Issue #16: Book Review: A Passage North by Anuk Arudpragasam
The first time Sri Lanka came into my awareness was in secondary school on a day I was flipping through the atlas in the school library. I was looking at the map of India when I noticed the small pear-shaped island off the coast of the sub-continent. Due to a lack of internet access at the school, I couldn’t learn much about the country other than that its largest city and commercial capital is Colombo. Years went by, and the country faded into the back of my mind until they were in the news during Easter in April 2019 when three churches and three hotels were targeted by Islamic extremists in a series of coordinated terrorist attacks. I became interested in learning about the country and its history, and no longer hindered by the lack of internet access, I fell into a Wikipedia wormhole.
I learnt that the majority ethnic group in the country are the Sinhalese people, who make up over seventy per cent of the island’s population and are concentrated in the southwest and central parts of the island. The Tamils, the largest of the minorities, make up about eleven per cent and live predominantly in the north and eastern parts of the island. I learnt about the protracted Sri Lankan Civil War that lasted for 26 years (1983 to 2009). The civil war started because the Tamils wanted an independent Tamil state called Tamil Eelam in the island’s north-east, citing constant discrimination and violent persecution against their ethnic group by the Sinhalese-dominated Sri Lankan government as their reason.
With all that in mind, when I saw that a novel by a Sri Lankan author set in post-Civil War Sri Lanka was longlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize, I couldn’t resist buying it.
A Passage North follows Krishan, a Sri Lankan Tamil who works for an NGO in Colombo and lives with his mother and ailing grandmother. Krishan receives a call that his grandmother’s former caretaker, Rani, has died, so he makes the long journey to the north of Sri Lanka - the ground zero of the civil war, to attend the cremation ceremony. That is all that happens in the book; that is the entire plot if one could even call it that. The novel has no clear plot, little character development, and no dialogue. Everything that happens between the time Krishan receives the call and when he gets to the north of the country is Krishan’s introspections on longing, loss, and the legacy and impact of the civil war. Sentences are long, and paragraphs span pages. At times, it felt like I was reading a collection of very long essays, so I found it a tad frustrating to read. Another issue I had with the book was that a lot of space was dedicated to describing the minutest details that added nothing to the story.
Readers may find the lack of plot and no dialogue off-putting, but I think the book is a decent introduction for anyone interested in learning about Sri Lanka and the devastating civil war.
The author, Anuk Arudpragasam has a doctorate in philosophy, and that shines through in the writing. There are some lovely sentences, and the introductory sentence in the book is an example.
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, and in those years before the weight of memory and expectation, and so it is sad and a little upsetting 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 realise 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 realise how much time has passed since we were last aware of ourselves, when we realise how many days, weeks, and months have slipped by without our consent […]
That is one paragraph, by the way, and I only excerpted the first half of it. That is the nature of the sentences in the book. Prolix, but delicately beautiful.