![]() ![]() ![]() The last member of his family still alive, Dinesh does not expect to survive long himself. Young Dinesh is part of the Tamil population being harried to the sea by the army as the desperate rebels of the Tamil insurgency try to co-opt every last civilian in the battle. The character Dinesh, whose thoughts these are, is a young man, as is the author, 28, but there’s nothing very youthful or contemporary about either the language or the thought. “Didn’t dying in the end mean being separated from other humans, after all, from the sea of human gaits, gestures, noises and gazes in which for so many years one had floated, didn’t it mean abandoning the possibility of connecting with another human that being among others always afforded?” The voice speaking is alien, not one of the “us” we are accustomed to hear in English language novels, including those coming from Asia. It’s written in English, a lyrical, plain, slightly odd English that immediately drew me in. Anuk Arudpragasam’s The Story of a Brief Marriage (2016) is a first novel by a young Sri Lankan about the final months of his country’s long civil war that ended in 2009. ![]()
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