• A Kitchen in the Corner of the House
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Archipelago Books

A Kitchen in the Corner of the House

A Kitchen in the Corner of the House

by Ambai (C.S. Lakshmi), translated from the Tamil by Lakshmi Holmström

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A Kitchen in the Corner of the House collects twenty-five gem-like stories from the innovative and perceptive Tamil writer Ambai.

Ambai’s narrators are daring and courageous, stretching and reinventing their homes, marriages, and worlds. With each story, her expansive voice confronts the construction of gender in Tamil literature. Piecing together letters, journal entries, and notes, Ambai weaves themes of both self-liberation and confinement into her writing. Her transfixing stories often meditate on motherhood, sexuality, and the liberating, in turn inhibiting, contours of the body.

In one story, a young girl is frozen in terror, waiting to tell mother that she’s just gotten her period. She thinks, “I need my mother. My heart yearns for her….” Fueled by such longing, each of Ambai’s characters seek a freer form of language and expression in Tamil. In another, a yellow fish flits into the ocean with an arrogant snort – at one moment on the brink of death and in the next, freely merging with the ocean’s blue-grey depths.

Additional Book Information

Series: Archipelago Books
ISBN: 9781939810441
Pages: 376
Publication Date:

Praise

In the first half of the book, we find stories revolving around the female body and expounding on domestic themes while in the latter half of the book, we encounter tales on politics, activism, and the role of Indian women in these areas...Ambai infuses a deep sense of reality in her stories by making the worlds of these women rich in sensory details - one can almost smell and taste and feel the environment of the characters.
—Sanskriti Nagar, The Cleveland Review of Books

Ambai has created an inspiring collection of female characters who study and have sex. Some wish to be mothers, some do not. These women do not merely long for existence beyond their husbands and brothers and fathers; they achieve that freedom. Holmström’s translation emphasizes the energy Ambai must have included in the original Tamil, and she also manages to bring the sounds of Tamil to an English-speaking reader.
—Emma Deshpande, The London Magazine

Women and the seemingly infinite variety of restrictions they labor under are the focus of this wide-ranging story collection by the feminist Tamil writer Ambai. While the details are specific to India, particularly the south, the themes are universal — pregnancy, motherhood, domestic labor, politics, playing second fiddle to men, even (as in the title story) inconvenient architecture.
—Alison McCulloch, The New York Times

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