Getting Under Sail

by Brannavan Gnanalingam

Morocco to Ghana. Overland. Three New Zealanders. Armed with a guide book and stereotypes. They go being warned of danger, poverty and war by people who had never been there. They end up embroiled in a civil war - but it wasn't really anything to do with Africa.

Writer Brannavan Gnanalingam has won awards and been published in all sorts of places: the Listener, the Dominion Post, the Lumiere Reader, and Salient amongst others. However, he has never been published by Lawrence and Gibson. All that is changing with his debut novel, Getting Under Sail. a tale of three friends and their road-trip through West Africa. Part-travelogue, part-picaresque, and part-confessional, the novel tells the story of three friends travelling through West Africa.

240 pages, Paperback

Published March 24, 2011

About the author

Brannavan Gnanalingam was born in Sri Lanka and moved to New Zealand via Zimbabwe at the age of three.
He is a music and film reviewer for the Lumière Reader, Under the Radar, and the Dominion Post, and also works as a lawyer in Wellington, New Zealand.
He is the author of five novels, all published by Wellington publishing collective Lawrence & Gibson which specialises in experimental non-fiction and heavyweight literature.

Reviews

[Vaughan Willis]

Three twenty-something almost-friends from New Zealand decide to go on a road trip through Francophone West Africa (Morocco to Ghana). Or at least two of them do, deciding to invite the third only because they feel they have to. But to their surprise he accepts. The three reach Cairo and the bitching begins. Oh and what bitching and bickering. One friend, called “Mitya” for the novel (we are told he is really James or something like that) is a fundamental Christian and a lawyer, another, “Ivan” for the novel is a performative liberal but just as much a bore as Mitya, and the third, who narrates the novel, is simply “I” and he is of Sri Lankan heritage. So two whities and one who is not. The three can’t help feeling all of the dislocation, judgementalism, reflexive suspicion, alienation and discomfort of being privileged by birth among those who are anything but by theirs. They can’t help their racism too, even the member of Sri Lankan parentage. He, who is always treated just a bit differently by the locals, experiences it in return (and also from his traveling companions and other tourists). But it is he who relates best to the locals as people. Boy, this is a realistic portrayal of the experience of first-worlders travelling in the third world. We are also treated to the vacuities of the conversations and interactions among the tourists themselves, especially when they spend a few days together at a beach resort in Ghana. I didn’t want this oh-so-realistic book to end. But having read "Sprigs" first, it is clearly something of a training exercise, writing wise, for that.

[Al Siew]

It's the kind of travel writing I imagined I would write if I could write. Punchy, funny, well-paced with some thought provoking reflections from the narrator. I really, really enjoyed this.