Zero Degree

Awards and accolades

• Zero Degree was longlisted for the 2013 edition of Jan Michalski Prize.
• Zero Degree was inducted into the prestigious '50 Writers, 50 Books - The Best of Indian Fiction', published by HarperCollins.
• Zero Degree was selected as one of the fifteen incredible Indian novels.
• The Sunday Guardian considers Zero Degree an important novel in Metafiction genre.

  Literary contemporaries on ''Zero Degree''

• In his foreword to the Malayalam translation of Zero Degree, Paul Zacharia wrote, "It is like an open experimental laboratory. Amidst the smoke, noxious vapors, and beautiful imagery, I experienced a wondrous journey."
• Tarun Tejpal opines that Zero Degree is remarkable for its experimental voice and its varying and shifting tonalities.
• Anil Menon considers Zero Degree bold and ambitious. He posits that the ancient fascination with language and reality continues to burst through the crust in Charu Nivedita’s works.
• Noted translator Jason Grunebaum considers Zero Degree wildly exciting and complains that Charu does not write in Hindi, so that he would translate Charu's works to English.
• Poet Vivek Narayanan says about Zero Degree: "I think we should take Zero Degree not just as a playful, ironic “postmodern” novel but as a novel of oppositions and contradictions: a deeply autobiographical novel where the self has been scattered, an ironic pastiche novel that speaks to raw experience, a defiantly cosmopolitan novel than nonetheless pins a very particular kind of schizophrenic rage that perhaps—I could be wrong—any Tamilian will immediately recognise."

  Universities on ''Zero Degree''

• Zero Degree was on the curriculum in Spring 2010 in a Comparative World Literature course, taught by Jordan Smith, at California State University, Long Beach.
• University of Rochester has included Zero Degree in its translation program.
• The Malayalam translation of Zero Degree is in the curriculum for postgraduate students at the Mahatma Gandhi University, Kottayam.

  Translations

• Zero Degree was translated into Malayalam in 1999 by Dr G.Balasubrahmanian and Dr P.M.Gireesh.
• It was translated into English in 2008 by Pritham K. Chakravarthy and Rakesh Khanna.
• Further translations into Telugu, Hindi and Spanish are on the anvil.

  Reviews

• Special feature