Zero Degree - Charu Nivedita
To buy online - http://www.amazon.in/Zero-Degree-Charu-Nivedita/dp/8190605615
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Zero Degree - Wow!!! What a reading experience!!! I understood the lifeline of this novel is love/affection - the dearth / surplus of it. Both Aarthi and Avanthika sought love and attained it at a very young age; both were cheated; one became a whore and another got love of the hero.
Genesis(the girl baby of the hero) asks her dad at one point, when he would die, so that she would build a Taj Mahal for his dad.
The hero showers all the love on his daughter and when he is separated, he longs for his daughter. The daughter could not reciprocate the love because of threatening by her mother. The dad longs, longs, longs, goes to Himalayas; stands in front of the Almighty/ Mountain / Zero Degree.
The father writes a poem - Chamundi Devi-which encompassed the whole meaning/text/feelings/emotion of the novel.
Eccentricities of the hero:
The hero goes to a whore, places his bag in the table. She asks about him and once she knows that he is a literary magazine writer, she pees on the bag. So, he keeps eighteen copies of his novel at any time.
He exhibits his phallus outside a ladies' college. The girls expressions of 'shit' and 'oh my god', when read in Tamil, are hilarious.
He collects phone directories of many nations to have phone sex.
He laments that he has to read Tamil daily in addition to English daily to know more about local news, because the English dailies do not give a damn about local news.
Pleasure of Text:
Chapter Six- that says the massacre of a terrorist along with an actress winning national award- was a game for the reader. I read it twice, thrice and parenthesized the actress text alone.
In one of the earlier chapters, the author compares line by line of a son of a whore to child labourers of North India.
The most difficult chapter to read was the one, where a dog chases the hero. Without parenthesis, I took three to four readings to get to know what was about it - the Physics comparison, etc.
Poems:
In first reading, I liked the Chamundi Devi poem and 'the the trinity of male gods asking Devi to cook Chapati' poem.
Other poems were good. But it requires further readings of the novel to get the full pleasure of text out of those poems.
Vulgarity:
In no part of the novel, I felt that there was an overt display of vulgarity / obscenity. The coital details were written as it happens - he does it in doggy position- that chapter was not at all vulgar / obscene.
The hero explains how to do masturbation to a female through through phone - it was not at all obscene. I wonder why the naysayers say the sexual text as obscene. And that 'ninth century brain hibernated writer' - his betrothal , first night- all were full of fun.
Conclusion:
The novel Zero Degree is really a masterpiece. It makes the reader play with the text, gives work to the reader' brain. Yet, it transfers the emotion- that is the love- that is the lifeline of this novel.
(Originally written on November 15, 2013 in Charu Nivedita Readers’ Forum, Facebook)
(Originally written on November 15, 2013 in Charu Nivedita Readers’ Forum, Facebook)
