The Abyss

About this book

"An astonishing work... I have read nothing like it in years."--Sam Sacks, The Wall Street JournalJeyamohan's darkly comic masterpiece relays an episode in the life of a magnificently drawn antihero, Pothivelu Pandaram: a man of few virtues caught in a trap of his own making. Pandaram is a small-time crook and temple functionary of the middle castes who lives, quite comfortably, on the revenue generated by a group of physically deformed beggars. whom he buys, sells, and breeds. There is Mangandi Samy, with just one arm, no legs, and "a little head on top," who only speaks in divine songs he himself invents; Ahmedkutty, an intellectual whose testicles hang to the floor "like two great pumpkins"; Muthammai, mother to eighteen children. It is a profitable business and Pandaram a largely unsentimental dealer--harried only occasionally by the sense of something terribly wrong--but when he makes an impulsive trade, his luck turns. Written with an unflinching eye and suffused with a deep existential longing, The Abyss is an extraordinary novel--for its terrain, its fundamental questions about humanity, and its slow, strange twist, which achieves for its dehumanized characters a return to subjecthood.