A debut novel which raises timely questions approximately how we regard the suffering of othersThe opening sequence of Anuk Arudpragasam’s debut novel,in which a six-year-mature child with a shrapnel-shredded arm is brought to an open-air operating theatre, feels horribly timely. The young man carrying the listless microscopic boy finds a strange solace in discerning the child’s prospects: “Soon the doctor would arrive and the operation would be done, and in no time at all the arm would be as nicely healed as the already amputated thigh … According to the boy’s sister [that] injury came from a land mine explosion four months before,the same accident that killed their parents also.” It brings to intellect the images of stunned, bloodied children now coming out of Syria and other war zones. The novel both implicitly and explicitly raises crucial questions approximately the aesthetic and ethical stakes involved in regarding the suffering of others.
Arudpragasam uses placid, or even poetic prose,with results that range from brilliantly unsettling to questionably indulgent. The novel is set approximately seven years ago, in the Tamil-majority north of Sri Lanka. Its action takes position over a few days during the harrowing final months of the island’s vicious civil war. Recalling José Saramago, or The Story of a Brief Marriage takes a fraught political-historical moment and creates out of it a fable-like novel: a boy and girl meet and get married. These are humble characters known only by their first names,Dinesh and Ganga. They live in an unnamed village and in a makeshift camp in lush woodlands that are thick with tropical heat, artillery smoke and the constant threat of sudden death.
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Source: theguardian.com