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Summary
Summary
SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE * A young man journeys into Sri Lanka's war-torn north in this searing novel of longing, loss, and the legacy of war from the author of The Story of a Brief Marriage .
"A novel of tragic power and uncommon beauty."--Anthony Marra
"One of the most individual minds of their generation . "-- Financial Times
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY TIME AND NPR
A Passage North begins with a message from out of the blue: a telephone call informing Krishan that his grandmother's caretaker, Rani, has died under unexpected circumstances--found at the bottom of a well in her village in the north, her neck broken by the fall. The news arrives on the heels of an email from Anjum, an impassioned yet aloof activist Krishnan fell in love with years before while living in Delhi, stirring old memories and desires from a world he left behind.
As Krishan makes the long journey by train from Colombo into the war-torn Northern Province for Rani's funeral, so begins an astonishing passage into the innermost reaches of a country. At once a powerful meditation on absence and longing, as well as an unsparing account of the legacy of Sri Lanka's thirty-year civil war, this procession to a pyre "at the end of the earth" lays bare the imprints of an island's past, the unattainable distances between who we are and what we seek.
Written with precision and grace, Anuk Arudpragasam's masterful novel is an attempt to come to terms with life in the wake of devastation, and a poignant memorial for those lost and those still living.
Author Notes
Anuk Arudpragasam was born in Colombo, Sri Lanka. He studied philosophy in the United States, receiving a doctorate at Columbia University. 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. He currently divides his time between India and Sri Lanka.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
A young man ruminates about Sri Lankan history and his own life in the introspective latest from Arudpragasam (The Story of a Brief Marriage). After leaving a PhD program in India and spending two years as an NGO worker in Sri Lanka following the end of the civil war, Krishan returns home to live with his mother and frail paternal grandmother in Colombo. He then learns that his grandmother's caretaker, Rani, has fallen into a well and died while visiting her family in the north. As Krishan wrestles with the appropriate response to the news, he also mulls over an email from Anjum, a bisexual Indian ex-girlfriend with whom he shared an intense relationship. Krishan decides to travel north for Rani's funeral, and reflects on Rani's life as the mother of two sons killed in the war, while he still fixates on his time with Anjum. He interrupts these reminiscences with lengthy summaries of poems and a documentary film, the latter providing historical background on the civil war in a way that sometimes feels forced. Overall, though, the elegant descriptions of Krishan's sentiments helps smooth over the slow pace and spare plot (on cigarettes: "the present more bearable even when he wasn't smoking because it meant the present was leading to something good"). Readers who enjoy contemplative, Sebaldian narratives will appreciate this. Agent: Anna Stein, ICM Partners. (July)
Booklist Review
In his second novel, Arudpragasam uses a deeply introspective and philosophical lens to examine themes of war, displacement, and grief, as he did in his first novel, The Story of a Brief Marriage (2016). Krishan has returned home to Sri Lanka to help his mother take care of his grandmother. On the heels of receiving an unexpected correspondence from Anjum, with whom he had a brief but intense affair, Krishan hears from the daughter of his grandmother's former caretaker, Rani, who informs him that Rani died in a tragic accident. Heading north by train to pay his respects, toward the lands devastated by the Sri Lankan civil war, Krishan reflects on his relationship with Anjum and Rani's life, which was marked by tragedy, losing both her sons to the war. He uses poetry, literature, and film to sift through his feelings, and his detailed retellings result in several stories within the story. Long, contemplative passages make this best suited for those who relish lovely writing and philosophical musings, who will thoroughly enjoy it.
Guardian Review
For almost 30 years, the beautiful teardrop-shaped island of Sri Lanka was divided by a terrible civil war. It had its roots in an ethnic conflict between the island's largely Buddhist, Sinhala-speaking population in the south and the Tamil minority in the north. In 2009 the war came to a bloody and unexpected end when Sri Lankan government forces attacked and overwhelmed the rebel-held north. Anuk Arudpragasam, a Sri Lankan writer of Tamil heritage, wrote his first novel, The Story of a Brief Marriage, about a young Tamil couple who are trying to survive in a shrinking northern enclave as the government forces close in around them. He returns to the same landscape for his second novel, A Passage North, the action of which takes place in the years following the government victory. Having studied in India, Tamil Krishan has come back to the island. He is working at an NGO in Colombo and living with his mother and ailing grandmother in the family home. As the novel opens, he gets word that his grandmother's former carer, a woman named Rani, has died violently. Rani had recently moved back to the conquered north; she was traumatised by the war, in which she lost two of her children. Is her death an accident? Suicide? Murder? Krishan decides to go to the funeral. At almost the same moment, he gets an email from his former girlfriend, an Indian activist called Anjum, whom he still loves. The trip thus becomes a twofold journey: a geographical one to the flat, palm-studded landscape of Sri Lanka's north and a psychic one into the trauma of war and Krishan's own past. Just as in The Story of a Brief Marriage, the author unwinds his story in long flowing sentences that are stretched with participial phrases and subordinate clauses. This is Krishan recalling the beginning of his relationship with Anjum: "They did in fact meet a few days later, this time at his flat rather than hers, and this second night too had gone the way of the first, the two of them again hardly sleeping, again moving in and out of those different modes of bliss, and again followed, not long afterward, by a kind of anxiety, less this time about whether he'd actually felt what he remembered feeling or even about whether Anjum had felt the same way, but about whether, rather, what they'd experienced together could possibly continue, whether it wouldn't somehow just vanish into thin air." I suspect this kind of prose divides readers. Precision or preciousness? Pitch-perfect evocation of the bliss and insecurity of new romance, or a wordy descent into near-cliche? "An exquisite form of noticing," gushes Colm Tóibín on the jacket. "Fine writing," said Jorge Luis Borges, "a beginner's mistake." At his best, Arudpragasam is a patient and meticulous observer. He evokes the physical environment, the clanking train that takes Krishan north, the conquered Tamil territories, Rani's funeral rites. He is also good on less concrete things: the colourism of the subcontinent; the misogyny Anjum encounters on the Delhi metro; the lingering hostility towards Tamils in Colombo after the war. But on many occasions, the book's rhetorical flourishes seem like swirls of dry ice masking an insubstantial story and unclear motivation. Why, in fact, does Krishan feel the need to go to his grandmother's carer's funeral? What's at stake for him? What possible change can he undergo? And while the setup hints at tantalising possibilities, in the end Rani's violent death turns out not to be a mystery to be solved, but the opportunity for another disquisition on memory, chance and trauma. In The Story of a Brief Marriage Dinesh and his new wife, Ganga, are in the thick of the action, menaced by Sri Lankan government forces and trying to scratch together some kind of existence. It gives the book a desperate energy. But in A Passage North Krishan is a frustratingly passive protagonist. He does a lot of wondering and remembering; he smokes spliffs, and has some sex, but no real agency. Among people who have experienced so much struggle and trauma, Krishan seems drifting, inconsequential and oddly self-important. He ends up overshadowed by the more dynamic minor figures who crop up in the narrative: his charismatic lover Anjum and poor bereaved Rani; the Tamil nationalist leader Kuttimani; the suicide bombers Puhal and Dharshika. Krishan never meets these last two characters. They appear in a documentary film that he is obsessed with and discusses at length with Anjum. They are real people - you can see them here - and their affection for each other and readiness to sacrifice themselves provoke all sorts of questions as Krishan watches them in the film. "It was hard not to wonder, listening to her as she spoke, how such a person was possible and how she'd come to be, what experiences and what inner affinities had led down this path so different from those taken by other men and women her age, a path that was headed so clearly toward death and the total extinction of consciousness it brought but that she followed, nevertheless, with such ease and confidence, as though she couldn't wait to reach its end." The work of wondering how such a person as Puhal was possible and how she'd come to be seems like one of the things that novelists are supposed to do for us. But the detail and particularity of memorable fiction requires a form of wondering that is both deeper and less abstract than this. The frustration of A Passage North is that it gives us glimpses of extraordinary characters, but focuses its imaginative energy on the sophomoric musings of its hero.
Kirkus Review
Arudpragasam, whose first novel, The Story of a Brief Marriage, made a critical splash in 2016, is back with an intelligent, quite often moving novel of meditation and aftermath. The plot of this book, conventionally speaking, would fit on a cocktail napkin: Krishan, a young Sri Lankan man who lives in the southern city of Colombo and works for a nongovernmental organization there, receives a phone call; takes a long walk, during which he stops to smoke a few cigarettes; makes the titular train journey into the recently war-ravaged north, during which he recalls a love affair now over; attends a village funeral. That's it. And yet the novel is charged throughout with tension and excitement. Part of that derives from Arudpragasam's fierce intelligence and his total commitment to plumbing Krishan's psyche, to following his thoughts patiently, relentlessly, with exquisite subtlety. Not many writers can successfully invite comparison to W.G. Sebald's slow, inward, thoughtful--yet somehow pulse-pounding--novels, but Arudpragasam can and does. The rest of the novel's tension comes from the powerfully evoked historical context. This isn't just the aftermath of a love now over, or of a young man's idealistic early 20s, or even of the life of a grandmother's caretaker now dead in what appears to be an accidental fall down a well (the funeral to which Krishan is headed); beneath them all, agitating the water to which the book returns again and again, is the long, still-rippling wake of Sri Lanka's bloody three-decade civil war, in which the grandmother's caretaker, Rani, lost both her sons (and in which Krishan's father was killed). The result, if such a thing be possible, is a novel of philosophic suspense, one whose reader shivers in anticipation not of what will happen next but of where the next thought will lead. A luminously intelligent, psychologically intricate novel--slow in always rewarding ways. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Arudpragasam's first novel, The Story of a Brief Marriage, set during the Sri Lankan Civil War, intimately detailed the life of a newlywed couple nurturing a matrimonial bond during a prolonged and violent conflict. Taking place over the course of a single day, the novel illuminated the beauty of our ephemeral existence. Here, Arudpragasam processes the war's lingering effects through Krishan, who must travel to Sri Lanka's Northern Province to attend the funeral of his grandmother's caretaker. The story unfolds exclusively through Krishan's memories and musings while he sits on a train speeding through scarred terrain. Ruminating on his family's experience of the war, the Tamil diaspora and its creation of silent communities of trauma spread across the globe, and his limited knowledge of Sri Lanka's history, Krishan philosophically ponders the permanence of grief passed down through generations. Arudpragasam's writing is purposefully dense, intentionally layering tangential stories with minute details to illuminate the interconnectedness of past and present. VERDICT Intricately written prose that navigates sorrow, exclusion, and national identity.--Joshua Finnell, Colgate Univ., Hamilton, NY
Excerpts
Excerpts
1 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. Standing there before the window of his room, looking out through the dust-coated pane of glass at the empty lot next door, at the ground overrun by grasses and weeds, the empty bottles of arrack scattered near the gate, it was this strange sense of being cast outside time that held Krishan still he tried to make sense of the call he'd just received, the call that had put an end to all his plans for the evening, the call informing him that Rani, his grandmother's former caretaker, had died. He'd come home not long before from the office of the NGO at which he worked, had taken off his shoes and come upstairs to find, as usual, his grandmother standing outside his room, waiting impatiently to share all the thoughts she'd saved up over the course of the day. His grandmother knew he left work between five and half past five on most days, that if he came straight home, depending on whether he took a three-wheeler, bus, or walked, he could be expected at home between a quarter past five and a quarter past six. His timely arrival was an axiom in the organization of her day, and she held him to it with such severity that she would, if there was ever any deviation from the norm, be appeased only by a detailed explanation, that an urgent meeting or deadline had kept him at work longer than usual, that the roads had been blocked because of some rally or procession, when she'd become convinced, in other words, that the deviation was exceptional and that the laws she'd laid down in her room for the operation of the world outside were still in motion. He'd listened as she talked about the clothes she needed to wash, about her conjectures on what his mother was making for dinner, about her plans to shampoo her hair the next morning, and when at last there was a pause in her speech he'd begun to shuffle away, saying he was going out with friends later and wanted to rest awhile in his room. She would be hurt by his unexpected desertion, he knew, but he'd been waiting all afternoon for some time alone, had been waiting for peace and quiet so he could think about the email he'd received earlier in the day, the first communication he'd received from Anjum in so long, the first attempt she'd made since the end of their relationship to find out what he was doing and what his life now was like. He'd closed the browser as soon as he finished reading the message, had suppressed his desire to pore over and scrutinize every word, knowing he'd be unable to finish his work if he let himself reflect on the email, that it was best to wait till he was home and could think about everything undisturbed. He'd talked with his grandmother a little more--it was her habit to ask more questions when she knew he wanted to leave, as a way of postponing or prolonging his departure--then watched as she turned reluctantly in to her room and closed the door behind her. He'd remained in the vestibule a moment longer, had then gone to his room, closed the door, and turned the key twice in the lock, as if double-bolting the door would guarantee him the solitude he sought. He'd turned on the fan, peeled off his clothes, then changed into a fresh T-shirt and pair of shorts, and it was just as he'd lain down on his bed and stretched out his limbs, just as he'd prepared himself to consider the email and the images it brought to the surface of his mind, that the phone in the hall began to ring, its insistent, high-pitched tone invading his room through the door. He'd sat up on the bed and waited a few seconds in the hope it would stop, but the ringing had continued without pause. Slightly annoyed, deciding to deal with the call as quickly as possible, brusquely if necessary, he'd gotten up and made his way to the hall. The caller had introduced herself, somewhat hesitantly, as Rani's eldest daughter, an introduction whose meaning it had taken him a few seconds to register, not only because he'd been distracted by the email but also because it had been some time since the thought of his grandmother's caretaker Rani had crossed his mind. The last time he'd seen her had been seven or eight months before, when she had left to go on what was supposed to have been just a four- or five-day trip to her village in the north. She had gone to make arrangements for the five-year death anniversary of her younger son, who'd been killed by shelling on the penultimate day of the war, then to attend the small remembrance that would be held the day after by survivors at the site of the final battle, which was only a few hours by bus from where she lived. She'd called a week later to say she would need a little more time, that there were some urgent matters she needed to attend to before returning--they'd spent more money than planned on the anniversary, apparently, and she needed to go to her son-in-law's village to discuss finances with her daughter and son-in-law in person, which wouldn't take more than a day or two. It was two weeks before they heard back from her again, when she called to say she'd gotten sick, it had been raining and she'd caught some kind of flu, she'd told them, would need just a few more days to recover before making the long journey back. It had been hard to imagine Rani seriously affected by flu, for despite the fact that she was in her late fifties, her large frame and substantial build gave the impression of someone exceptionally robust, not the kind of person it was easy to imagine laid low by a common virus. Krishan could still remember how on New Year's Day the year before, when they'd been boiling milk rice in the garden early in the morning, one of the three bricks that propped up the fully laden steel pot had given way, causing the pot to tip, how Rani had without any hesitation bent down and held the burning pot steady with her bare hands, waiting, without any sign of urgency, for him to reposition the brick so she could set the pot back down. If she hadn't yet returned it couldn't have been that she was too weak or too sick for the ride back home, he and his mother had felt, the delay had its source, more likely, in the strain of the anniversary and the remembrance on her already fragile mental state. Not wanting to put unnecessary pressure on her they'd told her not to worry, to take her time, to come back only when she was feeling better. Appamma's condition had improved dramatically since she'd come to stay with them and she no longer needed to be watched every hour of the day and night, the two of them would be able to manage without help for a few more days. Excerpted from A Passage North: A Novel by Anuk Arudpragasam All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
