The Story of a Brief Marriage

by Anuk Arudpragasam

Dinesh is a young man trapped on the frontlines between the Sri Lankan army and the Tamil Tigers. Desensitized to the horror all around him, life has been pared back to the eat, sleep, survive. All this changes when he is approached one morning by an older man who asks him to marry his daughter Ganga, hoping that victorious soldiers will be less likely to harm a married woman. For a few brief hours, Dinesh and Ganga tentatively explore their new and unexpected connection, trying to understand themselves and each other, until the war once more closes over them. Told in meditative, nuanced and powerful prose, this shattering novel marks the arrival of an extraordinary new literary voice.

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, War, Asia, Literary Fiction, Novels, Literature

208 pages, Paperback

First published September 6, 2016

About the author

Anuk Arudpragasam is a Sri Lankan Tamil novelist. 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. His second novel, A Passage North, came out in July 2021 and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

Reviews

[Jessica Woodbury · Rating 4 out of 5]

It took me a month to read this book. Writing a review for it makes you want to pull out your Thesaurus and find all the synonyms for "bleak." But the word that came to me as I read the first chapter was "visceral." And that is the word I'm going to stick with, though there are many other words you could use to describe it.

You do not read a book set in a war-torn country refugee camp and expect happiness and light. It will not be that kind of book. And yet there is something about this story that is not lovely exactly, but that is utterly human. It is, in a strange way, if not a celebration of life then a heightened awareness and observation of what life means and what it feels like.

Arudpragasam tells you with his title what will happen and how the story will end. You are not waiting for anyone to be saved, it is clear that it is not that kind of story. It is just being with Dinesh, being with him as he takes in the world, as he tries not to feel and sometimes can't help but feel, that is utterly transporting.

This is a book that writes about bodies with the same utter frankness one thinks of one's own when no one else is paying attention. It is a book where an entire chapter is just Dinesh walking to the well and washing himself. And yet that chapter had me completely transfixed. I do not know how Arudpragasam is able to do that but he does.

It took me a month to read this book because it is a book set in an arbitrary and hurtful universe. It is hard to read more than a little at a time because it is so vivid and affecting. I picked it up because it was blurbed by Garth Greenwell, and while it is very different than his WHAT BELONGS TO YOU, there are elements they have in common. The immersive-ness, the delicate and beautiful language. You cannot read this book without being changed by it in some small way.

[Alena · Rating 4 out of 5]

This probably wasn't the best choice for a beach read as the novel takes place over 24 hours in a refugee camp during Sri Lanka's Civil War. It's a testament to the writing that despite the sand and splashing, and despite the fact that I couldn't locate Sri Lanka on a map, I was completely drawn into this book.

Be warned - if you don't want four pages devoted to the description of nail trimming and bathing, this is not the book for you. The author's attention to detail, including bowel movements, is what makes this book unique. He is actively describing the state of living and he's doing it in the midst of chaos and death and fear and despair (really, not a beach read).

It's hard, and it's gross and it's incredibly sad, but it's also beautiful and extremely well written.

[Ilse · Rating 4 out of 5]

Being close to someone meant more than being next to them after all, it meant more than simply having spent a lot of time with them. Being close to someone meant the entire rhythm of that person's life was synchronized with yours, it meant that each body had to learn how to respond to the other instinctually, to its gestures and mannerisms, to the subtle changes in the cadence of its speech and gait, so that all the movements of one person had gradually come to be in subconscious harmony with those of the other.

(****1/2)

[Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer · Rating 4 out of 5]

From the hemisphere of his mind devoted to the past and the hemisphere devoted to the future great swathes had been shaved off, and enclosing the sensitive little core that belonged to the present there remained only the thin layer of the recent past and near future, leaving him without that recourse to the distant past or future by which in times of difficulty ordinary people were able to ignore or endure or at least justify the present moment.

The debut novel of the 2021 Booker-shortlisted author of “A Passage North”.

“A Passage North” is a rather oblique treatment of the Sri Lankan Civil War itself but a more direct treatment of the war’s legacy both for those involved and for those, like the author and his narrator, whose involvement was after the event. This book by contrast is a fully immersive exploration of the last days of the war itself – with no consideration of legacy (in fact a strong sense of characters who realise they realistically do not have a future to face).

“A Passage North” is a novel of the interior and mind, this book by contrast while equally philosophical is very much a novel of the body and of physicality (in fact one of the very things it examines is how the body and its functions endure and persist even when normal thought patterns are rendered inoperable and irrelevant).

“A Passage North” opens with a philosophical discourse on our relationship with The Present – this book is a painstaking examination of the present; one I can only describe as Okotian in its painstaking examination of the physicality of the present moment (albeit whereas Simon Okotie and his brilliant Absalon trilogy uses the technique in a mildly absurd setting, this is book is haunting, visceral and bleak)

“A Passage North” is Wikipedian in its detail on the history of the Sri Lankan Civil war; this book deliberately eschews history and context – we read only of “the movement” and “the army” with no geographical or background detail, the author describing how his intention was to try to capture the experience of those involved in the conflict has said “I didn’t want to have history there because I didn’t want to give the reader or myself a chance to escape from the immediacy of that situation.”

Although it does not say this book is set in March 2009 - two months before the defeat of the Tamil Tigers and in the ever decreasing area of control as a group of homeless civilians are trapped in a small area on the Northeast coast subject to conscription by the Tigers and murderous shelling by the Government forces and with a bleak outlook for their truncated futures.

The book has two young characters (in their late teens I think) who both help in and around a field hospital set up in a school. The main character whose mind and body we observe and mainly inhabit is Dinesh – on his own after the death of his mother from shrapnel wounds.

The book opens shockingly with Dinesh carrying the mangled body of a small child to the hospital.

The other character is Ganga – after the death of her mother and brother her father feels driven to secure some form of security for her by arranging a marriage and approaches Dinesh to marry her. The story then follows them over the next day or two – both highly traumatized and (in the author’s words) “estranged from their own minds as a result” – albeit the marriage forces Dinesh for a short period to try to make some sense of everything that has occurred to him.

As he does that Dinesh is conscious more than ever of his body and its functions – lengthy sections of the book deal with: Dinesh defecating (and examining the results); him eating a meal; him cutting his hair and nails and washing his body (and examining everything he removes from his body); him examining a mutilated bird; him trying but failing to have sex with his new wife; him examining her asleep body and later falling asleep himself; him actively monitoring his own inhalation and exhalation in the face of trauma and trying to link these to the idea of respectively encompassing the wider world and retreating from it.

A powerful ending to this impressive book leads Dinesh to mentally retreat from his body and the narrator to retreat from trying to understand him.

[Tanuj Solanki · Rating 5 out of 5]

the review first appeared in The Hindu Business Line's Saturday supplement BLink

The Persistence of the Body

The final leg of the Sri Lankan civil war provides the setting for Anuk Arudpragasam’s debut novel, The Story of a Brief Marriage. The protagonist, a Tamil youth named Dinesh, is trapped, like thousands of other Tamil evacuees, between the battle-lines and the sea. A stoic narrator accesses Dinesh’s inner life. In the terminal world presented to us, it is understandably difficult to find the whys and hows. Not surprising, therefore, that more than a dozen times in the novel our view into Dinesh’s thought processes is marked by a recurring sentence template: why or how so and so happened, it was difficult to say. Towards the end of the novel, after severe shelling from the Lankan army has annihilated the titular marriage between Dinesh and a young girl named Ganga, this difficulty becomes too much, so much that the narrator—and we suspect Arudpragasam himself—reneges its access into Dinesh’s inner life. The narrator’s single sentence confession is supremely affecting, acquiring an incredible power as a limit is approached—the limit where literature can do nothing but shake its head in the face of the intensity of human suffering:

[…] one has no choice but to watch blindly from the outside […] not so much because one lives in different circumstances, in a situation of privilege […] nor because one is attempting […] in another language entirely […] but because, when such things happen to a person, [their] life […] becomes lost inside their body and ceases to find expression.

The novel begins, too, in the aftermath of a shelling. Dinesh brings an unconscious child, shattered arm needing amputation, to the camp clinic. Later he wonders how the child will balance his body given that he has already lost a leg on the same side. In the camp, severed limbs abound; there is general madness; a woman is gulping down sand. Dinesh’s mind, perhaps like some others’, has found ways of shutting out the hell. Each time, he achieves a perverse calm after the first shell lands, the deafening noise having muted everything thereafter.

The mind, Arudpragasam seems to suggest, builds its own tiny reconciliations. To cope, the mind may also choose momentary blankness, allowing the body a certain amount of discretion. “Dinesh noticed that the ground was no longer passing beneath him.” Such sentences occur more than once.

But Arudpragasam is aware that such dissociation with the body is untenable. After all, one can lose one’s mind, but one can’t lose one’s body. For the body there are no lapses possible, no reconciliations on offer, nothing but physical reality waiting. The body can’t lie to itself. This object that belongs to us, that is very nearly the totality of us, never stops inhaling exhaling, never ceases its need for ingestion excretion, never ceases to want hygienic upkeep. Even in times of great distress, when death is imminent, the body’s involuntary functions are never inhibited.

It is Arudpragasam’s focus in looking at the body and bodily functions, and his patience at extracting meanings from these, that make this novel a standout one. In the first chapter, Dinesh takes a long, peaceful shit on the beach; he also smells his own ‘production’; in the third, he eats hungrily just after his marriage (the marriage is not much more than a symbolic way of responsibility-fulfillment for Ganga’s father, Somasundaram, who goes missing immediately after the tiny ceremony); in the fifth, he cuts his hair and nails, washes his clothes, and bathes (he smells his bodily surplus, again); in the sixth, he comes close to having sex with Ganga; in the seventh, he finds sleep after a long time; and in the eighth and final chapter, when all is lost and the irreversible happens, he breathes. Barring the end, it is difficult not to see Dinesh’s situation as steadily progressive, and perhaps that was Arudpragasam’s intention. The feeling of disembodiment, an estrangement between a mind reconciled with death and a body that wants nothing more than the performance of its functions, is one that Dinesh is shown to suffer from at the beginning. This feeling dissolves itself as the novel progresses. The mind begins to hope, and Dinesh grants the possibility, even if minuscule, of him and Ganga surviving the war and getting to be a married couple in ‘ordinary life’. The body begins to relax, too (he sleeps). But then the outer world returns with its war and senselessness, leaving him shell-shocked again.

Arudpragasam seems to suggest that in extreme circumstances, healing, if it is possible at all, begins with the body. But the revelation here is that even in extremis a body may communicate with that surplus that makes humans human, that concentration of subjectivity called the moral self. It is a great tactic by him, mostly due to the perverse discomfort it causes to the reader, to have Dinesh persist with common decencies even in living hell.

With this superlative debut, Arudpragasam achieves heights that many literary fiction writers fail to approach in their entire lives. It joins a hallowed literary tradition, with a long line that runs from the works of Dostoyevsky to Camus to Coetzee, with many detours such as Shalamov and Kertesz. For young South Asian writers, Arudpragasam has done the service of setting the bar very high. This reader will be shocked if the awards don’t follow.

***

[Katia N · Rating 5 out of 5]

This short novel is set within less than 24 hours time frame during the last months of Sri Lanka’s civil war in 2009. The events take place in a displaced people camp on the coast of the ocean. These people physically do not have anywhere to go anymore - they face water. They are Tamils pushed out of their villages by the Government forces fighting Tamil Tigers. They are under constant shelling being methodically annihilated. But there is no politics in the novel. It could happen anywhere where people are made to run from war. The novel starts with extremely graphic scene. It ends with the graphic scene as well. There is a lot of violence throughout. But it is not about violence. It is a study of silence, study of the moment. It tries to investigate what a person, totally traumatised, depraved of any dignity or hope would do or feel. And it is utterly beautiful and successful in it.

Dinesh, a very young man, alone in the camp, is bestowed a girl by her father to be his wife. The father does it with a faint hope to protect her as he no longer can himself. And those two young people are awkwardly trying to become closer.

Initially Dinesh is not sure he wants to get married as he is not sure how it is the best to spend his days in the presence of death:

“Didn’t dying at the end meaning separation from other humans, after all, from the sea of human gaits, gestures, noises, and gazes in which so many years one had floated, didn’t it mean the abandoning the possibility of connecting with other human that being among others always afforded? Unless on the other hand, dying mean being separated from oneself above all, being separated from all the intimate personal details that had come to constitute one’s life. If that was the case should be spend his remaining time committing to memory the shape of his hand and feet, the texture of his hair, fingernails and teeth, appreciating for the last time the sound of his breathing, the sensation of his chest expanding and contracting.”

But then he goes for this marriage. This triggers the emotions, the existence of which he has totally forgotten. The author shows how “ the small window of consciousness” suddenly opens for a short period of time in the boy’s traumatised mind. But there is no soapy sentimentality at all in this, just psychological insight. For example, Dinesh thinks about togetherness as a momentary mood which is very easy to scare away, as opposed of loneliness, which is there to stay:

“Having put them at last at the presence of such mood such conversation always … had to end… not even a movement could be made, for just as butterfly perched on the edge of a blade of grass, so lightly that the blade quivers slightly but does not bend, can be approached only up to a certain distance before it folds its wings nervously and twitches, after which the slightest noise….will prompt it silently flit away, so they were aware that the mood… could slip away, leaving them stranded once more in their own separate worlds, leaving each one of them once more alone.”

Alongside, the novel describes a lot of physiologic details which I would find normally off-putting. But within the context, and with the skill he does it, they seem totally relevant and necessary.

Many novelist are trying to write the book set firmly in the “Present”, in the fleeting moment. Not many succeed, but this one does. I cannot imagine how hard it is to write something like that. One has to always balance on the edge not to succumb totally to the state the main character is in. But equally to keep this compassion… The novel read like a series of beautiful and terrifying stills. But notwithstanding the subject matter, violence, realism and brutality, there is sense of if not hope then a glimmer of light in in the book:

“He would gaze disbelievingly at the razor-edged vividness that everything around him acquired, as though he’d been lifted somehow from his environment, sifted out of the small section of the world in which he’d been absorbed as though he’d been made aware for a brief moment, of a world vaster than and more independent of him, a world that he had the chance, in some way, to encompass in its entirety.”

If Proust would write about the displacement and violence, he might write something similar. The one of the most powerful books i’ve read recently.

[Maxwell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Told over the course of 24 hours, The Story of a Brief Marriage examines how life continues amidst the chaos of war and separation. Dinesh lives in a refugee camp during the Sri Lankan civil war. He's completely alone, no family remaining. Every day he faces the violence and destruction the war brings upon the citizens of his country, from the very first sentence of the novel:

"Most children have two whole legs and two whole arms but this little six-year-old that Dinesh was carrying had already lost one leg, the right one from the lower thigh down, and was now about to lose his right arm."

This arresting image and many others continue throughout the text. There's a strong focus on the body, on the feeding, cleaning and maintenance that our human existence requires. Dinesh ruminates on these things and others, including family, marriage, and the innate human need for connection.

Arudpragasam is an excellent writer. On a sentence level, the text flows from topic to topic, place to place, leading the reader along the journey with Dinesh. It's quite a condensed novel and a short timeframe in which the story takes place, and Arudpragasam manages to pack so much in so few words. At times it does feel a bit weighed down in its meditativeness; he tends to give too much time to things as if that will imbue them with meaning, instead of allowing them to hold their own meaning simply by existing.

Dinesh's story is just one of many. You get the sense that there is so much more going on outside of this singular narrative, but the text makes you feel deeply for the fate of this one individual. What came before and what is to come seems to matter much less than what is happening right now. Arudpragasam captures the need for an anchor to the present; something that helps you get through each day, whether that be a parent or sibling, a spouse or just a moment of silence rooting you to the earth.

[Book Riot Community]

It took me about a month to read this book. The writing is so simple and precise, yet the experience is so vivid and visceral that it feels like magic. I do a lot of reading before bed and this book would transport me and leave me exhausted, but not ready to sleep. Set in a Sri Lankan refugee camp, it follows Dinesh, who has lost everything, through a single day. The title already tells you the main plot: Dinesh marries Ganga, in an act of either hope or desperation. They may never live a normal life together, the odds of them both surviving the civil war are low, and yet this joining of two people who barely know each other adds something to the constant loss and destruction of their lives. I know it sounds bleak, and it is. But reading it you know you are reading something masterful. Arudpragasam describes the physical experience of being alive in a way that makes your heart beat faster.

–Jessica Woodbury



from The Best Books We Read In August 2016: http://bookriot.com/2016/08/31/riot-r...

[Roger Brunyate · Rating 4 out of 5]

Living

Perhaps people simply had no choice. Perhaps they had to keep moving, to get up in the morning, and to go on until evening. Breathing was not a choice or habit after all, it was not something you could start or stop at will. The atmosphere entered the body of its own accord, and in the same way it took its leave, from the first breath to the last, so perhaps in a way living was not a choice. The air would go on advancing, and till it stopped it would go on receding. When you were hungry you would have to eat, and when you were thirsty you would have to drink. When your bladder was full you would have to piss, and when your bowels were full you would have to shit. The legs had to move, so people had to go places, and so there were places they went. The arms had to work too, and so people had to carry things, and so there were things they gripped and held. All the while the atmosphere kept advancing and receding, the chest kept rising and falling, and maybe that was all, maybe that was life.

This quotation sums up the philosophy of Anuk Arudpragasam's mesmerizing novella as well as anything could, but just about any page in the book would give the same message: that life is simply something we are a part of, and we accept it as eventually we accept death. It is a long quotation—in fact the full paragraph is twice this length—because Arudpragasam takes his time to examine everything, whether cataclysmic or mundane. He spends an entire chapter describing his protagonist washing himself, four pages on him moving his bowels, countless paragraphs on the simple act of breathing in and out, as though no one function is more important than any other. I suspect that this is a Hindu philosophy, reduced to the very simplest terms.


Shelled field hospital in Sri Lanka

Although not specifically stated, the setting is clearly Sri Lanka in the last years of the Civil War, which ended in 2009. Government forces have pushed the Tamil majority towards the sea at the northwest corner of the island. The civilian population flees to ever more crowded camps, racked by disease and famine, and prey not only to Government shelling but to the cadres of their own side seeking ever younger recruits. To avoid the exploitation of their teenage daughters, many parents try to get them married, in the hope that this may help them avoid conscription, or worse. This is the spine of Arudpragasam's plot: a devoted father, having already lost his wife and son, persuades a young hospital volunteer named Dinesh to marry his remaining child, Ganga. The novella, which covers a span of 24 hours, is the story of their brief marriage.


Tamil girl soldiers

I include these photos from the Sri Lankan Civil War, not as a parallel to the book, but as the real-life background against which Arudpragasam does something quite different. Indeed, the contrast between subject and style is his entire point, even though to readers accustomed to swifter action the result may seem boring. Everything is leisurely and precisely detailed, whether tender or horrific; it is certainly not that he sugar-coats anything. On the very first page, for example, Dinesh is introduced carrying a six-year-old who has already lost a leg, and is about to lose the opposite arm:

Shrapnel had dissolved his hand and forearm into a soft, formless mass, spilling to the ground from some parts, congealing in others, and charred everywhere else. Three of the fingers had been fully detached, where they were now it was impossible to tell, and the two remaining still, the index finger and thumb, were dangling from the hand by very slender threads. They swayed uncertainly in the air, tapping each other quietly, till arriving at last in the operating area Dinesh knelt to the ground, and laid the boy out carefully on an empty tarpaulin.

But despite all the fear and carnage, what Arudpragasam paints is a portrait of Life, not triumphing over death as in the Western heroic tradition, but coexisting with it in the Eastern one. And even though Dinesh hardly knows Ganga, he is so respectful, so aware of his responsibilities, that their brief marriage becomes a true love story—though unlike any other you have ever read.

[Rae Beeler · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is overwhelming, in every way possible. From the first sentence - "Most children have two whole legs and two whole arms but this little six-year-old that Dinesh was carrying had already lost one leg, the right one from the lower thigh down, and was now about to lose his right arm" - to the last, it is simply captivating and heartbreaking and it gave me all the feels.

Given the title, you know going in to it how the story will end, or rather that this isn't going to be a tale of happiness and you're not waiting around for anyone to be saved. And honestly, I've never seen or read horror rendered within a novel written with such poetry and visceral detailing. The story itself takes place in a war-torn Sri Lanka near the end of the civil war, and our characters are living in a refugee camp during the span of about 24 hours. And really, it's very much a contemplation of what it is to be human, and our narrator Dinesh takes you into his world as life unfolds regardless of war. Reading about the shellings and bombings in the novel feels like I could be reading about what's happening in Yemen or Syria or Somalia, which is just absolutely devastating.

It's an incredible piece of fiction, and I highly recommend.

[Ahtims · Rating 5 out of 5]

Why this Book?
Recommended by Girish and urged on by Sharadha.
I started the Book, felt disgusted and nauseous in initial two pages, was about to give it up... when Sharadha said she is at 25% and it is good.
Continued reading and was drawn into civil war ravaged life of Dinesh, a representative of the innocent citizens who are the ones whose lives get irrevocably damaged or changed by war.
The author dissects Dinesh's single day , minute by minute and takes us into the intricacies of his surroundings as well as his mental makeup.
I pitied and sympathised with Dinesh... saw him collecting relics, eating rice grain by grain with great enjoyment, learning to accept things and people in his life , get married, reconcile to his new life, try to improve himself as a person... And finally .... suffer and tolerate and improvise and rationalise.
Ganga is the girl he is married to..
Would have loved to know her thought processes too..but she was presented here only via Dinesh's view point.
A poignant story..
A story that opens our eyes to the futility of war , without attempting to rationalise or abhor it.

[Atri · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the past too he had felt this strange desire for stillness, not often, but more than once or twice. He would be sitting with one or two of his friends on the outskirts of the village at late evening, cross-legged on the earth, the darkening blue sky spread out before them in the distance. What they spoke about at such times he could no longer say, but there were moments, Dinesh could remember, when their conversation would begin to slow down, when everything they said would seem to circle around some strangely intangible object, around a place or thing they could sense in the vicinity even if it couldn't be seen. All their questions, answers, pauses, and responses, all their additions, hesitations, and elaborations, each and every utterance made at such times felt like a delicate attempt to move closer to this object, so that tentatively, intuitively, stopping and starting, their conversation would seem to spiral around this sensed but unseen place or thing, drawing closer and closer to it, moving more carefully and more nervously as smaller and smaller circles were drawn round it, till finally, with much apprehension, each of them fully absorbed in what was going on, something was said that could not possibly get nearer to what they sought. When such a point was reached they were able to sense it almost instinctively, even if they couldn't see or touch what they had found, as though what they had been searching for all along was not so much a place or a thing as a mood, a mood which has been obscurely understood from the very beginning as a means by which they could come together, by which they might move out of their own separate worlds, onto a plane in which they could recognize and understand each other fully for a brief time. Having put them at last in the presence of this mood such conversations always, if they succeeded, had to end, had to come to a point where nothing more could be said, where not even a movement could be made, for just as a butterfly perched on the edge of a blade of grass, so lightly that the blade quivers but does not bend, can be approached only up to a certain distance before it folds back its weightless wings nervously and twitches, after which the very slightest noise, a heavy breath or the cracking of a joint, will prompt it to silently flit away, so also they were aware that the mood that had been so patiently and yearningly and painstakingly sought could be caused, by the most innocuous further word or motion, to slip away, leaving them stranded once more in their own separate worlds, leaving each one of them once more alone.

[Subashini · Rating 5 out of 5]

Recently I saw a quote by Virginia Woolf, from A Room of One's Own, about novels with integrity, and I realised it could also work as an accurate description of this book. This book affords its characters, especially the main character Dinesh through whom we see this war-ravaged slice of world, dignity. I think there is an ethics to this careful, precise, philosophical writing. That anyone who writes like this must consistently value the moral in process of creation and the responsibility that comes with it. I realise this is a slippery slope, to attribute some quality to the author of these words as though the author and the words are one. I remind myself that all art is artifice and language, especially when artfully constructed, can deceive us. But I also want to believe in the conscience at work behind truthful writing. Otherwise, what is the point of writing and reading?

A longer piece that I wrote for Pop Matters is available here.

[Sangeetha Ramachandran · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Happiness and sadness are for people who can control what happens to them"

After reading this one, I found it really hard to channelize my thoughts and feelings about it. These are pages filled with wonderings of a man's mind under horrors of war. Dinesh, one of the evacuees in Sri Lankan Civil war who had lost his family and belongings is being approached by a man with a marriage proposal. In a situation where no one can control events of the day leave alone thinking about future, Dinesh and Ganga are brought together by this arranged marriage. The story continues to tell us how love and hope find place in us regardless of how vulnerable the situation is.

A very poignant novel with matter of fact writing that would make a reader understand the feelings of an ordinary person under war. The author had explained well their state of mind when they were brought together by arranged marriage and how they were struggling to fill the awkward silence between them. Clearly there were things to talk about like scars on their body, unexpected fatal shellings around but that wasn't going to do any better. They obviously didn't want to talk about their past and could not talk about their future. When they started to find comfort in another's presence, Dinesh could finally overcome his inabilities to cry his heart out and get to sleep in solace. Even though, throughout the story the character Ganga had been little muted, I constantly wondered what her perspectives would be on the things happening around her, since she was also there bearing every loss as Dinesh.

I can't help admiring the language even while it was filling me with such sadness. Very deeply moving, this book is a simple work emphasizing the fact that love will give you solace under all conditions possible and that is the only hope for living in this dangerous world.

[david · Rating 3 out of 5]

A boy and a girl. In the middle of a civil war. Bombs are dropping incessantly. They are detainees in an open cage with thousands of others fleeing the violence between Sri Lanka and its’ Tamil Tigers.

Dinesh and Ganga. Both lost their entire families and escaped one of these lousy internment camps popping up all around the world. In the Middle East, in the Far East, and in parts of Europe. In California, Texas...

The two children are sanctioned by the fiat of the Sri Lankan government as with all the other Tamils, although many seem non-violent, in a liminal caged state between the forest and the sea. Always being pushed closer to the water.

The parents of both agreed for them to be married the day they (the parents) were killed at the beginning of the story.

These two young adults married now for a day, know nothing of the world or each other.
And they must learn to be together, know each other, while bombs drop, and living is hard.

It may be considered a great or not-so-exceptional story.

I'm flummoxed by this one.

It could surely be rated by any number of stars.

[Noah · Rating 1 out of 5]

The long paragraphs and chapters made it hard to get through (especially as not much HAPPENS in the course of the book). A chapter devoted to defecation and another to a shower did not provide me with the sorts of human insights into the conflict in Sri Lanka as I wanted. The writing felt cold and provided no real shading to the character of Dinesh (or his even less-well-drawn wife). Glad to finally be done with it.

[Jonathan Pool · Rating 3 out of 5]

It is unusual that the title of the book is also a spoiler, but that the case here. Given the set up in which two strangers hastily marry, while the shells fly around them, the reader’s anticipation of what is likely to happen gives the story and the writing a gravitas that makes this an immersive read. The roar of war is a constant backdrop to a day in the life of Dinesh(kanthan), and his world has narrowed to revolve around a clearing in the jungle, the shelter of an upturned boat, and the horror of a field hospital. There’s no safety assured here (in the Sri Lankan Civil War); no Red Cross protection, no sense of rules of engagement in a war context. There are body parts, shit and blood. But who says it is right to romanticise war?.
There’s a wistfulness, a sadness and a deep reflection in Arudpragasam’s writing. His style is unmistakable in his Booker shortlisted A Passage North . Both his novels are marked by deep introspection, and its no surprise that he cites Proust and Musil as key influences. The author microscopically examines things which come to the attention of the protagonists. Dinesh cuts his nails and his hair; his wife Ganga, (Gangeshwari Somasundaram) cooks some rice. The two sequences run not to a single sentence, or paragraph, but are examined from a multitude of perspectives
I wonder how Anuk Arudpragasam writes- I would assume you need to get these reflections committed to paper in a single outpouring?
When a person cries it is mostly, and normally a response that is involuntary and/or uncontrolled. Not in Arudpragasam’s world:
“It had been a long time since he’d last cried. It would feel good probably and might even allow him to remember the past he’s been striving to understand, but all things considered it was best for him to wait till later “ (118)

This is a book that continues at a single pace. The book ends and you would hardly know it. It’s a book who’s writing has a beauty when examined objectively, but its one that rarely stirs the reader. Perhaps that is the best way to present an account of war in which everything becomes numb.

[Beverly · Rating 4 out of 5]

This sparse yet meticulously elegant debut novel allows the reader walk in Dinesh’s shoes, a Tamil evacuee of the Sri Lankan Civil War for twenty-four hours where life span is measured in minutes.
Three words came to mind when I finished the last page – unflinching, scathing, heart weary.
Unflinching as the author did not allow me from the first page to look away from the intricate steps to perform basic human functions. As I was snuggled comfortably in my bed with my connecting bathroom, I read what goes through Dinesh’s mind as he goes about wanting to have a bowel movement – he needs to find a perfect spot that will not make him a target for violence, needs to prepare the spot and then hope that his body remembers how to defecate as he has not eaten but a few grains of rice in a couple of days.
Scathing in that bombing are a constant several times a day – have dehumanized humanity into a cycle cowing and silence as the author brilliantly uses Dinesh as an “Everyman” to touch the reader’s heart and soul.
Heart weary in that this storyline is being replayed in too many times and places.
I was captured by Arudpragasm’s quiet meditative tone and poetic language that contrasts with the horrific and despair to deliver a powerfully poignant testament to the human spirit.
The Story of a Brief Marriage is an impressive debut and I look forward to reading future works by the author.

[Irene · Rating 5 out of 5]

Set in a make shift refugee camp in Sri Lanka populated by those displaced by more than two decades of fighting, this story unfolds over a single day. The narrator is a young man who has lost everything except his basic humanity. When another refugee asks him to marry his daughter in order to give both young people a bit more security, something in him begins to briefly re-awaken. This is a beautifully and sensitively written account of one person’s struggle to be truly human in a world that wants to destroy it. This is a powerful meditation on what it means to be human. 4.5 stars rounded up

[Jaclyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is so slow and quiet that if you don't pay attention you just might miss its power. When it's tender it's beautiful and when it's brutal it breaks you. Set over the course of a few days during the Sri Lankan civil war the book explores our need for connection during times of chaos and despair.

[Ellen · Rating 2 out of 5]

"Bleak" would be the top word for this one. The novel takes place over about a day in a refugee camp in Sri Lanka. The main character, Dinesh, sleeps just outside the camp in the forest, and the novel opens with him carrying a boy injured by shrapnel during a bombing. The author uses about ten words where one would do, and this works to great effect in this opening chapter - you circle around and around this boy's injuries and the facts of life in what is literally a last-stop refugee camp, the last place these people can go before they're in the sea. Later, this style makes the novel a struggle to read; everything is excruciatingly detailed, from taking a bath to walking through the woods to taking a shit. Under 200 pages, this book felt endless at times and I struggled to bring myself back to it. So, I'm not quite sure how to rate it; I wonder if that painful reading experience wasn't the intention, a way to capture the experience of living in the camp and force you to go through it yourself. The tedium of the narration is such that evening a bombing doesn't elicit much feeling, which may be exactly what Arudpragasam intended for his readers.

[Joy D · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had previously read this author’s brilliant book A Passage North, so I decided to check out his debut. It is a tragedy based on the Sri Lankan Civil War. With death all around him, Dinesh decides to marry Ganga (at her father’s suggestion). They try to find a brief respite amongst the violence, carnage, and chaos. It starts and ends with war, but in between we find ourselves in the mind of an introspective young man.

I ended up with mixed feelings – I appreciated the reflections about life and death, and this is definitely an anti-war book, but there is just so much death, destruction, and trauma that I felt it needed something more than reflections and violence. I think the author tries to go there, but it never felt like any connection was established between the two main characters. It is very short and never felt like a finished work to me. I enjoyed the writing style at the prose level, and plan to read more of the author’s work in the future.

[jo · Rating 5 out of 5]

this is a tremendously beautiful book. it's set in 2009, during a civil massacre the author says got little acknowledgment internationally and maybe also nationally, and it's fucking brutal. it takes place in a refugee camp in northeast sri lanka, where tamil evacuees are trying to escape the attack of the government but are backed up against the sea, with nowhere to go. the tamil tigers, the rebel organization that is fighting the government, are almost as feared as the government, because they recruit people on sight, and can of course be brutal themselves. stuck in this small refugee camp, people are shelled like fish in a barrel every single night, with bombings starting at a specific time with eerie regularity, and ending at an equally specific time. every night someone dies, and many people lose limbs. every night you know you or someone you love may or will not survive. there is a little camp hospital with no supplies at all, and one doctor, and the doctor's job is just really to cut limbs to prevent death. he does so with a kitchen knife, cuz he has nothing to be a doctor with.

so the book, which takes place over 24 hours, is foreshadowed by death, and the protagonist, ganesh, a young man whom we first encounter transporting a body that was injured the night before, and walking through a ground strewn with the dead and with severed limbs (no one bothers burying bodies any more), lives in full awareness that any day can be his final day, and probably will. the camp is full of families in mourning, all of them having lost a number of their members, and the main activities are to help in the cleanup, prepare meals (those who have food saved), eat, and sit around waiting for the nightly shelling. it's grim and brutal and hopeless, but what gives it so much beauty is ganesh's lovely personality. ganesh spends quite some time in his head, working things out, thinking about this and that, and especially, in a luxuriant and sensual way that gives the book its meat, sensing things, with all his senses, and reflecting on his sensations.

near the beginning he feels a great desire to have himself a good shit, the way we often do but rarely acknowledge, in spite of the fact that he hasn't eaten in days and has nothing really to expel. he just feels like enjoying this bodily gesture, so often imbued with pleasure we like to magnify by bringing reading material to the bathroom, or, nowadays, cellphones and tablets. so, after aiding, mostly by witnessing, a gruesome surgery on a child, he relishes the idea of his upcoming shit, and plans carefully where to have it, so that it may be private, and take as long as he wants it to take, and be as comforting as he wants it to be. and after this shit he takes a tremendous chance of being found by the tamil tigers, who would conscript him on the spot, or maybe being killed by the government, and has himself a nice clean-up in the sea (later, when he recounts this to ganga, she's nothing short of astonished, and considers him mad).

i won't say anything more about the plot (what i already said happens right at the beginning). the amazing gorgeousness of this book lies in the intense pleasure ganesh gathers from seeing, hearing, and feeling. it's as if, in this camp of desperation and certain death, his sense of touch, especially, were magnified, and every single contact between his skin and anything else caused him untold vibrations of pleasure and vitality. so the book dwells a lot on ganesh's touching, and observing, and feeling. it also dwells on his memories, and his detachment from what he has lost, and what he is doubtlessly about to lose -- as if everything that was lost had frozen in glass, opaquely, numbly, and only the sensations of the body, the tiny movements of the body in connection with the heart and the soul, mattered.

so, in the midst of this bleakness, you simply sway with ganesh's simple, undemanding delight at all things tactile, or odorous, or just interesting to see.

in the course of the novel something happens to ganesh, though. he develops a profound attachment to his new wife, and this attachment seems to emanate from his intensity, to be a product of his having let go of the past and his focusing on the small sensual experiences of the present. so unencumbered, ganesh can love passionately his new wife of few hours, the very presence of her, of her skin, the fact of her body, the infinite treasures of her mind, which he savors in delighted anticipation. and when ganga dies, you know ganesh may just never recover, cuz just how many losses can one encase in glass? how many rebirths can one give oneself?

this tremendous book does a fabulous job of investigating the terrible burden of masculinity in this culture, for sure, and maybe in all cultures. even thought this is not its primary focus (i'd say its primary focus is death), the way men are allowed to love and feel is quite present too, with all its constrictions, its intensities, and its heartbreaks.

[Michelle D’costa · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had been planning to read this since long and I managed to do it last year. From the first page itself, the prose startled me with its matter of fact tone and description of disturbing scenes as if it were normal.

This story is not something people would encounter every day unless they are in a war zone. It shakes you from within and makes you realise that every moment in life matters and to take nothing for granted.

I recommend that everyone read this because you won't look at life the same way again. It makes you question, what is love? What are our basic necessities? What does really matter in life? What is free will?

It's a gripping tale of what it takes to survive in the most difficult circumstances.

[Jan · Rating 5 out of 5]

A brilliant debut, almost unbearably poignant, that puts us inside the POV of a sweet, thoughtful young man for 24 hours in a refugee camp during the Sri Lankan civil war, circa 2009. Lots happens, and Dinesh observes it minutely through a haze of shock and PTSD. I think it would be hard to approach this novel with an open heart and not come away gutted by this short meditation on life, death and the human spirit under extreme duress...and the thought of how many people are living in similar circumstances today. Shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize, winner of the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, and a 2016 best of the year by the Wall Street Journal, NPT and the Financial Times.

[Ming · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the sweetest, most tender stories I've read. In the midst of horror, the possibility of a connection and joy occurs. The writing is subtle and poetic and builds this feeling of expansiveness while focusing on two young people. I have to say the emotions in this book often choked me up. I was moved and taken by the beauty of the language and the senses the words evoked. (I did object to the length of so many of the paragraphs, some spanning 2-3 pages. It felt overwhelming to have those scenes and passages that drawn out. Please let me breathe, let me reflect and take it in.)

The scene where he watches his new wife sleep is achingly gorgeous and bittersweet. Oh my.

I recommend this book. The author will continue to do amazing writing. I will read more of his books.

A few quotes here:

He had spent no more than eight, maybe night nights here, and still for some reason he’d come to feel so close to it, especially to this bed where each night he lay, silent and still, unsleeping. It was as if in the hours he’d spent there his body had shed some warm, imperceptible substance into the earth and stone, something that filled the little space with an understanding of him, so it had become in a way a part of him, a special place, a home almost. What exactly he might have shed it was hard to say—a scent perhaps, perhaps old skin. Perhaps it was the murmuring of his body from previous nights, just the faint traces of his bodily rhythms vibrating still through the particles of earth and stone. Perhaps it was just these echoes of the body, resounding in the places a person has been long after they have gone that made a place a person’s home, and perhaps the slight shiver one has in returning to a childhood home was due only to them, due simply to the sudden resonance of the body’s living pulsations with the pulsations that had been imparted to the place long before, as when a tuning fork strikes a full-bodied object, is taken away, and then before its trembling fades is brought beside it again.

Long ago when he was a child, he remembered, lying in a field somewhere, staring up at the sky, he had rolled onto his stomach to find that the ground he’d been lying on contained little patches of touch-me-nots hidden among the grass. A few of the delicate green leaflets that his body had somehow left untouched were still open, each one scarcely a millimeter broad, but most of the leaves had curled up tightly around their stalks to protect themselves from his body, leaving their coarse brown undersides exposed…. The only thing he could do was be patient, to wait until the touch-me-nots unfurled again of their own accord. How long it would take he didn’t know, minutes, or hours, or days, but when they did bare themselves up to the atmosphere he would be more careful he had promised himself, would take care to be as soft and gentle with them as the vapor of an exhaled breath.

Just as another person might in the same kind of situation say that a part of themselves was dead, though physically they were perfectly intact, meaning only that a person around which an entire aspect of their lives had grown and entwined had been taken away, leaving this part of themselves to go limp or atrophy, all the woman meant was that thought her son’s heart was no longer beating she still carried the rhythm of his life inside her muscles and nerves, and that in a sense therefore he was still alive and well inside her own body, just as he had been before he was born.

Dinesh felt an urge to say something, but hesitated. He wanted to respond to Ganga’s silence by accepting it somehow, by acknowledging what it contained, but at the same the thought of disrupting it by speaking seemed in some way inappropriate. There had been silence between them before, of course, as they had stood transfixed after the marriage ceremony, as they had sat next to each other for the first time in the clearing, and as they had eaten together afterwards in the camp, but this silence felt different somehow. The earlier silence had been the silence that existed between people living in different worlds. It had been the silence that existed between everybody in the camp, the silence between people separated by a sheer wall of polished stone. The silence that was present between them now on the other hand was one that connected them rather than separated them. It charged the air between them so completely that the slightest movement by either one of them could be sensed at once by the other, so that their bodies were as if suspended together in a medium that was outside of time.

Ganga’s breathing had become calmer, and her arms were draped only loosely now over his body. All Dinesh could feel of himself, no mater how he tried, was an imperceptible quivering between his leg. He strained one more time and felt even less, then one more time and felt nothing at all. His body completely limp, as if it had completely let go, he buried his head as deep as he could inside the seclusion of Ganga’s neck, inside the small, private hollow between her collarbone and the side of her neck, and began, without any warning, to cry.

[Fraser Simons · Rating 4 out of 5]

The granularity of the prose work to open wide a truly brief window of time. The prose work manages to encapsulate and enshrine so many small, innocuous moments that are very affecting—both because they capture the beauty and grace of a person going through immense hardship—and augmenting the terrible effects, to the degree where it was an almost constant uncomfortable (but necessary) read.

[Dan · Rating 3 out of 5]

The story of a ‘brief marriage’ in Sri Lanka in the midst of the recent civil war, death and trauma. The camp that Dinesh, a young man who is the main character, resides in is comprised of tents and dugouts, largely ineffective against the artillery shells. Dinesh, in no official capacity, brings the wounded to the doctor and helps dig graves for those who have died.

At some point early in the novel, a stranger begs Dinesh to marry his daughter, so that she might be safer and have a chance to survive the war. The marriage takes place and the two newlyweds struggle to consummate the marriage for a number of reasons. What happens at the end of the novel is a bit predictable but I won’t spoil it here..

I think this novel had more potential but suffered from the following:

1. There is only one milieu for the story. Although the length of a novel, this is really a short story and it would have been better to strip away a hundred or more pages.
2. The author writes in a very passive style and there are a lot of run-on sentences which make for some long distracting sentences.
3. There was not much dialogue in the novel. While this can create an intended mood for the novel and sometimes work, in this case there just isn’t enough information conveyed other than there are lots of bombs and Dinesh is married to a girl who won’t talk to him.
4. I did not learn much about the Sri Lankan Civil War. Perhaps some scenes, facts or geography about the war or which leaders are making decisions might have leant a little more structure and conveyed more information to the reader.

[Kathrin · Rating 5 out of 5]

I hardly ever give 5 stars to a fiction book, but I don't think there is a choice with this one.

It certainly is not for the squeamish ... I felt nauseous around page three. It was a hard read, but such an interesting and heartbreaking story. The author made me feel like I was looking into Dinesh's head and gain an understanding of living in such a surreal place. See how a war doesn't only destroy bodies, but that it is destroying minds.

Despite the horrible subject matter, the writing is absolutely beautiful.

[Shawn Mooney (Shawn Breathes Books) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Shelling and bombing and dead decomposing bodies and the wounded surround you in the rebel camp. A man from the medical tent asks you to marry his daughter, it being a given that none of the three of you can expect to survive the end of the week, never mind the end of this war. Yes, you say. She too has all but disappeared into numbness. No time for romance, for much of anything. Except what really matters. Devastating; it aches with truth.