these many hats, in a postmodernist gesture he also lets us know that he is enchanted and not ‘influenced’ by any of them, by ostentatiously annotating each hat-wearing moment.

The author’s audacity — about content, form and language — is totally charming; the fact that in ‘real’ life, he appears to be as unpredictable, as difficult to locate in a hierarchy of Tamil writers, and is bathed in a glow of speculation, controversy and love-hate makes it all the more intriguing.

The translation by Pritham K Chakravarthy and Rakesh Khanna transcreates what one imagines to be the sting and slap and sharp tenderness of the original, without letting go of the necessary quantity of non-Tamilness. Malavika PC’s cover captures a sense of the intricate madness of the journey inside.

Zero Degree is, without doubt, an unusual experience in reading; unlike most books, it challenges — and inspires — the reader to create a structure from the apparent mayhem of form and content. Or, in the author’s words, “Please, go ahead and search for meaning in the host of words scattered in these pages.”