K.R. Meera is a multi-award-winning writer and journalist. She has published short stories, novels and essays, and has won some of the most prestigious literary prizes including the Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award, the Vayalar Award and the Odakkuzhal Award. In 2015, she won the Kendra Sahitya Akademi Award for Aarachar, widely hailed as a contemporary classic and published by Penguin Random House India as Hangwoman. In 2017, her The Poison of Love was published to ecstatic acclaim. She lives in Kottayam with her husband Dileep and daughter Shruthi.
Ministhy S. is an IAS officer who hails from Kerala and works in Uttar Pradesh. She is also a writer and translator. Her translation of K.R. Meera's The Poison of Love has been widely lauded as a masterpiece. Her books in English include essay collections and books for children. She has also translated books from Hindi and English to Malayalam.
One fateful day, Deepti vanishes mysteriously. Baffled by her disappearance and consumed with grief, Prakash, her husband, loses his eyesight. For Prakash, the inexplicable loss of his wife is doubly painful because she was pregnant with their child. And no amount of consolation can bring him solace in the years that ensue.
Into this void steps Rajani, a woman with a tormented past. Despite her initial disdain of Prakash, she steadily finds herself drawn to him. And although an intense desire brings them together, Prakash is unable to give Rajani the love she craves just as he is powerless to dispel the luminous memory of Deepti. But where will this grave obsession lead?
The Unseeing Idol of Light is a haunting tale that explores love and loss, blindness and sight, obsession and suffering-and the poignant interconnections between them.
Flitting between darkness and light, and a plethora of emotions,
The Unseeing Idol of Light by K.R. Meera is a haunting tale . . . Meera's narrative exhibits a complex but a clever interplay of light and darkness . . . [It's] hard to believe that it is a translation from Malayalam. The efforts of Ministhy S. in keeping the voice intact do not go unnoticed. Needless to say, the book becomes at once heart-warming and heart-rending.K.R. Meera writes in the language of violence, obsession, and rage. The writer is best known for her award-winning novel
Hangwoman, and she lavishly wields the noose in this novel as well . . . [In this novel] Meera [is] telling the story of not one woman but all women.[An] intricately plotted novel . . . There are many subplots and twists in this tale that features characters struggling with their real or metaphorical blindness . . . Though the story unfolds through vividly described characters and events, in edgy prose filled with forensic insights,
The Unseeing Idol of Light is constructed less like a narrative of modernist fiction than an instructive fable . . . Perhaps the novel's greatest achievement is its vision of blindness as a general condition of all humans, not restricted to or even particular to the sightless.A gripping, defiant novel, filled with mirroring symbols and themes. Violence underpins everything . . . But this is also a story of love . . . The protagonist of her novel, Prakash loses his vision after Deepti disappears, and for a novel so grounded in the real, this Marquezian element of exaggeration lifts it into an ethereal, unsettling level.Meera is the master of writing about love and loss . . . Translated lyrically by Ministhy S.,
The Unseeing Idol of Light is, on the surface, the story of a wife's disappearance and a husband's grief. But Meera's brilliance makes us realise that this isn't the story of just one woman but of the many nameless women in the country who go missing in that place between darkness and luminescence . . . This book is a monumental work of passion that pulls in a rich mosaic of emotions, encompasses the ambiguity of light and darkness, and tells us the universal truth about how love can be both freeing and enslaving.[Meera's] narrative strength in weaving stories of gender and justice exposes many faultlines in a society celebrated for its peace and harmony . . . Meera's novel, originally written in Malayalam a decade ago, couldn't have been more relevant than today. Young women, men and civil society organisations are slowly coming out against the silent suffering of women, both within homes and outside. While Meera's novel is yet another addition to her brilliant body of work and Indian literature, it is to be read within the contours of the perplexing realities of contemporary Kerala society.The novel's strength lies in the associative meanings it evokes-the complex ways in which words acquire layered significances through its interactions with the lives of the characters.Lay[s] bare and explore[s] the capricious, toxic nature of deeply-felt emotions . . . Ministhy manages to ensure that the text flows smoothly in English.The imagery is strikingly beautiful and is packed with many riveting little mysteries.
