Key Points
Pune: Charu Nivedita, born with another name, is a 70-year-old Tamil male writer who sports torn jeans and three gold necklaces...
For decades, he was dismissed as a peddler of porn.At many literary events, discussions of my work led to physical violence, he recalled.Fearing for his life, he lived for five years under the pseudonym Muniyandi, the name of a rural Tamil deity...
But it is an earlier autofictional work,Marginal Man(2018), the translation of a 2011 Tamil book, that gives a fuller picture of this extraordinary writer and his approach to writing...
Sex forms a large part of the book, with vivid descriptions of encounters experienced by Udhaya and his male friends, the sexual thoughts of his woman friends, anddetails such asthe varied ways in which female genitaliafeatures in theTamil lexicon of swear words...
On the last count, Charu admitted,Marginal Manflags.Six people, including himself, worked on the translation, but the outcome of their brave effort to reproduce the novels multiple registers is patchy.Also,he said, the sprawling novel required agood editor...
