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Anuk Arudpragasam

A Passage North: A Novel Paperback – Jan. 11 2022

by Anuk Arudpragasam (Author)

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SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE • A young man journeys into Sri Lanka’s war-torn north in this searing novel of longing, loss, and the legacy of war from the author of The Story of a Brief Marriage.

“A novel of tragic power and uncommon beauty.”—Anthony Marra
“One of the most individual minds of their generation.”—Financial Times

SHORTLISTED FOR THE DYLAN THOMAS PRIZE • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR—Time, NPR

A Passage North begins with a message from out of the blue: a telephone call informing Krishan that his grandmother’s caretaker, Rani, has died under unexpected circumstances—found at the bottom of a well in her village in the north, her neck broken by the fall. The news arrives on the heels of an email from Anjum, an impassioned yet aloof activist Krishnan fell in love with years before while living in Delhi, stirring old memories and desires from a world he left behind.

As Krishan makes the long journey by train from Colombo into the war-torn Northern Province for Rani’s funeral, so begins an astonishing passage into the innermost reaches of a country. At once a powerful meditation on absence and longing, as well as an unsparing account of the legacy of Sri Lanka’s thirty-year civil war, this procession to a pyre “at the end of the earth” lays bare the imprints of an island’s past, the unattainable distances between who we are and what we seek.

Written with precision and grace, Anuk Arudpragasam’s masterful novel is an attempt to come to terms with life in the wake of devastation, and a poignant memorial for those lost and those still living.

Print length

304 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Hogarth
Publication date

Jan. 11 2022
Dimensions

13.23 x 1.57 x 20.27 cm
ISBN-10

0593230728
ISBN-13

978-0593230725
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Review

“In sentences of unusual beauty and clarity, Arudpragasam observes even the most mundane of actions . . . with an attention so absolute it feels devotional. He is equally gifted at atmospheric, sensory description that transports the reader to Sri Lanka and India and at examining the emotions—elation, fear, impatience, satisfaction, shame—that simmer below the surface of our everyday lives.”—The New York Times Book Review

“It can take just two novels to establish a writer as one of the most individual minds of their generation. With his new novel, a revelatory exploration of the aftermath of war, Arudpragasam cements his reputation. [An] extraordinary and often illuminating novel.”—Financial Times

“A tender elegy . . . [a] wholehearted and necessary act of preservation by its author.”—NPR

“[A] profound meditation on suffering . . . survivor’s guilt and war’s aftermath. In dense, hypnotic prose, Arudpragasam explores the desire for independence that enflamed the decades-long civil war, the violence that ensued and the emotional scars that refuse to heal.”—The Guardian

“Sumptuous . . . reminiscent of Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost.”—Oprah Daily

“Mesmerizing, political, intimate, unafraid—this is a superb novel, a novel that pays such close, intelligent attention to the world we all live in.”—Sunjeev Sahota, author of The Year of the Runaways

“Written with scrupulous attention to nuance and detail, A Passage North captures the rich interior of its protagonist's mind but also contemporary Sri Lanka itself, war-scarred, traumatized. At its center is an exquisite form of noticing, a way of rendering consciousness and handling time that connects Arudpragasam to the great novelists of the past.”—Colm Tóibín, author of Brooklyn and The Testament of Mary

“Anuk Arudpragasam’s first book already showed what a fine novelist he was and this second novel provides proof, if any were needed, that he is a major writer, vastly accomplished.”—Amitava Kumar, author of Immigrant, Montana

“It’s difficult to think of comparisons for Arudpragasam’s work among current English-language writers; one senses, reading his two extraordinary novels, a new mastery coming into being.”—Garth Greenwell, author of Cleanness and What Belongs to You

“This is a novel as both an elegy and a love song, not only for a place, but for the souls, living and dead, who are bound to that place—what an unforgettable and perfect reading experience.”—Paul Yoon, author of Snow Hunters and Run Me to Earth

“A luminously intelligent, psychologically intricate novel.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

About the Author

Anuk Arudpragasam was born in Colombo, Sri Lanka. He studied philosophy in the United States, receiving a doctorate at Columbia University. His first novel, The Story of a Brief Marriage, was translated into seven languages, won the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, and was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. He currently divides his time between India and Sri Lanka.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

1

The present, we assume, is eternally before us, one of the few things in life from which we cannot be parted. It overwhelms us in the painful first moments of entry into the world, when it is still too new to be managed or negotiated, remains by our side during childhood and adolescence, in those years before the weight of memory and expectation, and so it is sad and a little unsettling to see that we become, as we grow older, much less capable of touching, grazing, or even glimpsing it, that the closest we seem to get to the present are those brief moments we stop to consider the spaces our bodies are occupying, the intimate warmth of the sheets in which we wake, the scratched surface of the window on a train taking us somewhere else, as if the only way we can hold time still is by trying physically to prevent the objects around us from moving. The present, we realize, eludes us more and more as the years go by, showing itself for fleeting moments before losing us in the world’s incessant movement, fleeing the second we look away and leaving scarcely a trace of its passing, or this at least is how it usually seems in retrospect, when in the next brief moment of consciousness, the next occasion we are able to hold things still, we realize how much time has passed since we were last aware of ourselves, when we realize how many days, weeks, and months have slipped by without our consent. Events take place, moods ebb and flow, people and situations come and go, but looking back during these rare junctures in which we are, for whatever reason, lifted up from the circular daydream of everyday life, we are slightly surprised to find ourselves in the places we are, as though we were absent while everything was happening, as though we were somewhere else during the time that is usually referred to as our life. Waking up each morning we follow by circuitous routes the thread of habit, out of our homes, into the world, and back to our beds at night, move unseeingly through familiar paths, one day giving way to another and one week to the next, so that when in the midst of this daydream something happens and the thread is finally cut, when, in a moment of strong desire or unexpected loss, the rhythms of life are interrupted, we look around and are quietly surprised to see that the world is vaster than we thought, as if we’d been tricked or cheated out of all that time, time that in retrospect appears to have contained nothing of substance, no change and no duration, time that has come and gone but left us somehow untouched.

Standing there before the window of his room, looking out through the dust-coated pane of glass at the empty lot next door, at the ground overrun by grasses and weeds, the empty bottles of arrack scattered near the gate, it was this strange sense of being cast outside time that held Krishan still he tried to make sense of the call he’d just received, the call that had put an end to all his plans for the evening, the call informing him that Rani, his grandmother’s former caretaker, had died. He’d come home not long before from the office of the NGO at which he worked, had taken off his shoes and come upstairs to find, as usual, his grandmother standing outside his room, waiting impatiently to share all the thoughts she’d saved up over the course of the day. His grandmother knew he left work between five and half past five on most days, that if he came straight home, depending on whether he took a three-wheeler, bus, or walked, he could be expected at home between a quarter past five and a quarter past six. His timely arrival was an axiom in the organization of her day, and she held him to it with such severity that she would, if there was ever any deviation from the norm, be appeased only by a detailed explanation, that an urgent meeting or deadline had kept him at work longer than usual, that the roads had been blocked because of some rally or procession, when she’d become convinced, in other words, that the deviation was exceptional and that the laws she’d laid down in her room for the operation of the world outside were still in motion. He’d listened as she talked about the clothes she needed to wash, about her conjectures on what his mother was making for dinner, about her plans to shampoo her hair the next morning, and when at last there was a pause in her speech he’d begun to shuffle away, saying he was going out with friends later and wanted to rest awhile in his room. She would be hurt by his unexpected desertion, he knew, but he’d been waiting all afternoon for some time alone, had been waiting for peace and quiet so he could think about the email he’d received earlier in the day, the first communication he’d received from Anjum in so long, the first attempt she’d made since the end of their relationship to find out what he was doing and what his life now was like. He’d closed the browser as soon as he finished reading the message, had suppressed his desire to pore over and scrutinize every word, knowing he’d be unable to finish his work if he let himself reflect on the email, that it was best to wait till he was home and could think about everything undisturbed. He’d talked with his grandmother a little more—it was her habit to ask more questions when she knew he wanted to leave, as a way of postponing or prolonging his departure—then watched as she turned reluctantly in to her room and closed the door behind her. He’d remained in the vestibule a moment longer, had then gone to his room, closed the door, and turned the key twice in the lock, as if double-bolting the door would guarantee him the solitude he sought. He’d turned on the fan, peeled off his clothes, then changed into a fresh T-shirt and pair of shorts, and it was just as he’d lain down on his bed and stretched out his limbs, just as he’d prepared himself to consider the email and the images it brought to the surface of his mind, that the phone in the hall began to ring, its insistent, high-pitched tone invading his room through the door. He’d sat up on the bed and waited a few seconds in the hope it would stop, but the ringing had continued without pause. Slightly annoyed, deciding to deal with the call as quickly as possible, brusquely if necessary, he’d gotten up and made his way to the hall.

The caller had introduced herself, somewhat hesitantly, as Rani’s eldest daughter, an introduction whose meaning it had taken him a few seconds to register, not only because he’d been distracted by the email but also because it had been some time since the thought of his grandmother’s caretaker Rani had crossed his mind. The last time he’d seen her had been seven or eight months before, when she had left to go on what was supposed to have been just a four- or five-day trip to her village in the north. She had gone to make arrangements for the five-year death anniversary of her younger son, who’d been killed by shelling on the penultimate day of the war, then to attend the small remembrance that would be held the day after by survivors at the site of the final battle, which was only a few hours by bus from where she lived. She’d called a week later to say she would need a little more time, that there were some urgent matters she needed to attend to before returning—they’d spent more money than planned on the anniversary, apparently, and she needed to go to her son-in-law’s village to discuss finances with her daughter and son-in-law in person, which wouldn’t take more than a day or two. It was two weeks before they heard back from her again, when she called to say she’d gotten sick, it had been raining and she’d caught some kind of flu, she’d told them, would need just a few more days to recover before making the long journey back. It had been hard to imagine Rani seriously affected by flu, for despite the fact that she was in her late fifties, her large frame and substantial build gave the impression of someone exceptionally robust, not the kind of person it was easy to imagine laid low by a common virus. Krishan could still remember how on New Year’s Day the year before, when they’d been boiling milk rice in the garden early in the morning, one of the three bricks that propped up the fully laden steel pot had given way, causing the pot to tip, how Rani had without any hesitation bent down and held the burning pot steady with her bare hands, waiting, without any sign of urgency, for him to reposition the brick so she could set the pot back down. If she hadn’t yet returned it couldn’t have been that she was too weak or too sick for the ride back home, he and his mother had felt, the delay had its source, more likely, in the strain of the anniversary and the remembrance on her already fragile mental state. Not wanting to put unnecessary pressure on her they’d told her not to worry, to take her time, to come back only when she was feeling better. Appamma’s condition had improved dramatically since she’d come to stay with them and she no longer needed to be watched every hour of the day and night, the two of them would be able to manage without help for a few more days.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Hogarth (Jan. 11 2022)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 304 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0593230728
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0593230725
Item weight ‏ : ‎ 204 g
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 13.23 x 1.57 x 20.27 cm

Best Sellers Rank: #155,891 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #326 in Asian American Literature (Books)
- #2,167 in War Fiction (Books)
- #2,498 in War & Military Action & Adventure

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Anuk Arudpragasam

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Anuk Arudpragasam was born in Colombo, Sri Lanka. He studied philosophy in the United States, receiving a doctorate at Columbia University. His first novel, The Story of a Brief Marriage, was translated into seven languages, won the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, and was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize.

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Mr. Sj Dilley

Beautifully written, quietly moving, staggeringly insightful

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on July 30, 2021

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A Passage North is a beautiful, understated novel which I was very keen to read after it was longlisted for the Booker Prize.

On the surface, this is a very simple novel: in the first section of the novel, Krishan, a young man in Colombo, Sri Lanka, receives news that Rani, his grandmother's carer has died in the northeast of the country. The second section describes his journey north to attend her funeral, and the third section describes her cremation. There is no other real action in the present day, and most of the novel really takes place within Krishan's head as we follow his thoughts on Rani, his grandmother, and his relationship with his former lover Anjum.

Rani has lost both of her sons in the Civil War and has been receiving regular psychiatric treatment; Krishan is surprised that she finds some measure of contentment in caring for his belligerent grandmother, whose gradual and reluctant withdrawal from the world is movingly described. Rani's experiences also seem to force Krishan to confront the losses of the Tamil people, from which he has felt relatively insulated (in spite of having lost his own father during the war), as he has been studying in Delhi where he met Anjum. This asymmetric relationship is well-drawn - Krishan is consumed by desire for Anjum, but Anjum is very clear that the pursuit of her political ideals will come first and that their relationship will not outlast their time together in Delhi. In some ways, Krishan himself registers as a bit of a blank in comparison to these three women, but it is his clear-sightedness and self-awareness that allows them to be so clearly delineated.

What makes this novel so impressive is the sheer beauty of its writing. Arudpragasam writes in long sentences (frequently as long as half a page), but these feel graceful and fluent rather than convoluted and torturous, and they lend themselves to the extended and precise exploration of ideas such as time, memory, loss and desire. The novel is full of staggeringly insightful observations. For instance, describing Krishan's grandmother, Arundpragasam writes that "Krishan had always thought of death as something that happened suddenly or violently, an event that took place at a specific time and then was over, but thinking now of his grandmother as he sat there on the rocks, it struck him that death could also be a long, drawn-out process, a process that took up a significant portion of the life of the dying person." Or, writing about Krishan's initial infatuation with Anjum: "It was funny how similar desire was to loss in this way, how desire too, like bereavement, could cut through the fabric of ordinary life, causing the routines and rhythms that had governed your existence so totally as to seem unquestionable to quietly lose the hard glint of necessity, leaving you almost in a state of disbelief, unable to participate in the world." There are many other examples.

The novel does not flinch from the horrors of the Sri Lankan Civil War, in particular when describing the torture of Kuttimani and his fellow separatist leaders, and when recounting a documentary about two young female members of the Black Tigers. (It is worth mentioning that I had virtually no knowledge of the Sri Lankan Civil War before I started reading and this wasn't a problem - the novel makes everything very clear.) However, there is something almost redemptive about the Krishan's growing understanding out the lives of others as he journeys northward, so that the novel leaves us feeling tentatively hopeful about the future.

Overall, I found this an excellent and quietly moving novel, which I would warmly recommend to others.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for giving me access to an online copy of this book to review.

19 people found this helpful

Paul Fulcher

A fascinating novel influenced by the great Thomas Bernhard

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on August 8, 2021

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A fascinating novel, heavily influenced by Thomas Bernhard and, the author's favourite novel, A Book of Memories by Péter Nádas, simultaneously political and philsophical.

On a Booker longlist that seemed to prize readability and accessibility, it was great to see the author here resisting the standard traits of novel writing, as indeed the judges recognised in their citation (A Passage North is quiet by serendipity, possessing its power not on its face, but in hidden, subterranean places. It has a simple conceit which revolves around the philosophy of the present as a disease of the past. It is in subverting our sense of time and even of how a story should be told that this novel achieves its strongest effect and strikes an indelible mark on the reader's soul.)

From an interview in the Paris Review:

"INTERVIEWER

What are some aspects of novel writing that you don’t pay as much attention to?

ARUDPRAGASAM

Story. Creating a well-rounded character. Setting. Dialogue. Historical context. I try to pay attention to these things—I do try—but they’re always afterthoughts.

I have in my mind that the reader expects the character to be believable or the story to be interesting. I have this little voice in my head that says I need to try—but those elements of novel writing are not what I am interested in."

A Passage North opens as it goes on with an extensive philosophical musing on the nature of the present.

"THE PRESENT, WE assume, is eternally before us, one of the few things in life from which we cannot be parted. It overwhelms us in the painful first moments of entry into the world, when it is still too new to be managed or negotiated, remains by our side during childhood and adolescence, in those years before the weight of memory and expectation, and so it is sad and a little unsettling to see that we become, as we grow older, much less capable of touching, grazing, or even glimpsing it, that the closest we seem to get to the present are those brief moments we stop to consider the spaces our bodies are occupying, the intimate warmth of the sheets in which we wake, the scratched surface of the window on a train taking us somewhere else, as if the only way we can hold time still is by trying physically to prevent the objects around us from moving. The present, we realize, eludes us more and more as the years go by, showing itself for fleeting moments before losing us in the world’s incessant movement, fleeing the second we look away and leaving scarcely a trace of its passing, or this at least is how it usually seems in retrospect, when in the next brief moment of consciousness, the next occasion we are able to hold things still, we realize how much time has passed since we were last aware of ourselves, when we realize how many days, weeks, and months have slipped by without our consent.

Events take place, moods ebb and flow, people and situations come and go, but looking back during these rare junctures in which we are, for whatever reason, lifted up from the circular daydream of everyday life, we are slightly surprised to find ourselves in the places we are, as though we were absent while everything was happening, as though we were somewhere else during the time that is usually referred to as our life. Waking up each morning we follow by circuitous routes the thread of habit, out of our homes, into the world, and back to our beds at night, move unseeingly through familiar paths, one day giving way to another and one week to the next, so that when in the midst of this daydream something happens and the thread is finally cut, when, in a moment of strong desire or unexpected loss, the rhythms of life are interrupted, we look around and are quietly surprised to see that the world is vaster than we thought, as if we’d been tricked or cheated out of all that time, time that in retrospect appears to have contained nothing of substance, no change and no duration, time that has come and gone but left us somehow untouched."

The novel is set in Sri Lanka around 5-6 years after the 2009 defeat of the Tamil Tigers by Government forces.

Our first-person narrator is Khrishan, a Tamil from Sri Lanka, who had been studying in Dehli at the time of the Tigers defeat. The break-up with his girlfriend Anjum, who prioritised her social activism over their relationship, and then seeing the post-war suffering of the Tamil people led him back to Sri Lanka. He first gets involved in reconstruction work in the north-east of the country, but soon realises that the mental trauma of the conflict will persist much longer than the physical, and that the reconstruction is a form of erasure, and returns to his family home in Colombo, which he shares with his mother and his elderly paternal grandmother (his father having been killed by a bomb in the civil war).

"The purpose of all the government’s demolition and renovation in the northeast had, of course, been to erase any memory that might spur the Tamil population back toward militarism, and in this it had been more or less successful, for one hardly heard ordinary people talking about the Tigers in the northeast now, one hardly heard anyone giving them more than a passing thought. It was strange to consider, since for decades the Tigers had been the central fact of life in the northeast, but it also made sense to a degree, for memory requires cues from the environment to operate, can function only by means of associations between things in the present and things in the past, which meant that remembering became far harder when all the cues that an environment contained were systematically removed. Without the physical objects that allowed it to operate organically, memory had to be cultivated consciously and deliberately, and how could the average person in the northeast afford to actively cultivate their memory of a world now gone when there were so many more urgent concerns, how to make ends meet, how to rebuild their homes, how to educate their children, concerns that filled up all their mental space? The truth was that eventually most people would have ceased remembering the past anyway, even if all remaining traces of the Tigers had been left untouched, for the truth was that all monuments lose their meaning and significance with the passing of time, disappearing, like the statues and memorials in Colombo dedicated to the so-called independence struggle against the British, into the vast unseen and unconsidered background of everyday life.
...
Deliberately or not the past was always being forgotten, in all places and among all peoples, a phenomenon that had less to do with the forces that seek to erase or rewrite history than simply the nature of time, with the precedence the present always seems to have over what has come before, the precedence not of the present moment, which we never seem to have access to, but of the present situation, which is always demanding our attention, always so forceful and vivid and overwhelming that as soon as one of its elements disappears we forget it ever existed."

As the novel begins he has just returned from the office (he now works in an administration role at an NGO on more administrative matters) to contemplate an email he had received from Anjum, the first since their break up almost 4 years earlier. But as he is about to re-read the email he receives a phone call informing him that Rana, his grandmother's carer until recently, had died. Khrishan had first come across Rana, a Tamil, when visiting a hospital, where she was undergoing electroshock therapy for the mental trauma caused by losing both of her sons during the civil war, and had invited her to live with the family as a way to both solve their care issues and to help with Rana's mental healing.

Arudpragasam originally aimed to write a novel in the style of Bernhard's stunning Extinction, attempting to replicate the "the sustained engagement with a single consciousness in a constrained space" (from the Literary Friction podcast) in Bernhard's novel, although he found it difficult to achieve that in his own writing in a "bearable" way, eventually expanding the locations and characters (the novel was originally going to be the main character and his grandmother).

"The outside world in Extinction is like scenery, it’s like a backdrop in the theater, where it’s so obvious that you’re not supposed to pay attention to it—it’s really just there so that what is happening in the foreground can happen. I wanted to write a book like that, one that involved sustained engagement with a single consciousness at a kind of intense level. I tried very hard, and I couldn’t do it in a way that anybody who wanted to read my writing or any friends of mine were willing to tolerate. In fact, I couldn’t do it in a way that I could tolerate. I had difficulty following this ideal, and slowly, over the course of years, the world began to seep more into the novel."

That said, the novel's action is still relatively limited, taking place over a few days, with Khrisnan going for a walk, and then taking a train to Kilinochchi (which was the de facto capital of the Tamil Tigers territory) where he attends Rana's funeral, all the while pondering deeply on thoughts provoked by the email and phone call that open the novel as well as on the effects of the civil war (here, the narration can seem rather one-sided, but then this is a first-person narrative).

Although the setting of the novel is wider in practice, as his thoughts extend the narrative scope via some flashbacks to his time with Anjum, and indeed the thoughts he had then. This from a train journey he and Anjum took after they had been separated for some weeks, as they prepare for bed in a sleeper carriage:

"He would think, listening to the Sivapurānam, of the sea in Sri Lanka as it was during the calmer months, specifically of the sea in Trincomalee as he’d seen it once on a warm, late June evening, the water a calm, waveless sheet of glimmering, glistening blue that stretched out silently toward the sky. He would think of how the water unfurled itself so softly across the gentle slope of the beach, how it swept over the smooth, polished sand with such tenderness and how reaching its full extension, just as it was losing all its momentum, it would pause as if taking a breath in a last brief embrace of the earth, clasping the land for as long as it could before being drawn back with a sigh into the sea. He would think of the sea, rolling and unrolling itself softly and placidly across the edges of the earth in this way, coming into contact with the shore so lovingly and gratefully and then, when it was time, withdrawing so gracefully, and he would wonder whether it was possible for him too to be in Anjum’s presence and then return to himself with such grace and equanimity, to attach himself to the thing he loved and then detach himself without each time ripping apart his soul, though the truth, he knew, was that such a stance was only possible at certain moments, at least for him, moments in which he was, for whatever reason, briefly in possession of himself, for it was difficult to be philosophical in the midst of desire, it was difficult to be as removed from the world as religious devotees claimed to be when you were caught up in the bliss of union or in the desperation of being parted."

There is a certain irony here in that Khrisnan is very much being philosophical in the midst of desire - he is hoping to have sex with Anjum in their compartment. And that speaks to one potential issue with the novel - at times the philosophising is somewhat artificial, but then Arudpragasam isn't aiming for realism.

Bernhard's influence is also clear in the long sentences and paragraphs, and the recollected reported speech (there is no dialogue in the novel).

Another differentiating element is how Arudpragasam incorporates various literary works in translation including the Tamil Periya Purānam, the Sanskrit The Cloud Messenger, a Sansrkit version of the Life of the Buddha and some Pali Buddhist women’s poetry.

Overall - a worthwhile inclusion on the Booker longlist and a potential shortlist contender. Recommended

4 people found this helpful

JohnT

What is this book about?

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on December 14, 2021

Verified Purchase

This is an extraordinary book, and I guess I enjoyed reading it.

But I was left wondering what sort of story this is meant to be.

Is it a love story? it certainly contains one of this, although when the book finishes the affair is left in a curious, unresolved state.

Is it a hsitorical novel, doucmenting, to some extent, the Sri Lankan Civil War and its aftermath? Again it does that and in some more more completely than the love affair.

Is it a tale of a yound man's prersona journey? Well definitely, but some how that is the back drop against which the other action plays.

Is it story of class and culture?? Yes, again, that - I learned about Hindu death rituals and Tamil society in Sri Lanka.

But some how the novel just stops, leaving too many unresolved threads. I was left unsatisfied.

It is also written in an extraordinary style, with some of the longest paragraphs I have ever seen (pages and pages), a huge and unusual vocabulary, used effectively and without pretension. The style is reminiscent of strem of consiosness style, but not exactly the same.

I'm pleased I read this book, for all my somewhat ambivalent feelings about it.

2 people found this helpful

Donny Rock

Tedious

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on September 22, 2021

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A long novel, mainly stream of consciousness and recollection, of life in Sri Lanka. There's much to be leaned here about Sri Lankan culture and its civil war. Unfortunately, it's told in seemingly unending prose, unbroken by any dialogue and loaded with what to me is unnecessarily detailed descriptions of everything. Whatever happened to 'show, not tell'? I found the whole thing somewhat unrelenting.

4 people found this helpful

Sena

An introspective novel

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on September 23, 2021

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This novel is destined to be the definitive novel about the Sri Lankan Civil War, a war which lasted thirty years and claimed at least 100,000 lives. Anuk Arudpragasam is a member of the minority Tamil community in Sri Lanka. Both Sinhalese and Tamils suffered in the war, but Tamils being in the minority suffered more.
There are three main characters in the novel: Krishan, a young Sri Lankan Tamil man, his lover Anjum, an Indian woman from Bangalore, and Rani, a tragic victim of the war whose two sons met violent deaths.
There are several interesting references to Buddhism in the novel. Buddhism is claimed by the majority Sinhalese in Sri Lanka as their “national” religion, but Arudpragasam points out that the Theravada Buddhism practised in Sri Lanka is only one of several varieties of Buddhism.
On his passage North, Krishan comes across a lake near Kilinochchi, near the epicentre of th e war. The lake reminds Krishan of a documentary on two Tamil Tiger women, which he had watched in the company of Anjum in India. Anjum said the film had reminded her of a collection of Buddhist poems written by women between the third and sixth centuries B.C. - Poems of the First Buddhist Women: A Translation of the Therigatha eBook : Hallisey, Charles: Amazon.co.uk: Kindle Store

One person found this helpful

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Product description

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About the Author

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Product details

About the author

Anuk Arudpragasam

Customer reviews

Top reviews from Canada

Top reviews from other countries

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