The opening sequence of Anuk Arudpragasam’s debut novel, in which a six-year-old child with a shrapnel-shredded arm is brought to an open-air operating theatre, feels horribly timely. The young man carrying the listless little boy finds a strange solace in discerning the child’s prospects: “Soon the doctor would arrive and the operation would be done, and in no time at all the arm would be as nicely healed as the already amputated thigh … According to the boy’s sister [that] injury came from a land mine explosion four months before, the same accident that killed their parents also.” It brings to mind the images of stunned, bloodied children now coming out of Syria and other war zones. The novel both implicitly and explicitly raises crucial questions about the aesthetic and ethical stakes involved in regarding the suffering of others.
Arudpragasam uses placid, even poetic prose, with results that range from brilliantly unsettling to questionably indulgent. The novel is set approximately seven years ago, in the Tamil-majority north of Sri Lanka. Its action takes place over a few days during the harrowing final months of the island’s vicious civil war. Recalling José Saramago, The Story of a Brief Marriage takes a fraught political-historical moment and creates out of it a fable-like novel: a boy and girl meet and get married. These are humble characters known only by their first names, Dinesh and Ganga. They live in an unnamed village and in a makeshift camp in lush woodlands that are thick with tropical heat, artillery smoke and the constant threat of sudden death.
Accepting the impossibility of his own survival, Ganga’s father decides to do what best he can for his daughter and proposes that Dinesh marry her. Given their collective horrible situation, Dinesh is surprised by this offer. But in keeping with the muted feeling and fatalism that mark every character in the book, he accepts, as does Ganga, though neither seems particularly excited about it. The carnage surrounding them is too much for a newlywed couple to overcome, given how much each has already lost: “But if they couldn’t talk about their pasts, what could they say to each other at all, given that there was no future for them to speak of either?” Full story...
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Arudpragasam uses placid, even poetic prose, with results that range from brilliantly unsettling to questionably indulgent. The novel is set approximately seven years ago, in the Tamil-majority north of Sri Lanka. Its action takes place over a few days during the harrowing final months of the island’s vicious civil war. Recalling José Saramago, The Story of a Brief Marriage takes a fraught political-historical moment and creates out of it a fable-like novel: a boy and girl meet and get married. These are humble characters known only by their first names, Dinesh and Ganga. They live in an unnamed village and in a makeshift camp in lush woodlands that are thick with tropical heat, artillery smoke and the constant threat of sudden death.
Accepting the impossibility of his own survival, Ganga’s father decides to do what best he can for his daughter and proposes that Dinesh marry her. Given their collective horrible situation, Dinesh is surprised by this offer. But in keeping with the muted feeling and fatalism that mark every character in the book, he accepts, as does Ganga, though neither seems particularly excited about it. The carnage surrounding them is too much for a newlywed couple to overcome, given how much each has already lost: “But if they couldn’t talk about their pasts, what could they say to each other at all, given that there was no future for them to speak of either?” Full story...
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