The Story of a Brief Marriage by Anuk Arudpragasam

Which only seems to have enhance those feelings of guilt. Albeit of an experience he never actually had to survive. In a sense, Krishnan, who has, for a period of time, been studying in India, is trapped between these two poles, absent and present, and with something of a guilty-survivor syndrome. As to the Tamils who remain, ‘memory became far harder to maintain when all the clues to that memory that an environment contained were systematically removed’. By a war he’s experienced at one remove – largely through gruesome blogposts and online images, the posts of expatriate Tamils who haunt the internet and spend ‘their free time trying to convince themselves that their pasts on this island had really taken place’, who campaign to have informal Hindu temple sites named on Google Maps in order to maintain their connections to a land in which their culture and heritage is being slowly erased. Haunted by a girlfriend, Anjum, who left him to commit to activism. Just as Krishnan, the central protagonist of A Passage North, seems to be caught up in a drift through life and postconflict Sri Lanka. But once you get into the rhythm, it’s easy, perhaps even pleasant, to let yourself be swept away. As the detail and qualification of a statement accumulates, the experience is a bit like watching Charles and Ray Eames’s film Powers of Ten (1968), a portrait of the universe that zooms out from planet Earth and then back in to a quark.

Initially, at least, you find yourself waiting anxiously for a full stop and the chance to come up for air.

This, his second novel, explores characters who struggle to survive in the wake or on the edges of that trauma.Īrudpragasam’s writing style – long, multiclause sentences – is overwhelming at first.

(Arunpragasam is Tamil.) It ended in victory for the Sri Lankan army and the genocidal wipeout of their Tamil opponents and numerous Tamil civilians besides. Anuk Arudpragasam’s award-winning debut novel, The Story of a Brief Marriage (2016), explored characters who were in the thick of conflict, being bombed by the Sri Lankan army while eking out an existence of sorts in a Tamil refugee camp during the latter stages of the Sri Lankan Civil War (1983–2009), a conflict staged between a Buddhist Sinhalese majority in the south and a Hindu Tamil minority in the north.

The Story of a Brief Marriage by Anuk Arudpragasam