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Summary
Summary
In the tradition of In the Time of the Butterflies and The Kite Runner , a tender, evocative novel about the years leading up to the Sri Lankan civil war
* A Library Journal Best Indie Fiction of 2013 * A Largehearted Boy Best Book of the Year *
On the day the Herath family moves in, Sal Mal Lane is still a quiet street, disturbed only by the cries of the children whose triumphs and tragedies sustain the families that live there. As the neighbors adapt to the newcomers in different ways, the children fill their days with cricket matches, romantic crushes, and small rivalries. But the tremors of civil war are mounting, and the conflict threatens to engulf them all.
In a heartrending novel poised between the past and the future, the innocence of the children--a beloved sister and her overprotective siblings, a rejected son and his twin sisters, two very different brothers--contrasts sharply with the petty prejudices of the adults charged with their care. In Ru Freeman's masterful hands, On Sal Mal Lane , a story of what was lost to a country and her people, becomes a resounding cry for reconciliation.
Author Notes
Ru Freeman is the author of A Disobedient Girl . She is an activist and journalist whose work appears internationally. She calls both Sri Lanka and America home.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Political activist and journalist Freeman's second novel (after A Disobedient Girl) is set in early '80s Colombo, Sri Lanka, at the start of the civil war between the Sinhalese government and Tamil Tigers. Sal Mal Lane, named for its trees, is home to Tamils, Sinhalese, and mixed-race Burgher families whose children, aware of what separates them, still enjoy a normal life (cricket matches, romantic longings, a musical show), though Freeman never lets it be forgotten that tragedy looms. The Sinhalese Herath children take piano lessons with a Tamil teacher and befriend her ailing father. The strange Raju, a young Tamil man, looks after Devi, the youngest Herath-a neighborhood favorite. The Silva family's two boys want to join the army to fight the Tigers, and Tamil boy Sonna Bolling feels so alienated that he falls in with thugs. When violence finally arrives, Sonna tries to stop it but is instead blamed-with devastating consequences. Sustaining adult interest in young protagonists is Harper Lee-hard, and had this saga-which is three-quarters foreboding, one-quarter violent, heartbreaking denouement-been more concise, it could almost have been called a masterpiece. Agent: Julie Barer, Barer Literary. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
In July of 1983, volatile tension in Sri Lanka between the Sinhalese majority and Tamil minority erupted in a series of armed attacks and violent riots. Freeman, who situated her first novel, A Disobedient Girl (2009), amid life on the island nation of her birth, here explores more intimately the country's complex social and political dynamics. We enter the fray in the years leading up to Black July, and we see the effects of civil unrest on the inhabitants of Sal Mal Lane, an otherwise quiet neighborhood. Family ties begin to dissolve as the Sinhalese Silvas try to win over the newly arrived Heraths, Catholic nuns scold schoolchildren for name-calling, and the bin Ahmeds observe Ramadan with increasing caution. Freeman's gift for verisimilitude is manifest with searing clarity: ivy crawling over glass-crowned walls, wax-paper lanterns alighting, the bulbous trunks and bursting orange bulbs that give the lane its name. And in fictionalizing Sri Lankan history, Freeman accomplishes what reportage alone cannot: she blends the journalist's loyalty to fact with impassioned imagination.--Baez, Diego Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
BEFORE reading this rich, sensory novel, my literary familiarity with Sri Lanka came mostly from Michael Ondaatje's rollicking memoir, "Running in the Family." But it was enough of an introduction, with all its extravagant, hilarious dysfunctions, to pique my interest in the island nation. Ru Freeman's assured second novel is a much quieter yet rewarding portrait of a community of families on a dead-end road in Colombo, the country's capital. They are a mixed lot on Sal Mal Lane: Sinhalese, Tamils and Burghers, descendants of European colonizers. Down this road live the comfortably middle class and the dirt poor; the sick, the heartbroken and viciously prejudiced; youngsters vivacious with talent, or misshapen by abuse; and a few residents in their middle and later years who are roused by the arrival of the Heraths, a family with four lively children. It is the Heraths, and especially their children - Suren, Rashmi, Nihil and little Devi - who are at the heart of this generous story. Freeman seems to suggest throughout that no one on this lane is wholly bad, only scarred by hurt and misunderstanding. And though we are privy to the inner lives of the adults and their litany of sorrows - Old Mrs. Joseph's husband committed suicide over an adulterous affair; her son, Raju, is a deformed, would-be bodybuilder; the Boilings, barely scraping by, are plagued by a past calamity - and we receive periodic news of growing political turmoil in the country, Freeman never strays far from the neighborhood's youngest inhabitants. They are wondrous to behold, with their intelligence, imagination and innocence. I don't know that I've seen children more opulently depicted in fiction since Dickens. "They stood together even when they were apart," Freeman writes. "There was never a single Herath child in a conversation, there were four; every word uttered, every challenge made, every secret kept, together." The youngest of the Herath siblings, Devi, is a whirlwind of energy and defiance - "the picture of impenitence." Impulsive, and with an unlucky birth date, she is the street's beloved mascot, and the source of her brother Nihil's paralyzing fear for her safety. "I want Devi to grow up to be 50 soon so I can stop worrying about her," he says. A kindly neighbor coaxes him to stop watching over Devi and return to his dreams of cricket stardom. Suren, the oldest sibling, is intent on thwarting his mother's plans for an engineering career for him in favor of a musician's life. Under his influence, even the dutiful Rashmi evolves from a miniversion of Mrs. Herath - with her "certain aura of reprobation" - to a much less compliant daughter. Their stories are brilliantly woven into the fabric of the neighborhood, changing its inhabitants forever. As she did in her graceful first novel, "A Disobedient Girl," Freeman delineates the divergent worlds of young and old with great sensitivity. Though the two groups often clash and at times awkwardly overlap, the divide is never fully breached. "Ah, the conversations between parents and children, the way they unfold, always with good intentions, rarely with complete honesty," she writes. The lane itself serves as a lushly riotous backdrop, with fragrant, shady sal mal trees and blooming roses, tumbledown walls and buses that roar down a nearby thoroughfare, including "the near-mythical 109, whose route nobody knew." It is in and around this lane that the novel leisurely unfolds, with its intermittent, small-scale urgencies, with the children's kite-flying and cricket playing, their tentative romances and grudges, their variety shows and bike riding, all heightened by their ignorance of the encroaching violence. "On Sal Mal Lane" takes place over the five years (1979-83) auguring Sri Lanka's 26-year civil war, and Freeman brings the particularities of that strife to vivid life, even if only Mr. Herath, a government official buried in his newspapers, is clued in about the turbulent times, imagining the C.I.A.'s hand in everything. Alas, the violence cannot be kept at bay forever, or so the narrator keeps reminding us, taunting us with the preordained tragedy to come. If I were to have one quarrel with the novel, it would be with this omniscient, chummy narrative voice and its distinct, often opinionated perspective ("And who, you might ask, am I? I am nothing more than the air that passed through these homes, lingering in the verandas I am the road itself, upon whose bosom the children played"). Freeman's narrator muscles her way (one suspects the narrator is female) into the tale, coloring it with too much foreshadowing, not trusting the details of the story to speak for themselves. It's as if the narrator feels insecure about her ability to hold the reader's attention without a steady stream of nudges, promises and intrusive asides. "Yes, we could blame Lucas," Freeman writes, instructing us on one character's role in the undoing of the Heraths, "but we would be wrong." Or, referring to the scant news coverage of the country's turmoil: "Their predictions of the future were nothing like the one that was coming. Not even close." Elsewhere, the narrator comments on Nihil's self-sacrificing decision to give up cricket practice in order to take care of his younger sister: "Sacrifice, no matter how pure the intention, can never guarantee outcomes, it merely lulls us into believing it can." Instead the novel soars when it permits the reader to surrender to its sensory beauty, language and humor. Who can resist the description of the bodybuilding Raju, who "usually walked with his head tilted sideways and hanging down as if he was helpfully exposing his neck to a tired executioner"? Or the unhappy achievements of his nephew-cum-nemesis, a street tough who enjoyed "cutting the clotheslines in his neighbors' backyards and rejoicing in the way everything clean turned instantly muddy." Or the "scruffy," good-natured twin sisters, Dolly and Rose, the latter whose "big dream was to break the Guinness World Record for standing on one foot . . . a task that she felt was well within her sights." Freeman is also wonderfully deft at evoking the dawning globalism of a late-20th-century childhood - the popularity in Sri Lanka of the Hardy Boys and "The Catcher in the Rye" and "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," of Bruce Lee and Muhammad Ali, and pop songs by Culture Club and ABBA, U2 and the Beatles. Led by the increasingly rebellious Suren Herath, the children on Sal Mal Lane decide to stage a variety show that bedazzles the entire neighborhood - except, of course, Mrs. Herath, who views it as both a personal betrayal and a degradation of everything she holds dear. The performances range from a traditional Kandyan dance to a rousing rendition of "Yellow Submarine." When the much-promised violence finally arrives, the fallout from the political and ethnic turmoil on the people of Sal Mal Lane is skillfully, forcefully rendered. And it is a crushing heartbreak; many crushing heartbreaks. But these tragedies might have unleashed even more poignancy and power had we been spared the novel's overbearing sense of menace, or been allowed the opportunity to question - or dare hope against - the inevitable harm. On this road live the middle class and the dirt poor; youths vivacious with talent, or misshapen by abuse. Cristina García's new novel is "King of Cuba." She teaches creative writing at Texas State University-San Marcos.
Kirkus Review
Sri Lanka erupted into violence in the 1980s, with people identifying themselves as Tamil or Sinhalese, Hindu or Buddhist, Burgher or Muslim--the conflicts brewed over language policies, territories and curfews. Against this backdrop of sociopolitical unrest, Freeman (A Disobedient Girl, 2009) sets her second novel. The inhabitants of Sal Mal Lane, like a constellation of stars, orbit around the Herath family, whose house is in the middle of the street and whose matriarch embraces the songs and customs of many religions. A devout Buddhist, she nonetheless teaches her children to sing Christian hymns in four-part harmony. Gravity draws first the attention of Mr. Niles, who discerns a troubled soul through Nihil's uncertain voice; then Sonna Bolling, a bully and political thug-in-waiting; then the Silvas, whose own matriarch embraces every bias and prejudice; and later Raju, whose ugly face belies his lovely heart. Utterly devoted to his younger sister, Devi, Nihil negotiates the world of Sal Mal Lane and beyond, learning about Mr. Niles' previous war experience, which has left him chastened, aware that racial distinctions blur, and frightened to witness the rising turmoil. Slowly, the tensions ratchet up. Sonna joins an anti-Tamil gang, and violence intrudes into everyone's lives. Yet, the event that brings everyone to their knees has nothing to do with Tamil-Sinhalese tensions and everything to do with the pointless loss of innocent life. Freeman establishes her narrator in the prologue as the air, the road, the dreams that bind her characters together. The technique may weave the characters more closely, but it also distances the narrator and the reader from woes that befall Nihil, Devi, Sonna, Raju and their families. Lovingly written, historically rich and compassionate to all sides of the turmoil, this tale is also frustratingly distant, leaving the reader sympathetic but not fully engaged.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
As in Freeman's absorbing 2009 debut, A Disobedient Girl, the intricate lives of young children also take center stage in this latest work. In 1979, the titular Sal Mal Lane is a cul-de-sac on the outskirts of Sri Lanka's largest city and former capital, Colombo. The Herath family's arrival with four young children-Suren the musician, Rashmi the singer, Nihil the cricketer, and baby Devi the favored-reshuffles friendships and alliances along the lane. Beyond the safety of this quiet enclave, the rest of the country is at an impasse: ethnic, religious, and political differences stir among a population long plagued by divisions and colonizations. War looms, and tragedy proves inevitable: "Everyone who lived on Sal Mal Lane was implicated in what happened.while this story is about small people, we must consider the fact that their history is long and accord them, too, a story equal to their past." VERDICT Dates and events ground the novel specifically in Sri Lanka, but the universal narrative of family remains borderless. As witness and storyteller, Freeman never falters, revealing "what happened" with clarity and resolve in prose both lingering and breathtaking. The result is simply stupendous.-Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
