In her latest offering, Eating Wasps, Nair, however, returns to the terrain that her 2001 novel, Ladies Coupé, had mapped with such sensitivity and attention: the sisterhood…. But naturally, Eating Wasps is the work of an artist who has diligently spent the last decade-and-a-half since it was published in the workshop, and it bears witness to how Nair’s writing has evolved. To begin a novel with the first-person account of a dead protagonist is a memorable move that, in the hands of a lesser writer, could go awfully wrong. But in Nair’s deft construction, Sreelakshmi, a young award-winning novelist who takes the Malayalam academy by storm through her honest writing about womanhood and sensual love, quickly becomes the novel’s living, breathing heart. While several chapters are quite dark, on the whole the sombre note is countermanded by the breezy effortlessness of Nair’s writing… The perfect book to read as winter begins to leave, Eating Wasps is a feminist novel that, in the season of #MeToo, ultimately reminds us that however hard the contours of the individual story of pain, persecution or trauma might be, once it is out there, articulated and heard, in that space between the listener and the teller, the subject — and, by extension, the reader — can begin to heal.
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