A Passage North

by Anuk Arudpragasam

"A young man journeys into Sri Lanka's formerly war-torn north, and into a country's soul, in this searing novel of love and the legacy of war from the award-winning author of The Story of a Brief Marriage. "The closest we seem to get to the present are those brief moments we stop to consider the spaces our bodies are occupying, the warmth of the sheets in which we wake, the scratched surface of the window on a train taking us somewhere else..." A Passage North begins with a message: a telephone call informing Krishan, newly returned to Colombo, that his grandmother's caretaker, Rani, has died in unexpected circumstances--found at the bottom of the village well, her neck broken. The news coincides with the arrival of an email from Anjum, a woman with whom he had a brief but passionate relationship in Delhi a few years before, bringing with it the stirring of old memories and desires. As Krishan makes the long journey by train from Colombo into the war-torn northern province for the funeral, so begins an astonishing passage into the soul of a country. At once a meditation on love and longing, and an incisive account of the impact of Sri Lanka's civil war, this procession to a pyre "at the end of the earth" shines a light on the distances we bridge in ourselves and those we love, and the indelible imprints of an island's past. Anuk Arudpragasam's masterful novel is an effigy for the missing and the dead, and a vivid search for meaning, even amid tragedy"--

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction, Asia, War, Contemporary, India

304 pages, Hardcover

First published July 13, 2021

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

[Adina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Shortlisted for Booker Prize 2021

I seem to be in a review slump and my inspiration has run dry. As a result, I’ve postponed writing about this novel (and others) for some time. I decided to write a few words anyway because it would be a peaty not to praise such a beautiful novel.

First of all, I cannot recommend it enough to listen to the wonderful narration by Neil Shah. Many complained that it was hard for them to find the flow, that it has no dialogue, the sentences are too long etc. The audiobook makes all these inconveniences disappear as I did not realise there was no dialogue until I read one of those complains. In addition, the audiobook is best suited for the job since the novel consists in the meandering thoughts of the narrator.

The novel opens with Krishan, a young man from Sri Lanka as he is informed by the death of his grandmother’s carer, Rani. The same evening, he receives an e-mail from his former lover. Krishna decides to travel north to attend the funeral and the journey becomes an occasion for remembrance. We learn about his family, the civil war in Sri Lanka, his relationship with Anjum and other struggles. The novel is sprinkled with discussions of old poems and philosophy.

The book reads as a long and beautiful flowing phrase. I thought it was an interesting way to learn about the war in Sri Lanka and about its culture. In addition, I also got to enjoy some beautiful writing, such as this excerpt: “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, in those years before the weight of memory and expectation, and so it is sad and a little unsettling 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.”.

[Paromjit · Rating 5 out of 5]

On the Booker Prize Shortlist 2021

An exquisite powerhouse of a profoundly moving, disturbing novel by the award winning Anuk Arudpragasam, philosophical, a meditation, that with its beautiful, lyrical and understated prose carries the capacity to break the reader as it details the broken soul of Sri Lanka in the aftermath and legacy of the thirty year long civil war, the annihilation of the Tamils, where the swathes of land are a metaphorical cemetery and where the funeral pyres are still burning. It subtly and closely examines identity, the rich layers of consciousness and connections, of the elusive nature of time, time that can come and go, leaving a person untouched, ageing a process of dying negotiated over many years. This is a story of a war torn nation, the scars and trauma, mental health issues, family, the complexities of intimate relationships, life, death, culture, traditions, religion, culture, memory, the personal and the political.

Krishan receives a phone call informing him that his grandmother's carer, Rani, at home in the northeast region has died, breaking her neck after falling into a well. This leads to him travelling by train for the funeral. He is further unsettled after receiving a email from Anjum, a political activist, the first after their separation in India, where he dropped out of academia to return to fulfil what he felt was his destiny, returning to help his country rebuild and recover. Through the stream of consciousness, his interior life depicts his experiences of Colombo, his grandmother's ferocious efforts to cling to the world in the face of the grim realities of the body and mind's deterioration, brought back from the brink by the care of a Rani, whose devastating losses of her sons and almost everything else, left her with mental health issues and trauma. We learn the intricate details of his relationship with Anjum, her sexuality, his fears, anxieties and vulnerabilities, and his awareness of his unrealistic yearnings for a reunion.

The war left many Tamils leaving, to scatter around the world, a determination to depart, despite the heartbreaking cruelty and hostility of the world to immigrants and refugees. Arudpragasam is a writer memorialising the terrors of the inhumanity of war, the people left behind to survive the unbearable consequences and losses, fearlessly acknowledging and comprehending that, for so many, learning to cope on a day to day basis in this life cannot address the festering open wounds that blight the soul and there is only so much the medical community can accomplish. This is a story that travels north through a country, its history, observing and noticing its people. This not a book that will let go of you, even as you finish reading the last page, a shellshock of a read, it is destined to linger, live long in the mind, one of the qualities that defines a great novel and author. Highly recommended. Many thanks to the publisher for an ARC.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is just phenomenal. A Passage North follows Krishan, a young man, as he travels from Colombo to a village in Sri Lanka’s northern province to attend the funeral of his grandmother’s caretaker. There is no dialogue. The entire novel consists of Krishan’s thoughts and recollections, told through magnificently complex yet lyrical sentences. The experience of reading this is almost meditative. We see the effects of the country’s civil war on its survivors as the work explores trauma, memory, aging, family, culture, and death.

[Elyse Walters · Rating 5 out of 5]

No surprise… but congrats…. This book is nominated for the Man Booker prize of 2021


The devastation of the civil war in Sri Lanka lives on through memories, through self-reflective mental images, through stories, through death.

“A Passage North” touches on the history of the violence, immigrants who have left—[Tamils who left Sri Lanka, their struggles in doing so, to live in other countries], and an intimate personal tale about — thoughts —of the caretaker, Rani, who died. Rani use to watch over Krishan’s grandmother…..
all the while…..
…..Krishan travels by train and buses to attend Rani’s funeral.

We get plenty of back stories about Krishan’s grandmother and mother whom he lived with in Colombo, and about a woman named Anjum, he can’t stop thinking about whom he met in India.

What stands out is the stream-of-consciousness style writing……
the contemplative prose. There are many long sentences — inviting us inside Krishan’s mind. And at times it’s like being inside our own minds…..[meditative thoughts about our world, our family, friends, the loss we’ve experienced, our experience of ‘home’, ‘love’, ‘death’]….

When I finished this novel ….beautiful and tragic….I said to myself…
“Whew, the entire novel - 304 pages - felt like one long sentence”!

Beautifully written. Compelling messages of Buddhism…[each of us has wisdom, awareness, love, and power within us]….and illuminating guidelines of images, visions, insights, inner understanding of reality….seeing ourselves as we really are.
This is a powerful book - takes patience- takes our full attention.

Example …..of being inside Krishan’s mind:
“There’d been so many stories of accidents in the north east in the years since the end of the war, drownings, fires, mind explosions, and road accidents above all, so many brief second- or third-page news items that noted how some or another unknown person from the former war zone had died in some or another bizarre or unexpected way. Accidents happened everywhere, of course, but these accidents had to have been more than just bad luck, for how could such hardy people, people who’d gone through so much and still come out alive, allow themselves to die so easily now and with such docility?
It was as though there was some other, more obscure logic at work than mere chance, as though death was in someway following these people, who’d managed to survive, as though they were in someway marked, the various statistically high probability‘s on which ordinary life was based beginning, for them, to alter, to change more and more in favor of their unforeseen demise—as though they themselves walked with open arms in the direction of these seemingly accidental deaths, as though they themselves welcomed them or even willed them to take place”.


“It was funny how similar desire was to loss in this way, how desire too, like bereavement, could cut through the fabric of ordinary life, causing the routines and rhythms that had governed your existence so totally as to seem unquestionable to quietly lose the hard glint of necessity, leaving you almost in a state of disbelief, unable to participate in the world”.

I found this book to be a huge open-hearted offering of mindfulness and compassion.

Many thanks to Random House Publishing Group, Netgalley,
and Anuk Arudpragasam

[Doug · Rating 2 out of 5]

1.5, rounded up.

TBH, if not for its Booker nomination, not only would I have never started this, but I also would have DNF'd it halfway through - but as a completest, I trudged onwards. It suffers from my most detested literary bête noire: long, convoluted run-on sentences that often go on (and on) for over a page, compounded by paragraphs that can go for 5 or 6 pages. I just get so lost that I spent an inordinate amount of time backtracking over sections, making for a rather dispiriting, enervative reading experience.

Had the subject matter been more intriguing, I might have been able to overlook these grievances, but I just found the entire thing rather dull, if not downright boring. The other major fault that drove me crazy, is that at several points within the book, the author stops the narrative momentum (and I use the term loosely) dead to synopsize other works - two long narrative poems, a fable, a historical event, and even, fercrissakes, a FILM.

Have you ever been to a social event and been cornered by an overeager casual acquaintance who decides they MUST regale you with the minute retelling of whatever it is they have just read or seen, till your eyes glaze over and you politely excuse yourself with some feeble excuse, so as to depart as hastily as possible? This felt exactly like 290 pages of just that feeling.

Another issue with this for me is that a large portion of it is about caring for an elderly female relative, which I have been doing for the past twenty years (mum is now 99!) - not that this was 'triggering', per se, but it did sort of grate on some sore spots. It ALSO deals with another character receiving ECT treatments for depression, which is something I have had second-hand experience with also and didn't particularly want to read about. And then, there were some sections that were nauseating and/or extremely violent ... (spoiler alert!) - detailed descriptions of eye gouging and what happens to the body during cremation! No thanks...

Despite all these failings, there were a couple of passages that proved interesting or novel enough to warrant a begrudging 2 stars. Of the 8 Booker longlisted works I've read so far, it is at the bottom of my rankings, however, and I suspect it will stay there. (Update upon completion of longlist: .... and it did!)

[Fionnuala]

After I finished A Passage North I picked up a book that is written in the kind of style that makes you read so fast that you belt along, tumbling over the sentences, incapable of slowing down, not taking a lot in because you're too busy turning the pages, but it doesn't matter because Sandro Veronesi's Hummingbird is set up in such a way that you keep up in spite of yourself. It's as if you're on a high speed train where the landscape becomes only a blur.

A Passage North, while much of it concerns journeys on trains, offers the opposite experience. Time slowed down as I was reading, the long sentences with their many clauses forced me into a snail's pace and inspired many halts for contemplation, sometimes mid-sentence, as though the reading train which is the book often stopped mid-station or was obliged to wait in a siding for hours and hours.

To add to the feeling of time slowing down, I realised that the action of this very long book covers only two days. It begins with a phone call, received in Colombo, the capital of Sri Lanka, about a death, and ends with the main character attending a funeral in the far north of the island. But in between, in the long slow sidings, entire lives are lived out, lives touched by war and huge changes in society. The book is a beautiful description (and description is a suitable word to describe this novel without dialogue), of what happens when an intense desire for independence, both on the part of the individual and on the part of the group, pushes family and love into a siding, and speeds on regardless to fulfil its own destiny.

*I've never come across so many uses of the phrases as if and as though in one book. There must have been hundreds.

[Henk · Rating 4 out of 5]

Shortlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize
Erudite and meandering, like being on a boat going down a river with sometimes lush scenery, some scenic detours and sometimes deep scars of deforestation. Engages effectively with trauma, ageing, privilege, sexism and relationships
To yearn was to be lost

Impressive in writing, if sometimes bordering on pretentious, this was an immersive read transporting the reader to Sri Lanka - 3.5 stars rounded up.

One of the most gorgeous (and long) opening sentences ever opens up A Passage North: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, in those years before the weight of memory and expectation, and so it is sad and a little unsettling 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.

Very reflective, the death at the start of the book sets off thought on the nature of observing a war, of being a scholar instead of an activist, on who to tell the news first, on colonialism in the sense that the atrocities of the civil war could only be believed after a commission of white men “vindicated” the facts of the war crimes.

Krishan, the alleged main character, more acts as a vessel for Anuk Arudpragasam to unfold his thoughts on plethora of topics. Many times these are quite brilliant, if long, sometimes, like the whole philosophical reflection on smoking, these paragraphs just feel very pretentious. At the end of the book suddenly one is made aware he has a brother and I was just surprised because in all grand philosophising he does, working for a NGO, he is actually very distant to both his family and the effects of the war in his home country.

The women around Krishan are much more interesting in my view than himself. We have Appamma, his grandmother who is afraid of being reduced to an obligation and brings about reflections on ageing that are quite brilliant.
And we meet Anjum, queer and former lover of Krishan, leading to mesmerising observations like:
Desire and satisfaction being like a horizon, ever moving out of reach.

Or in the words of the author who takes a more meandering approach:
We experience, while still young, our most thoroughly felt desires as a kind of horizon, see life as divided into what lies on this side of that horizon and what lies on the other, as if we only had to reach that horizon and fall into it in order for everything to change, in order to once and for all transcend the world as we have known it, though in the end this transcendence never actually comes, of course, a fact one began to appreciate only as one got older, when one realized there was always more life on the other side of desire's completion, that there was always waking up, working, eating, and sleeping, the slow passing of time that never ends, when one realized that one can never truly touch the horizon because life always goes on, because each moment bleeds into the next and whatever one considered the horizon of one's life turns out always to be yet another piece of earth.

The way a budding relationship, with all the uncertainty and projections is described is very well done, as are the reflections on sexism and personal space is also quite brilliantly captured, if weed and smoking a being very prominent here as well.

Ruminative and meandering is however definitely something that can be said of the main storyline, very little happens in the main temporal storyline. The long tracts on poems, films and buddha his origin feel excessively digressive.
Perhaps, as if, as though, it was as though - so much conjecture and reflection takes place in the head of Krishan that at times the book is quite tiresome, with the thoughts of a teenager who doesn’t sleep enough another excellent example of pretentiousness.
What also didn't help in my relation to the main character is his enormous privilege (albeit him being in Delhi and experiencing some "casual" racism on the streets due to his skin tone and being from the south raises the question of what in fact is privilege) compared versus the housekeeper whose funeral he visits.
Rani is not trapped just in poverty but her mental problems are like a moveable, invisible prison.
Her sons dead and the effects of the war with the Tamil Tigers being an everyday reality instead of some blogpost or a bad-quality picture. Death as a release of trauma is being pondered, and we have gorgeous writing of images forever imprinted on the retina, a poetic image that does work expertly in the context of the book.

A Passage North is a book with essentially no main character and no action, but still managed to engage me and clearly has important things to say on a myriad of subjects. Like the work of Hari Kunzru the author is erudite and doesn't shy away from hard questions on the modern day world.
A worthy shortlisted book for the 2021 Booker Prize!

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

I had the pleasure to put some questions to the author as part of the BBC Radio 4 Front Row Booker Book Group (the third year of three I have appeared - previously with Salman Rushdie and Tsitsi Dangarembga)

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p0b...

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Re-read after its shortlisting for the 2021 Booker Prize - for which it is in my view the most literary book on the list.

This is a philosophical novel yet one which is very readable if approached at an appropriately thoughtful manner and slow speed.

It is one which places us deep in the mind of a third party character and which largely (and deliberately) eschews each of:

a) Action - this is a novel of the interior not the exterior. The first section largely takes place on a coastal road walk, the second on a long and solitary train journey, the third on walk towards a cremation - but all really are located in the narrator's head;

b) Classical Character Development - replaced instead by introspective reflection;

c) Spoken Dialogue. The book is more interested in reflecting on conversations – in you might say their legacy – than in the immediate experience of them – which actually matches the book’s treatment of its core subject. The author has also effectively said that reported speech has greater fidelity anyway given he is often writing Tamil dialogue in English.

It is one that could not be described as autobiographical - but one where it is clear that the author has projected many of his own ambiguities and obsessions onto his third party character as well as one as well as one where sometimes as a reader one feels that the author has (not entirely satisfactorily) rather bypassed his character to include his own research for the book directly.

The author is a Sri Lankan Tamil who grew up in the capital Colombo, rather distant from the direct fighting in the Civil War. He wrote the book in the US while studying for a PhD in Philosophy at Colombia University. Interestingly given my comment about this being a philosophical novel he has argued that the Western study of Philosophy is rather abstracted and formal and divorced from an “introspective or essayistic” approach and instead he was more inspired by Robert Musil and “A Man Without Qualities” and the idea of using fiction to “place philosophical questioning and response in a kind of living, bodily situation.”

He has said that he is “obsessed” with the Sri Lankan Civil War and particularly its legacy as the Tamil diaspora came to terms with the allegations of the government atrocities which led up to the defeat of the Tamil Tigers – and all his novels have addressed this in some way. This book, compared to his other writing, is both a more oblique treatment of the war itself which remains in the background, but also 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.

He wondered brought him to this place so far removed from the world he knew, what forces had led him to leave the life he'd created for himself in India, to come to this place he'd never actually lived, this place that had hardly figured in his life growing up. He wondered what movements of fate had led to his seemingly accidental encounter with Rani in the hospital ward, to her arrival in their home just a few months later, to her unexpected death two days before and his attendance now at her cremation, unable to shake off the sense that his presence in this scene of desolation had been decided somewhere long before, that something inside him had been driving him toward it long be-fore the end of the war, something more than just guilt, some-thing like freedom, even if he could not say what exactly freedom was.

The book’s third party character Krishnan is also a Sri Lankan Tamil – again with a family base in Colombo (where he lost his father to a bomb attack but is otherwise relatively unaware of the details of the conflict in the North): who also went abroad to study – in this case Political Science in Delhi. There the shock end to the war and the subsequent Channel 4 “Killing Fields in Sri Lanka” documentary (https://www.channel4.com/programmes/s...) opens his eyes and he becomes obsessed with researching and mentally recording the war.

In Delhi he later met and fell in love with an Indian activist Anjum and is challenged by her devotion to women and labour cause activism – and when she makes it clear that she is focused on her causes more than him and signal the end of their relationship, he decides to quit his studies and return to Sri Lanka – working with a small NGO working in the North East with those affected by the war.

Later he returns to Colombo with a better-funded, more desk-based overseas NGO, living with his mother and ageing Appamma (Grandmother). After the latter has a number of falls Krishnan arranges for someone he met in his work – Rani, a Northern based Tamil lady who traumatised by the loss of her two sons (one in combat, one killed by shrapnel), is undergoing electric-shock therapy – to be his grandmother’s carer.

The book itself takes place over a couple of days: after a number of years of silence Krishnan receives an email from Anjum; on the same day he gets a call to say that Rani (who some time since returned to her family in the North) has died after an apparently accidental fall into a well. After a reflective walk, he decides to travel to the funeral to represent his family; and on the lengthy train journey and then at the funeral reflects on the events of his life.

He couldn’t help thinking, as the train hurtled closer toward his destination, that he’d traversed not any physical distance that day but rather some vast psychic distance inside him, that he’d been advancing not from the island’s south to its north but from the south of his mind to its own distant northern reaches.

The author has talked about the different ways of remembering the war – and his contribution being via his novels and this idea comes up also in the book

People would remain who insisted on remembering, some of them activists, artists and archivists who’d consciously chosen to do so but most of them ordinary people who had not other choice … who, in the most basic sense, simply couldn’t accept a world without what’d they’d lost, people who’d lost the ability to participate in the present and were this compelled to live out the rest of their lives in their memories and imaginations, to build in their minds, like the temple constructed by Poosal, the monuments and memorials they could not build in the world outside.

In this quote I would say that: Anjum is the activist (as are those, in a Tamil context, who take part in protests around the world); the author is the artist; Krishnan a mental archivist who tries to move towards activism; Rani the lost person without choice.

And this quote also includes one of the most interesting and allegorical aspects of the novel – the Sri Tamil legend of Poosal (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pusalar) and the idea of building a “castle in the mind” – something that Krishnan realises he was doing himself with his post-documentary, pre-Anjum reaction to the end of the war and which much more poignantly he realises Rani is doing.

This is a book of very deliberate juxtapositions of two concepts and then an examination of them together. These include:

1) The inexorable passage of time and the intensity of the present moment – this is key to the novel’s opening;

2) Desire and yearning – this is key to the novel as shown in its ending;

3) The past and the present ; 4) Absence and longing; 5) Activism and academia; 6) Action and introspection; 7) Agency and obsession; 8) Gaze and touch; 9) Sleep and Waking; 10) Travel and Exile.

A repeating (and all the more notable for being slightly unusual even at time discordant) image is of not just vision and sight – the author has even said that “Visions” was a working title for the book – but also the physical elements of eyes themselves.

It was only when looking at a horizon that one��s eyes could move past all the obstacles that limited one’s vision to the present situation, that one’s eyes could range without limit to other times and other places, and perhaps this was all that freedom was, nothing more than the ability of the ciliary muscles in each eye—the finely calibrated muscles that contracted when focusing on objects close by and relaxed when focusing on objects far away—nothing more than the ability of these muscles to loosen and relax at will, allowing the things that existed in the distance, far beyond the place one actually was, to seem somehow within reach.

And maybe it was for this reason, it had occurred to him at that moment, that eyesight weakened with the passing of the years, not because of old age or disease, not because of the deterioration of the cornea or the lenses or the finely tuned muscles that controlled them but because, rather, of the accumulation of a few such images over the course of one’s brief sojourn on earth, images of great beauty that pierced the eyes and superimposed themselves over everything one saw afterward, making it harder over time to see and pay attention to the outside world, though perhaps, it occurred to him now, four years later in the country of his birth, walking at the back of the procession bearing Rani’s body for cremation, Rani who’d seen so much that she would never been able to forget, perhaps he’d been naïve back then, perhaps it was not just images of beauty that clouded one’s vision over time but images of violence too, those moments of violence that for some people were just as much a part of life as the moments of beauty, both kinds of image appearing when we least expected it and both continuing to haunt us thereafter, both of which marked and branded us, limiting how far we were subsequently able to see.

And this is most striking and shocking in the true story of the arrest, death sentence and then prison riot murder of the Tamil militant Kuttimani (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selvara...) – his wish for his eyes and their eventual fate.

We also have the glances shared between two Black Tigers in the documentary from which this excerpt is taken https://www.pbs.org/video/frontlinewo... - a documentary which forms a key juncture in the development of Anjum and Krishnan’s relationship

There were I felt some false notes with the book.

The book was I felt very much at its strongest and most original when looking at the Sri Lankan conflict, or discussing how Anjum’s activism challenges Krishan: when on more conventional matters – in particular the period when Krishan and Anjum have sex for the first time and then the early stages of their relationship, I felt the philosophising style felt rather cliched – like a Alain de Botton derivative.

Some of the areas recounted are reproduced in detail which is simply unnatural such as Krishan’s tale of Kuttimani – supposedly remembered by Krishan while he smokes a cigarette on a train but runs to 12 or so pages, with exact dates and so on (although even then it misses a completely crucial detail that explains why the prison officials allegedly permitted and possibly even facilitated the riots – that his death sentence had been commuted to life imprisonment).

The second section in particular is weakened by being dominated by these two elements - however the first and third sections were both I felt exceptional and overall this was a very welcome addition to the longlist which thoroughly deserved its shortlisting and would not be an undeserving winner.

My thanks to Granta for an ARC via NetGalley

[Libby · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 stars
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2021

“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, in those years before the weight of memory and expectation, and so it is sad and a little unsettling to see that we become, as we grow older, much less capable of touching, grazing, or even glimpsing it...

Anuk Arudpragasam is a Tamil novelist from Sri Lanka. In an interview with ‘The White Review,’ he describes himself as training in the analytic tradition of philosophy. He describes himself as being somewhat disappointed with the results of his training in that little of what he was looking for could be obtained. “What I wanted from philosophy was not a declarative sentence, but a mood I could internalize, a mood that would help me assimilate the world I lived in, that would make certain dimensions of life more salient.” It seems to me that Arudpragasam has been particularly successful in translating a reflective, somber mood, with steady flashes of penetrating light onto the page in this novel.

The protagonist, Krishan is a young man living in Colombo, Sri Lanka with his mother and grandmother. His grandmother’s caregiver, Rani has traveled to visit her home in the north, to an area previously involved in the thirty-year Sri Lankan Civil War. Rani suffered tragedies during the war. Krishan met her in a mental institution and was not convinced that Rani could actually offer the care that his grandmother needed. Her doctor thought it would be good for Rani and suggested that she would be capable, so the decision is made.

As the novel begins, Rani’s daughter has called to inform Krishan’s family that Rani has died in an accident. Neither Krishan’s mother nor his grandmother can make the long trip north to Rani’s funeral, so Krishan volunteers to go on behalf of the family.

In a story short on plot with little dialog, this introspective novel felt far-reaching in its insightful and searing probe into the human psyche. When I read how Krishan felt guilty about missing the civil war, about being spared, I felt that this was actually the author’s true feelings. In reading some about the author, I discovered this was true. Arudpragasam describes his interest in the Sri Lankan Civil War as an obsession. Krishan in the novel also experiences it as an obsession, reading about it and looking at images on the computer. Arudpragasam’s first novel, ‘The Story of a Brief Marriage’ is set in the midst of the Civil War, while this one is looking back.

Rani is so consumed by trauma from the war that it has affected her ability to carry on. While she proves capable of caregiving, it is as though there is a void inside her, an emptiness. Krishan is sensitive and caring enough to perceive these emotions in Rani.

Arudpragasam’s prose is exquisite and intense, but always accessible. He explores themes we are all interested in…time, loss, distance, and the effects of trauma. The train is a symbol for the conveyance of time. It may rock, vibrate, roar, but it moves ever onward. On the train north, you may look back, but you cannot go back.

[Katia N · Rating 5 out of 5]

Update 14/09/21 It is shortlisted for the Booker now. I hope more people would become familiar with his work. It is a great book and his 1st novel The Story of a Brief Marriage deserves more attention as well.

Update 27/07/21 This book has made the Booker 2021 long list. I am very happy for this author. I hope more people would discover him after that.

I think I’ve finally found my favourite young writer working in English today. Four years ago, I’ve read his debut novel The Story of a Brief Marriage and was smitten by it. That novel has shown the possibility of depicting beauty and terror at the same time. It was a fair share of violence there, but at the same time the novel possessed a mediative quality humanising those people who hardly felt human themselves anymore.

No direct violence in this one. It is about the art of letting go. Letting go one’s love, past, even one’s life if it is meant to be. Also it is about being in the present; how different this is from seeing the minutes, days and events slipping by in a rapid succession.

I adore a slow-burning, introspective style of his writing. He manages to focus one’s attention in a moment and keep it there while the moment reveals itself like a bud of a flower.

“What for lack of a better word was sometimes called love, he had realized that night, was not so much a relation between two people in and of themselves as a relation between two people and the world they were witness to, a world whose surfaces and exteriors gradually began to dissipate as the two individuals sank deeper and deeper into what was called their love. Falling in love, or what deserved to be called falling love, he had realized that night, was not so much an emotional or psychological condition as an epistemological condition, a condition in which two people held hands and watched in silent amazement as the world around them was slowly unveiled, as the falsities of ordinary life began to thin and dissolve before their eyes, the furrowed eyebrows and clenched jaws, the bright colors and loud noises, the surface excitements and disturbances all dropping away so that what remained—time stripped bare—was the only way the world could truly be apprehended, so that even if this condition did not last, even if it was lost, as eventually it is always lost, to habit or circumstance or simply the slow, sad passage of the years, the knowledge that it has imparted remains, the knowledge that the world we ordinarily partake in is somehow not quite real, that time does not need to pass the way we usually experience it passing, that somehow it is possible to live and breathe and move in a single moment, that a single moment could be not a bead on an abacus of finite length but an ocean that can be entered into, whose distant shores can never be reached.”

Another thing I liked that in this novel, he does not use a dialogue at all. And without it, he still manages to create very vivid sense of interactions between his characters.

The one of the themes and the one I always find fascinating is the nature of memory and forgetting. At the end, we are hardly in power to chose what we remember and what we forget both personally and historically:

"Deliberately or not the past was always being forgotten, in all places and among all peoples, a phenomenon that had less to do with the forces that seek to erase or rewrite history than simply the nature of time, with the precedence the present always seems to have over what has come before, the precedence not of the present moment, which we never seem to have access to, but of the present situation, which is always demanding our attention, always so forceful and vivid and overwhelming that as soon as one of its elements disappears we forget it ever existed."

However, there are moments from our life that will always stay with us and suddenly would resurface whether we want it or not. He has found a beautiful metaphor:

perhaps it was not just images of beauty that clouded one’s vision over time but images of violence too, those moments of violence that for some people were just as much a part of life as the moments of beauty, both kinds of image appearing when we least expected it and both continuing to haunt us thereafter, both of which marked and branded us, limiting how far we were subsequently able to see.

This has reminded me of an interview I’ve read with a scientist studying memory. She was explaining that people who went through a traumatic experience or more rarely some striking positive event do not remember it. They practically re-live it for all intents and purposes everytime time their brain brings it over. Not surprising it limits their ability to “see” anything else in a broad sense of the word.

I can keep talking about this author and his two novels for a very long time, so much he impressed me. I can mention for example the way he composes his novels which is somewhat different from the recommendations I’ve read about in this book A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life for example. And I am so glad that it is!

"Story. Creating a well-rounded character. Setting. Dialogue. Historical context. I try to pay attention to these things—I do try—but they’re always afterthoughts. A lot of these other things accumulate, they find their place through a process of accretion, and they’re deposited in different waves each time I go through the text. Sometimes things occur to me, and I’m like, Oh, I can just add this. I write over drafts. There’s no first draft—I have a little center here or a little center there, and then I just go over it, and each time I do, more material accumulates until I find a way to connect those islands into something. I have in my mind that the reader expects the character to be believable or the story to be interesting. I have this little voice in my head that says I need to try—but those elements of novel writing are not what I am interested in."

(this is an excerpt from his interview you can find here. )

However, I would stop for now. I just share one more observation. I find quite difficult to formulate this one, but I try as it is worth it. I found both of his novel very relatable. And, it might sound strange. His character here is a young Tamil man. The novel unfolds in Deli and Shri-Lanka. There is nothing superficially in common between us. But his yearning filled me with yearning. His memories have sent me very far down my very personal memory lane that again has nothing in common with his on a superficial level. I guess I am trying to say that it is relatively easy to write about a struggling mother of two in a such a way that a struggling mother of two reading it would see herself on the page. But it is much trickier and much more valuable to write something so universal that people could relate to without sharing any background, race, identity or suchlike.

[Meike · Rating 2 out of 5]

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2021
I went into this with high expectations: A book about about Sri Lanka, written by a Tamil author? Yes!! But then this novel turned out to epitomize one of my pet peeves: Ruminative, meandering writing. And don't get me wrong: Arudpragasam achieved what he aimed to do, because for him, this text was never about plot or character development or the depiction of historical events; this is meant to be an experimental, philosophical meditation pondering human consciousness, trauma and memory. Unfortunately, I found the execution rather boring and tedious.

The plot is basically this: Krishan, a Tamil who works for an NGO in Colombo, receives a message from his ex-girlfriend who left him because she prioritzed her activism; he also gets a phone call informing him that his grandmother's carer has died while visiting her family in the North; he takes a walk; he makes a loooooong journey by train to the North; then he attends the carer's funeral. While these events unfold, we are basically trapped in his head where he ruminates about the Sri Lankan civil war and how he and the people around him were affected by it. The language is slow and winding, floating broadly, piling words on words on words - and while the storytelling technique is rather accessible and conservative, the experimental part only being the very limited scope that reflects one person's thought process, it's demanding and exhausting to read, because it's just so associative and descriptive and full of rhetorical flourishes and big images and words. It's just too much verbal hocus-pocus, not enough substance.

I saw some reviews comparing this to W.G. Sebald, but while Sebald also pondered war, trauma and memory, his writing is sparse, tentative, sometimes elliptic and does not define memory as a purely verbal endeavor, but a human technique that relies on all senses and forms of cultural expression. Arudpragasm's focuses on things that can and can't be verbally expressed, which is a very different framing, and the ornamental writing stands in stark contrast to what Sebald does; to put it differently: Arudpragasam trusts in the power of beautiful, elaborate wording as a means of healing, while Sebald distrusts verbal reflection altogether. (Needless to say, I'm of the Sebaldian conviction.)

But I want to do this text justice as the author never intended to do what I expected from this book in particular or from literature in general, and he is clearly an unusual writer with a vision and deep knowledge (he also draws from Sri Lankan culture and classic texts), it's just that this book is not for me. You can render texts that reflect consciousness wild and exciting, but the slowness and the meandering nature of this novel just drove me insane.

An ambitious novel that relies on its quiet undertones and that requires patience and a love for elegic storytelling.

[Marchpane · Rating 4 out of 5]

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2021

A Passage North is a reflective, sombre novel, set in Sri Lanka following the end of the civil war. A young man, Krishan, takes a long journey across the country to attend a funeral. The deceased is his grandmother’s carer, Rani, who had been suffering PTSD after her two sons were killed in the war. Despite losing his own father to the conflict, Krishan contends with the guilt that his own losses were meagre when compared to others, to people like Rani.

The protagonist, Krishan, is the least interesting of the characters and, perhaps not coincidentally, the one with the greatest relative privilege and the only male. The female characters—in addition to Rani there is Appamma, Krishan’s infirm grandmother, and Anjum, his politically active, queer former lover—who are complex and fascinating, are only really presented via Krishan’s perspective.

The novel is written in a discursive style, filled with long sinuous sentences that often appear to be saying the same thing three times over, the prose often coming across as portentous and high-minded. Even so, once ensconced in the book I found its reflectiveness absorbing, and enjoyed its digressions and philosophizing. The style might be off-putting or distancing for some readers, but I think it works, mainly because the topics covered are serious ones, weighty enough to carry such a prose treatment, and because Arudpragasam’s intellect is up to the task.

‘We experience, while still young, our most thoroughly felt desires as a kind of horizon, see life as divided into what lies on this side of that horizon and what lies on the other, as if we only had to reach that horizon and fall into it in order for everything to change, in order to once and for all transcend the world as we have known it, though in the end this transcendence never actually comes, of course, a fact one began to appreciate only as one got older, when one realized there was always more life on the other side of desire’s completion, that there was always waking up, working, eating, and sleeping, the slow passing of time that never ends, when one realized that one can never truly touch the horizon because life always goes on, because each moment bleeds into the next and whatever one considered the horizon of one’s life turns out always to be yet another piece of earth.’

The impression throughout the novel is one of Arudpragasam himself, as opposed to a character or fictive ‘narrator’, ruminating on his chosen themes: desire and yearning, liberation and constriction, trauma carried within and trauma forever imprinted on the terrain, memories and absences. An impressive and powerful work.

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 4 out of 5]

Finalist for the 2022 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction
Longlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize

A fascinating novel, heavily influenced by Thomas Bernhard and, the author's favourite novel, A Book of Memories by Péter Nádas, simultaneously political and philsophical.

On a Booker longlist that seemed to prize readability and accessibility, it was great to see the author here resisting the standard traits of novel writing, as indeed the judges recognised in their citation (A Passage North is quiet by serendipity, possessing its power not on its face, but in hidden, subterranean places. It has a simple conceit which revolves around the philosophy of the present as a disease of the past. It is in subverting our sense of time and even of how a story should be told that this novel achieves its strongest effect and strikes an indelible mark on the reader's soul.)

From an interview in the Paris Review:

INTERVIEWER

What are some aspects of novel writing that you don’t pay as much attention to?

ARUDPRAGASAM

Story. Creating a well-rounded character. Setting. Dialogue. Historical context. I try to pay attention to these things—I do try—but they’re always afterthoughts.

I have in my mind that the reader expects the character to be believable or the story to be interesting. I have this little voice in my head that says I need to try—but those elements of novel writing are not what I am interested in.

A Passage North opens as it goes on with an extensive philosophical musing on the nature of the present.

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, in those years before the weight of memory and expectation, and so it is sad and a little unsettling 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 realize, 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 realize how much time has passed since we were last aware of ourselves, when we realize how many days, weeks, and months have slipped by without our consent.

Events take place, moods ebb and flow, people and situations come and go, but looking back during these rare junctures in which we are, for whatever reason, lifted up from the circular daydream of everyday life, we are slightly surprised to find ourselves in the places we are, as though we were absent while everything was happening, as though we were somewhere else during the time that is usually referred to as our life. Waking up each morning we follow by circuitous routes the thread of habit, out of our homes, into the world, and back to our beds at night, move unseeingly through familiar paths, one day giving way to another and one week to the next, so that when in the midst of this daydream something happens and the thread is finally cut, when, in a moment of strong desire or unexpected loss, the rhythms of life are interrupted, we look around and are quietly surprised to see that the world is vaster than we thought, as if we’d been tricked or cheated out of all that time, time that in retrospect appears to have contained nothing of substance, no change and no duration, time that has come and gone but left us somehow untouched.

The novel is set in Sri Lanka around 5-6 years after the 2009 defeat of the Tamil Tigers by Government forces.

Our first-person narrator is Khrishan, a Tamil from Sri Lanka, who had been studying in Dehli at the time of the Tigers defeat. The break-up with his girlfriend Anjum, who prioritised her social activism over their relationship, and then seeing the post-war suffering of the Tamil people led him back to Sri Lanka. He first gets involved in reconstruction work in the north-east of the country, but soon realises that the mental trauma of the conflict will persist much longer than the physical, and that the reconstruction is a form of erasure, and returns to his family home in Colombo, which he shares with his mother and his elderly paternal grandmother (his father having been killed by a bomb in the civil war).

The purpose of all the government’s demolition and renovation in the northeast had, of course, been to erase any memory that might spur the Tamil population back toward militarism, and in this it had been more or less successful, for one hardly heard ordinary people talking about the Tigers in the northeast now, one hardly heard anyone giving them more than a passing thought. It was strange to consider, since for decades the Tigers had been the central fact of life in the northeast, but it also made sense to a degree, for memory requires cues from the environment to operate, can function only by means of associations between things in the present and things in the past, which meant that remembering became far harder when all the cues that an environment contained were systematically removed. Without the physical objects that allowed it to operate organically, memory had to be cultivated consciously and deliberately, and how could the average person in the northeast afford to actively cultivate their memory of a world now gone when there were so many more urgent concerns, how to make ends meet, how to rebuild their homes, how to educate their children, concerns that filled up all their mental space? The truth was that eventually most people would have ceased remembering the past anyway, even if all remaining traces of the Tigers had been left untouched, for the truth was that all monuments lose their meaning and significance with the passing of time, disappearing, like the statues and memorials in Colombo dedicated to the so-called independence struggle against the British, into the vast unseen and unconsidered background of everyday life.
...
Deliberately or not the past was always being forgotten, in all places and among all peoples, a phenomenon that had less to do with the forces that seek to erase or rewrite history than simply the nature of time, with the precedence the present always seems to have over what has come before, the precedence not of the present moment, which we never seem to have access to, but of the present situation, which is always demanding our attention, always so forceful and vivid and overwhelming that as soon as one of its elements disappears we forget it ever existed.

As the novel begins he has just returned from the office (he now works in an administration role at an NGO on more administrative matters) to contemplate an email he had received from Anjum, the first since their break up almost 4 years earlier. But as he is about to re-read the email he receives a phone call informing him that Rana, his grandmother's carer until recently, had died. Khrishan had first come across Rana, a Tamil, when visiting a hospital, where she was undergoing electroshock therapy for the mental trauma caused by losing both of her sons during the civil war, and had invited her to live with the family as a way to both solve their care issues and to help with Rana's mental healing.

Arudpragasam originally aimed to write a novel in the style of Bernhard's stunning Extinction, attempting to replicate the "the sustained engagement with a single consciousness in a constrained space" (from the Literary Friction podcast) in Bernhard's novel, although he found it difficult to achieve that in his own writing in a "bearable" way, eventually expanding the locations and characters (the novel was originally going to be the main character and his grandmother).

The outside world in Extinction is like scenery, it’s like a backdrop in the theater, where it’s so obvious that you’re not supposed to pay attention to it—it’s really just there so that what is happening in the foreground can happen. I wanted to write a book like that, one that involved sustained engagement with a single consciousness at a kind of intense level. I tried very hard, and I couldn’t do it in a way that anybody who wanted to read my writing or any friends of mine were willing to tolerate. In fact, I couldn’t do it in a way that I could tolerate. I had difficulty following this ideal, and slowly, over the course of years, the world began to seep more into the novel.

That said, the novel's action is still relatively limited, taking place over a few days, with Khrisnan going for a walk, and then taking a train to Kilinochchi (which was the de facto capital of the Tamil Tigers territory) where he attends Rana's funeral, all the while pondering deeply on thoughts provoked by the email and phone call that open the novel as well as on the effects of the civil war (here, the narration can seem rather one-sided, but then this is a first-person narrative).

Although the setting of the novel is wider in practice, as his thoughts extend the narrative scope via some flashbacks to his time with Anjum, and indeed the thoughts he had then. This from a train journey he and Anjum took after they had been separated for some weeks, as they prepare for bed in a sleeper carriage:

He would think, listening to the Sivapurānam, of the sea in Sri Lanka as it was during the calmer months, specifically of the sea in Trincomalee as he’d seen it once on a warm, late June evening, the water a calm, waveless sheet of glimmering, glistening blue that stretched out silently toward the sky. He would think of how the water unfurled itself so softly across the gentle slope of the beach, how it swept over the smooth, polished sand with such tenderness and how reaching its full extension, just as it was losing all its momentum, it would pause as if taking a breath in a last brief embrace of the earth, clasping the land for as long as it could before being drawn back with a sigh into the sea. He would think of the sea, rolling and unrolling itself softly and placidly across the edges of the earth in this way, coming into contact with the shore so lovingly and gratefully and then, when it was time, withdrawing so gracefully, and he would wonder whether it was possible for him too to be in Anjum’s presence and then return to himself with such grace and equanimity, to attach himself to the thing he loved and then detach himself without each time ripping apart his soul, though the truth, he knew, was that such a stance was only possible at certain moments, at least for him, moments in which he was, for whatever reason, briefly in possession of himself, for it was difficult to be philosophical in the midst of desire, it was difficult to be as removed from the world as religious devotees claimed to be when you were caught up in the bliss of union or in the desperation of being parted.

There is a certain irony here in that Khrisnan is very much being philosophical in the midst of desire - he is hoping to have sex with Anjum in their compartment. And that speaks to one potential issue with the novel - at times the philosophising is somewhat artificial, but then Arudpragasam isn't aiming for realism.

Bernhard's influence is also clear in the long sentences and paragraphs, and the recollected reported speech (there is no dialogue in the novel).

Another differentiating element is how Arudpragasam incorporates various literary works in translation including the Tamil Periya Purānam, the Sanskrit The Cloud Messenger, a Sansrkit version of the Life of the Buddha and some Pali Buddhist women’s poetry.

Overall - a worthwhile inclusion on the longlist and a potential shortlist contender and certainly stronger than several other, better known, writers on the list (Ishiguro, Spufford, Lockwood).

Sources:

Literary Friction podcast: https://www.nts.live/shows/literaryfr...

FT interview: https://www.ft.com/content/e88203b0-b...

Paris Review: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2...

[Neale · Rating 4 out of 5]

Shortlisted for the 2021 Booker.

The novel opens with our protagonist, Krishan, excited by an email from his ex-girlfriend Anjum, who he still loves. It is the first communication she has made to him since their breakup. She wants to know all about what his life is like now that he has returned to Sri Lanka, he had been studying in India. His excitement and anticipation to read the email are broken though by a phone call from the daughter of his grandmother’s carer, Rani, informing him that Rani had fallen down a well in the night and broken her neck.

Rani was Krishan’s grandmother’s nurse and carer for two years and yet she was so much more.

Krishan’s grandmother lives in a room upstairs, too feeble now to make trips downstairs. Arudpragasam describes beautifully what it must feel like to age slowly, and equally slowly lose many abilities along the way. As the body becomes weaker, and afflictions such as arthritis sets in, we lose the ability to do the things we love. With Krishan’s grandmother one day she realizes that it is too tiring and painful to pursue her passion of gardening. Then the steps to her room upstairs become an obstacle too difficult to traverse. This is where Rani came in.

Over two years Rani had taken care of Krishan’s grandmother. Over these two years Rani had become much more than a nurse and carer. A strong bond had developed between the women, a genuine friendship flowering into existence. Rani had lost two sons to the war, traumatic flashbacks and nightmares of her youngest son’s death a nightly ritual. Appamma helped her with her grief. A grief that could never truly be assuaged. Both women needed each other, helping make the days bearable.

Rani was receiving electric-shock treatment for her depression and grief, and over time the treatments were increased. As the treatments increased Rani became befuddled easily and had trouble with memory loss. Was this the cause of her tragic fall into the well? Or possibly, with her grief and sorrow deepening, did Rani take her own life?

Rani’s funeral is in the north-east. Krishan must make passage north to attend.

While travelling north Krishan does not just cross physical distance, but psychic distance, as he finds himself conflicted, close to obsessing about the atrocities that were committed by the government troops, civilians killed, hospitals attacked in the civil war. Endlessly pondering on how different his life was, studying, while an entire culture was being displaced. He pores over news sites on the internet, discovering everything he can about the war and the crimes committed. The countless anonymous lives lost, and how different his life could have been.

He also ruminates about Anjum, his ex-girlfriend, and what it is like to be so deeply in love with somebody. To love somebody with your soul, and to constantly fear and agonize that that love is not reciprocated. Anjum is a political activist and Krishan comes to realize that this role consumes every fibre of her being. This novel is beautifully, sensually written. The feelings of desire, love, anxiety conveyed with a masterful deft touch.

There is also history, and the documentary film that Krishan and Anjum watch about the “Black Tigers” is most interesting. The Black tigers were an elite unit in the Tamil army and each of them knew that they were going to die in whatever attack they had planned. Two women are the focus of the documentary and there is a calmness, almost a feeling of liberation knowing that they are going to die, if not from enemy fire, then from the cyanide capsules they all carry.

So, to sum up, the book is predominantly about Krishan and his thoughts, about Anjum, about Rani, about the war, and his life. Pondering and reminiscing about what his life may have been like under different circumstances. He also feels guilt, being a Tamil himself. Guilt about all of those who died and were tortured in such a vicious war, guilt about the displacement of so many. The horror to survive a war and then die in a leaky fishing boat crossing a vast ocean. Even those who did survive, now living in horrible conditions, their home wiped from existence.

Beautifully written and an enjoyable read.

[Maxwell · Rating 5 out of 5]

[5 stars]

Shortlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize

There are so many layers to peel back in this novel. From meditations on war, particularly a civil war, and the repercussions it has on a nation and its people, to the effects of time and how we seek to escape or inhabit it from our various vantage points, Anuk Arudpragasam takes a simple story and manages to weave together a rich story of trauma, loss, and the connections that bind us as humans to one another.

Krishan, a Sri Lankan Tamil young man, returns from a few years abroad in India to his home country. His grandmother is ill and has a caretaker named Rani who has unexpectedly died in her northern village while on a trip there to memorialize her sons lost during the civil war. Krishan takes a train journey to attend her funeral as a representative of his family. Along the way, he recalls various events in his life as well as the events of his country, and ruminates on topics of love, desire, yearning, and our callings in life.

The sentences in this book are long. Sometimes half a page or more, and there is basically no dialogue. The paragraph breaks, even, are sparse, and Arudpragasam loves a good comma. However, these particularly elements, which normally intimidate me and make me expect a slow read, leant themselves to a very lyrical, flowing prose style. The writing is sort of stream-of-consciousness and used to flow in and out of time, moving between Krishan's present and jumping back into memories as he recalls them on his journey. The author uses the journey storyline to explore the various topics in a natural and moving way.

While the plot is simple and relatively uneventful, it never felt boring. I was always intrigued where Krishan's mind would wander, and over time I would eagerly anticipate the profound observations and musings he'd relate. Arudpragasam clearly has his PhD in Philosophy; the way that he imbues philosophical quandaries into the narrative to allow Krishan to reflect and try and sort through his feelings was excellent.

At the same time, for this reason, it did, only occasionally, take me out of the story. I think with time, and perhaps a re-read, I'll be able to appreciate, even more, this choice and come to glean something deeper from the text (I'm reminded of a fellow Booker nominee (and winner) The Sense of an Ending which I had a much stronger, positive reaction to upon a re-read). I also can't wait to discuss this one with the book club since there are so many elements to dissect, and every reader may find something particular to focus on or relate to in this multifaceted story. [Update: after our discussion I am officially bumping this up to a 5 star rating and as of right now it's my #1 to win the Booker this year.]

So happy this was longlisted, and I'd be surprised (and sad) if it isn't shortlisted. I'd even be happy to see it win because it has a quality to it that I expect will make it long-lasting, and I'm sure if Arudpragasam continues to write, he will be a force in the literary world for years to come.

[Ushashi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Shortlisted for Booker Prize 2021

Anuk Arudpragasam's A Passage North is exceptional both in the style of writing and in its topic. The protagonist Krishan, a Tamil man hailing from Colombo, takes a long train journey to a village in Northern Sri Lanka to attend the funeral of his grandmother's caretaker, Rani. Most of the book is basically his thoughts during the journey. Krishan ruminates about his life and that of others, and we go through a meditative journey of identity, choices, trauma, and life and death. There is very little dialogue throughout the book. It's a stream-of-consciousness, flowing from one thought to another, moving to and fro timelines, from his student days in India and his short yet passionate relation with Anjum, to his family with mother and grandmother in Colombo, to the war-ridden past of Sri Lanka and its ever-lasting effect on Rani and countless others. There are parts where he thinks about different stories, from ancient India to recent Sri Lanka, and relates those philosophies with his life. The prose is lyrical and beautiful.

The story covers a lot of grounds, it does it with surprising poise. The main backdrop is clearly the aftermath of the decades-long civil war between the Sri Lanka govt and the Tamil Tigers. Early in the book, Krishan thinks about his college days when he first got consumed guilt about being safe and relatively unharmed by the bloody war while his people were suffering in his own country and how it drew him to social work post-war. I found this part particularly touching, and relatable because at some point or the other this guilt about being safer than others touches most of us. The history of the war is peppered throughout the book, and at times it's brutal and bloody. The aftermath is most obvious in Rani, who lost both her sons in the war and is suffering from PTSD and depression. Rani's loss of interest in life in contrast to Krishan's grandmother's efforts to cling it casts light on age and yearning for life. Having a grandmother of similar age myself, I am amazed at how well some of Krishan's grandmother's behavior is written. Then there is Krishan's relationship with Anjum, her sexuality and personality, and Krishan's vulnerabilities regarding their relation. It was one of the most honest and sincere depictions of a relationship that I've read in some time. The book ends with Rani's funeral. It might seem graphic to some readers but watching a pyre burn does bring very similar thoughts to mind.

I am honestly surprised at how many things I found relatable even though it is set on a very different backdrop from what I've ever experienced. The writing is brilliant. I saw many reviews saying the sentences are too long, which is true. But fortunately, I listened to the audiobook and it didn't bother me at all. Maybe this book would be better to listen to! Either way, it's a brilliant piece of work and highly deserving of making the Booker shortlist.

[Marc Lamot · Rating 4 out of 5]

By a coincidence (or not?) this is the second novel in a short time that I read by a Sri Lankan author. Shehan Karunatilaka's The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida overwhelmed me with its hilariously sarcastic tone that highlighted the harsh reality of the Sri Lankan civil war. Arudpragasam's book is quite different. This one also is about the brutality of war, but the angle and tone are completely different. Arudpragasam follows young Krishan on his journey by train to the funeral of the Tamil woman Rani, who was his grandmother's caretaker. In an ingenious composition we remain in Krishan's head all the time, with constant musings on the war trauma of that caretaker, on his broken relationship with the beautiful Anjum who apparently has opted for a radical commitment on the side of the Tamils, on his own feelings of guilt about the shielded life he lived, and so forth. There is a storyline, but it is wafer-thin and unfolds very slowly, in sometimes very long sentences, regularly interrupted by philosophical reflections and references to stories from the Buddhist and Hindu tradition.

Right at the start, Arudpragasam sets the tone with a page and a half long philosophical reflection on the phenomenon of time, how much the present clings to us, and as a result both past and future remain unattainable beyond the horizon. These references to the mysterious phenomenon of time keep coming back, both in connection with Rani, with Anjum and with the war past, and they strongly reminded me of the temporality scheme of the German historian and philosopher Reinhart Koselleck. It also indicates the more or less cerebral content of this novel, which is reinforced by the long meandering sentences that are reminiscent of both Thomas Bernhardt and Javier Marias. Just to say that this book may not appeal to the reader who expects a strong, compelling, story. On the contrary, the unfolding is very slow. If there is any evolution in this novel, it is in the way Krishan comes to terms with his guilt, with his broken relationship, with life and death in general. That results in a thoughtful, subtle, introspective tone and structure, making this novel into a mesmerizing read, of a pretty high level. I am very curious to see what Arudpragasam will come up with next. Rating 3.5 stars.

[Linda · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5
Shortlisted for the 2021 Man Booker Award

I read this last week while on holiday in the Adirondack Mountains. The serenity of the place lent itself well to reading this finely crafted, slow-paced, meditative novel that examines the impact of trauma and the search for meaning in the aftermath of war.

The story takes place two years after the Sri Lankan Civil War (1983-2009). ) At the novel's outset, Krishan, a Tamil, who works for an NGO in Columbo, suddenly receives a call that his grandmother's caregiver, Rani, has fallen into a well and broken her neck while visiting her family in the north. Krishan decides to travel north by train to attend her funeral.

He reflects on his life, his broken love relationship, and Rani's death during the ride north. Krishan ruminates on the shift in his life's trajectory. As a graduate student in Delhi, he met and fell in love with an Indian activist. Her passion and a sense of purpose made him question his academic existence. Propelled by survivor's guilt and a deep affinity for the Tamil people, he decided to abandon his studies and return to Sri Lanka to help the war survivors.

Rani was a war survivor under psychiatric care who suffered from depression and experienced PTSD. She lost both her sons in the war. Rani's oldest died in battle, and she saw her 12-year-old son killed in front of her as they fled from the Sinhalese. Krishan brought Rani into his mother's home to help care for his grandmother after her stroke. He hoped that the relationship would be therapeutic for them both. It worked well for close to two years, and yet at times, Rani's depression would overtake her. So then, in addition to medication, her psychiatrist would provide shock treatment, a practice with which Krishan disagreed. He wondered if Rani's death was an accident or suicide.

Arudupragasam intersperses passages from Tamil folklore literature and eastern religious philosophy throughout Krishan's meditations, adding depth and local flavor to the narrative. He vividly describes Rani's Hindu funeral ceremony and creates a sense of continuity against a backdrop of suffering and loss.

The book moved me. The characters were well-drawn, and despite the suffering and loss, Krishan's insights, decency, and commitment provided hope for a better future.

[Atri · Rating 4 out of 5]

An introspective sojourn tracing the protagonist's metamorphosis and his coming to terms with the pivotal events of his life, the causes and consequences of his decisions. Arudpragasam explores the spectrum of emotions through the philosophical vein he adopts, reifying abstractions and lyrically evoking the imperceptible changes, that one is always oblivious of, except from the vantage point of time and experience. The transmutation of the self, the intensely subjective desire and yearning, are attuned to the kaleidoscopic range of situations - the concatenation of place and chance, the impingement of political realities on the psyche supposedly ensconced in the private sphere, and the subterranean arc of destiny that defines these unique configurations.

Listening to the sounds of the waves breaking gently against the rocks, the birds flapping their wings against the push of the warm breeze, he gradually became less restive, the present ceasing to be a void and becoming instead, for a short period of time, a place he could inhabit comfortably and securely.

[Eric Anderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

On the surface it's easy to summarize what happens in “A Passage North”. Krishan, a young man who has returned to live and work in his native country of Sri Lanka after the recent Civil War, travels to the war-torn Northern Province to pay respects at the funeral of Rani, his grandmother's former care-giver who died suddenly. This journey comprises the bulk of the action in this story. Readers who prefer a novel with a lot of plot-driven physical drama won't find it in this novel. The power of this book and the complexity of its tale comes from Krishan's meditative process. He was absent from the genocide which resulted in the death of many thousands of fellow Tamils. Though his father was a casualty of one of the Tiger bombings in Colombo, he didn't directly witness or feel the effects of this calamity. However, Rani was a witness to these horrific events and experienced tragic losses which left her severely traumatized. The question for Krishan is how to reconcile what he knows with what he has not directly seen and what steps should be taken to positively contribute to his country which has been ravaged by war. While he is contending with this enormous issue he's also simply a young guy who likes to hang out with his friends and smoke. He spends long periods of time wandering while staring out at the horizon and pines for his lover Anjum who's become a committed activist. Through the course of this novel we get a poignant sense of his state of being at a significant crossroad in life.

The author is a student of philosophy and this is heavily reflected in the narrative which meaningfully considers a number of dilemmas to do with the nature of life, time and reality. This is clear from the opening page which begins with the question of inhabiting the present moment. His meditative process offers a moving and new perspective on a number of issues. For instance, the world now witnesses significant conflicts online through first-hand footage shared by individuals embroiled in the action. However Krishan is cautious about granting these images legitimacy: “his initial reluctance to acknowledge the magnitude of what had happened at the end of the war, as though he'd been hesitant to believe the evidence on his computer screen because his own poor, violated, stateless people were the ones alleging it, as though he'd been unable to take the suffering of his own people seriously till it was validated by the authority of a panel of foreign experts, legitimized by a documentary narrated by a clean-shaven white man standing in front of a camera in suit and tie.” The question of authority is now a difficult one as we're wary of being manipulated, but also want to empower the real experience of individuals and resist being swayed by subliminal racial biases. This signifies a difficult modern issue we now all face that is not just to do with the act of witnessing but about the validity of what we see, who we choose to believe and how we interpret it.

Read my full review of A Passage North by Anuk Arudpragasam on LonesomeReader

[Roman Clodia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2021

... he couldn't help thinking, as the train hurtled closer toward his destination, that he'd traversed not any physical distance that day but rather some vast psychic distance inside him, that he'd been advancing not from the island's south to the north but from the south of his mind to his own distant north reaches.

There may be nothing new in equating a physical journey with a mental and emotional one, but Arudpragasam pulls it off with grace, thoughtfulness and an impressive skill. Weaving together the personal and the political, this is a narrative that is interior and introspective: there is no dialogue, we are constantly within Krishan's head, though he does recall and recreate scenes, reporting what others said.

The two themes that occupy Krishan throughout are his brief though passionate love affair with Anjum, a political activist; and a reckoning with the civil war in Sri Lanka which left him untouched, principally because of his young age, but with which he feels he needs to come to terms as part of his Tamil identity.

The Anjum strand has something of the obsessive intensity of Proust as Krishan relives the push-pull of a relationship, his own insecurities, and how to reconcile the desires of two people when a commitment to social justice requires no compromise.

The second thread deals with the wounds and traumas of civil war, something which Krishan has read about and researched but which get almost personified through the figure of Rani who has been caring for Krishan's grandmother, both older women carrying the scars of conflict.

In many ways, this is a quiet book, despite some horrific acts of violence that are recounted via Krishan's consciousness. With its recourse to poetry and literature as models for life, there's a kind of philosophical grace about the whole thing, and an interesting meditation that culminates in defining the difference between desire and yearning, and how each impact on a life lived - leading to an ending that is suffused with hope.

I toggled between the book and the audiobook (the latter thanks to W.F. Howes/NetGalley), and the audio feels especially appropriate to this introspective kind of narrative, feelingly read by Neil Shah, who keeps the pace slow enough for us to take in what is being said.

I've not been particularly excited about this year's Booker longlist or shortlist, but this is my favourite.

[Ari Levine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Shortlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize

This is a slow and ruminative novel of ideas, reminiscent of W.G. Sebald and Thomas Bernhard. Arudpragsam uses third-person narration to follow the subtle fluctuations of the mind of Krishan, a sensitive and bookish man in his mid-20s. The plot of the novel (such as it is) follows his one-way train journey from Colombo to a Tamil village in northeast Sri Lanka to attend the funeral of his grandmother's caretaker, Rani.

Along the way, fragments of his own past, his family's past, and Rani's past start rising to the surface of his consciousness, along with philosophical digressions into the nature of time, allusions to Tamil epic poetry, and allegories of the life of the Buddha. But mostly, the novel follows two mental threads, as Krishan processes the traumatic violence of the Sri Lankan Civil War (which permanently shattered Rani's psyche) and memories of the arc of his own affair with an elusive woman and fellow activist (over whom he obsesses melancholically ).

I found this incredibly moving, both emotionally and intellectually, if read at the proper speed and in a receptive frame of mind. So far, it's my second favorite of this year's Booker shortlist, after Damon Galgut's The Promise.

[But_i_thought_ · Rating 5 out of 5]

Have you ever encountered the type of read that feels like home, that lulls and soothes, inviting you to step outside of the flow of time, if only for a little bit, hitting you with the force of its revelations, the sentences unending, like an ocean, immersing you gently but kindly, in the warm embrace of its wisdom?

When such a book finds its way into your life, it is inevitably a meeting of the minds, a drawing of attention inwards, a Proustian journey through time and memory, exploring the passing of time, but even more so, those catalytic forces that lift us from the circular daydream of the everyday, that rupture the fabric of reality, briefly but decisively, whether as a result of love or grief or illness, forcing us to confront, perhaps for the first time, our neglected peripheries. For though the book is grounded in the violent history of Sri Lanka — in particular, the crimes committed by the Sri Lankan government against its Tamil citizens — it is a universal story at heart, a folding of time into prose, of trauma into language, an act which requires not only attention to silent forces, but also to ancient and mystical undercurrents, not least of all the messages inscribed in the shape of the clouds, and the invisible temples erected in our minds.

The result reads like an incantation, an act of seeing and of being seen, and a reminder of the vastness of the universe, a sense that “the world we ordinarily partake in is somehow not quite real”, and that despite our wounds and ours scars, we are still capable of this act of devotion, of attunement to the present moment, which, when transcribed in the manner that Arudpragasam has done here, becomes an experience so raw and pure, so earnest and hypnotizing, you don’t want it to end.

Mood: Meditative, mystical
Rating: 10/10

Also on Instagram.

[Matthew Ted · Rating 4 out of 5]

3rd book of 2022.

4.5. So nearly a five-star read but the novel takes some time to find its footing, or rather, took time for me to find my footing within its slow, rambling, almost Proustian sort of quality. Shy of 300 pages it's astounding to think of the novel being comprised of just 3 or so scenes in the story world's present, the rest being rambles into the past or other stories, be it the story of Siddhartha Buddha, the story of Selvarajah Yogachandran's, known as Kuttimani, imprisonment and subsequent murder, or the story of The Cloud Messenger, a Sanskrit poem. The narrator, Krishan, hears about the death of his grandmother's carer, Rani, in the beginning of the novel and the book is divided into the three parts (corresponding, loosely, I realise now, with the '3' periods of present-happening within the story) which relate to the stages of events following starting with part 1, 'Message', part 2, 'Journey' and part 3, 'Burning'. Reading part 1 I foresaw a slow but meditative read, which is what I got, but I comparatively gobbled part 2, finding it so deeply perceptive that I found myself almost alarmed at some passages that read as emotions I myself feel so strongly but have never fathomed to identify or put into words [1]. The turning point, from the vague respect but boredom of part 1, to the awe in which I read the rest, was this paragraph.

You could follow the thread of habit day in and day out, lost in studies and in work, among friends and colleagues and family, clasping this thread tightly with both hands so as not to lose your way, and then all of a sudden one morning, or afternoon or evening, sipping on a cup of tea at work or going to a friend's house on the weekend, you could come across a person or place or even an image of a person or place that suggested other possibilities, that brought to mind a completely different life, a life you might have lived or might still live, so that suddenly the life you'd been living for the last so many months or years, a life that till that very moment seemed fulfilling, satisfactory, or tolerable at least, became, with the soundless flicking of a switch, empty and hollow, lacking any connection to the person you felt you were or wanted to be.

This also gives insight into Arudpragasam's prose, which I've already described as Proustian, or you could even call it Sebaldian [2], with long sentences and long paragraphs, sometimes for pages at a time. Typically it couples perfectly with part 2, 'Journey', as Krishan sits as a passenger on a train like on this cover and his mind wanders to his ex-girlfriend, to the Tigers and the political state of Sri Lanka, and of Rani and his grandmother, subjects that continually come up time and time again throughout in a strange and obsessive circular motion like the structurally thematic circles Sebald plays with in The Rings of Saturn. And even though violence is a central part of the novel, coming up time and time again [3], the real centrepieces of the novel for me on finishing were the idea of yearning as apposed to desire and the fruitlessness of life itself, to live only to one day, die.

It also stands as a traditional tale of maturity, a portrait of the artist as a young man, as Krishan relates to his struggles with his ex-girlfriend which hold up as the more relatable and modern aspects of the novel, with sentences like this,

There was a tendency, he knew, when thinking about people from the past, to believe that they'd remained the same while you yourself had evolved, as if other people and places ceased moving once you'd left them behind, as if their time remained still while only yours continued to advance.

But in all the disappearing into the past, the stories within stories, the exploration of time, Sri Lanka's recent history, modern relationships, Rani's death, her grandmother's aging and deterioration, it all falls away and becomes a giant and consistent novel about yearning, perhaps more so than the other central theme I previously identified in the fruitlessness of life. As Krishan thinks in one of the final pages—

What he'd felt at the time was not so much desire as a kind of yearning, for though both desire and yearning were states of incompleteness, states involving a strong, sometimes overwhelming need for something outside one's life, what was called desire always had a concrete object, a notion of what was necessary to eliminate the absence one felt inside, whereas to have what was often called yearning was to feel this absence and yet not know what one sought.

—it becomes quite clear that this is a novel about being young and unsure of life's curvature. Of all the stories within the novel that add to this unifying thought, the Sanskrit poem he retells struck me the most, the man who asks a cloud to send a message to his distant lover. Once the retelling of the story is over, Krishan's thoughts continue, and his thoughts on it are where I want to end my review, as a final paragraph, to capture how the novel, in a way, feels in its entirety.

It is with this last statement that the yaksha ends his speech and the poem too comes to an end, though Krishna could never think about the poem's last lines without dwelling also on the image suggested so obliquely by its ending, the image of the yaksha looking up from that lonely mountaintop as the monsoon wind blows in from the south, the image of that desperate, homesick, divine or semidivine being watching helplessly as the cloud is ushered north, its edges slowly dissolving as it is pushed farther and farther into the distance, its bodily integrity imperceptibly dwindling and with it the message entrusted with so much longing, till finally, like the dissipation of desire into yearning, it evaporates soundlessly into the nothingness of the horizon.

_____________________________

[1] Which is perhaps a reading cliché, à la Orwell, 'The best books... are those that tell you what you know already', but it's for the first time in a long time that I've read things in a novel that do strike me as things I've felt but never thought about, or things I never expected anyone else to write about, proving to me that they are, as all things really are (another cliché), universal.

[2] And on the subject of Sebald, having just finished Angier's biography of him, it makes me wonder how much of the stories retold here throughout Krishan's wandering thoughts, sometimes directly from a book he once read or a documentary he once saw, are real books and documentaries that Arudpragasam has seen himself and whether he is using the material as Sebald himself often took from books, causing new thought-processes into what a writer is 'allowed' to 'steal', or whether they are merely invented for the purpose of his overarching story. Update: in the back of the novel on relooking, in the acknowledgements, Arudpragasam relates where the stories are from and what translations even, when referring to a book.

[3] With reports of steel rods up anuses, rods down penises, the gouging out of eyeballs. . .

[Daniel Shindler · Rating 5 out of 5]

“ A Passage North” is a quiet novel that turns inward to examine the ravages of war and the effects on the survivors.There are no passages of dialogue in this beautifully contemplative work.Instead, the story is driven forward by the internal thoughts of the narrator,Krishan, as he makes a journey of a few days to northern Sri Lanka.

Krishan is a young Tamil man living in Columbo, geographically distant from the northern part of Sri Lanka that bore the brunt of the decades long civil war. He gets a call telling him that his grandmother’s caregiver,Rani, has died during a visit to her home in northeastern Sri Lanka, prompting him to attend the funeral in her remote village.

The journey north gives Krishan a chance to reflect on his life. As he looks out of the train window, he witnesses the physical ravages wrought by the war and introspectively considers his past choices and uncertain future. Through his musings, a picture emerges of the psychological and societal costs of this long conflict.His thoughts have an underlying concern of how people can still live yet slowly become diminished in the aftermath of war. He wonders how one’s inner self can process closeness and connections to other people in the midst of so much violence.

Much of Krishan’s awareness crystallizes through his relationships with three women…his grandmother, Rani and his former lover Anjum. They are three strong women at different stages of their lives and each has reacted to grief and loss in different ways.Their life stories reveal that memory, trauma and action have determined the arcs of their lives as they cope with longing and displacement.

The author’s prose is intricately detailed and creates a novel that is political in its condemnation of war and philosophical in its delineation of the resultant life choices in war’s aftermath.These elements create a elegy to the lives lost in this war and a paean to those who have survived and are left behind to cope with the devastation.Their memories will linger in my thoughts.

[Hugh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2021

When the Booker longlist was announced earlier this week, this book was the one that jumped out at me as the most interesting looking surprise, and on the whole it did not disappoint me. It does rather contradict Rowan Williams' comments about picking readable books - while this is not a very difficult book, it certainly demands concentration, as it is written in fairly long sentences and paragraphs, and is a little short of plot, as much of it is written from a perspective inside the mind of its protagonist Krishan.

Arudprasagam is a Sri Lankan Tamil who has also lived in America and India, so it is perhaps inevitable that the island's long civil war and its aftermath are important themes, but for the most part he is not focused on the details of the war or any of its bloodier incidents.

The foreground story occupies just a few days in the life of Krishan, who lives in Colombo with his mother and grandmother. At the start he receives two messages, a short message from Anjum, a woman who he had an intense affair with as a student in Delhi and who is now involved in radical campaigning in the Indian state of Jharkand. The second is a phone call informing him that the grandmother's former carer Rani, a northern Tamil who has never recovered from the trauma of losing two sons in the latter stages of the war, has died after falling into a well in her village.

The remainder of the book follows Krishan's train journey north to attend Rani's funeral, but this is almost just a peg on which to hang his life story, as he has plenty of time to reminisce and reflect, notably on his relationship with Anjum but also on his political interests. There are also recollections of Hindu legends and epic poems, and what is perhaps most impressive is the way the author can spend so much time inside the head of his protagonist without making the book unreadable.

Overall this made for an interesting start to my longlist reading, but I would be quite surprised if this one wins.

[John Gilbert · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was not an easy read by any means. Sometimes beautifully written, sometimes tedious. I'm not a fan of books where there is no dialogue, paragraphs are pages long and some sentences went on with as many as 25 commas in them. Whatever happened to good grammar rules we learned in English classes, run on sentences were bad, break them up.

The story itself is heartbreaking, reviewing the horrible times during and in the end of the Tamil uprising in Sri Lanka. The narrator is a Tamil man, returning to the North of Sri Lanka for the funeral of his grandmother's carer, who lost both her sons towards the end of the brutal finish to the war. Having travelled myself to Sri Lanka in the late 90's, when the 'troubles' were still very much happening, the North of the country was inacessible, there were roadblocks throughout the country and the real fear of bombings or violence was present. The story of the brutality exhibited by both sides during this time, is heartbreaking, especially by the 'winning' Sinalese side.

I just wish this Brooker shortlisted novel was told in a more readible way, as it became a slog at times, but it could also be powerful.

[Neil · Rating 4 out of 5]

I came to this novel because of its inclusion on the 2021 Booker Prize longlist. I have to confess to complete ignorance of this author and this book so I went into it not knowing what to expect. It took me a few pages to get into the style, but once I did, the whole book was a pleasure to read.

What is it that might take a few pages to get used to? Firstly, this is a very reflective, interior novel that describes the thoughts and emotions of a young man. It has to be said that not much happens in the book, so don’t come to it expecting a detailed plot and story arc. In essence, a man receives two pieces of news (an email and a phone call), makes a train journey, and attends a funeral. That’s what happens, but saying it out loud here is not a spoiler because this book isn’t about plot. It’s also a discursive novel consisting of lots of long (and beautifully written) sentences: you have to concentrate as you read because it can sometimes be tricky to remember how you got to the topic you are reading about - there were several points where I had to skip back a few pages to see what it was that had reminded our protagonist of something and set him off thinking about the current ideas in his head. Thirdly, although people talk to one another, there is no dialogue in this book and all the spoken words are just reported speech: this creates its own atmosphere in the book which seems to fit very well with the overall tone.

For context, the novel is set in Sri Lanka a few years after the defeat of the Tamil Tigers. Large parts of the narrative concern the impact of that fighting and its legacy.

If you are prepared to concentrate a bit and don’t mind a novel where not much action happens, then this is a very luxurious experience. It sort of feels like you are being taken on a journey in the first class compartment when you are used to travelling second or third class: everything feels that bit more comfortable, that bit smoother. There are lots and lots of beautifully put together sentences and I think that it is the writing here that will stick with me most even though it was interesting to learn a bit more about Sri Lanka along the way.

For my personal tastes, I hope this novel takes the next step onto the Booker shortlist. My thanks to the publisher for an ARC via NetGalley.

[Kendra · Rating 1 out of 5]

I read and read and read this and felt like I was swimming against a current of words and meaningless disconnection and and minute detail. I realize that perhaps all types of writing aren't for me, and this is an example. I am certain other readers will love it, but my primary emotion was being relieved I was done with it.

[Joy D · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a beautifully written, introspective book that follows the thoughts of protagonist Krishan. It is set in Sri Lanka and contains only the barest thread of a plot. His grandmother’s caretaker, Rani, has died after traveling back to her home in northern Sri Lanka. Krishan journeys by train from Colombo to attend the funeral. Rani has experienced multiple tragedies in her life, including the violent deaths of two sons in the country’s civil war. As Krishan travels, he remembers people and events that have had a lasting impact on him and the people he loves.

Krishan’s thoughts address many aspects of life, such as love, loss, grief, aging, death, desire, yearning, and memory. He recalls the violence that changed so many lives. His thoughts return regularly to three women: his mother, grandmother, and his first love. He thinks about the war and its lingering impact a decade later. It is a philosophical book that examines the aftermath of the country’s civil war and how we spend our time on this earth.

I am amazed at the author’s ability to capture nuances, subtleties, and interpretations of what is seen, heard, and felt. Krishan’s thoughts flow from one topic to the next, as thoughts tend to do. I felt totally immersed in this story. I stopped several times just to contemplate. It is not one to rush through. I will definitely re-read this novel and can envision it winning literary prizes.

“Waking up each morning we follow by circuitous routes the thread of habit, out of our homes, into the world, and back to our beds at night, move unseeingly through familiar paths, one day giving way to another and one week to the next, so that when in the midst of this daydream something happens and the thread is finally cut, when, in a moment of strong desire or unexpected loss, the rhythms of life are interrupted, we look around and are quietly surprised to see that the world is vaster than we thought.”

The audio book is narrated by Neil Shah. His narration is quiet, almost somber, and fits the content. I listened to it twice and feel audio is a great vehicle for digesting the lengthy, stream-of-consciousness style sentences.