Anuk Arudpragasam’s The Story of a Brief Marriage

I reviewed Anuk Arudpragasam’s The Story of a Brief Marriage for PopMatters. Here is an excerpt from the review:

It seems wrong, somehow, that some reviewers on Goodreads and elsewhere have pointed out that this novel is too thoughtful and does not teach the readers about the war in Sri Lanka or give detailed descriptions of what one expects to be the correct image of a refugee in a war camp. Writers of fiction are not obliged to teach the reader anything; novels are an act of imagination that ideally should spur the reader to learn more about the social and political contexts in which it’s set on their own. To say that a thoughtful and introspective, reflective tone is an inaccurate description of a person in the midst of war also reveals a limited and perhaps even condescending worldview; one that assumes that people in dire straits somehow continually exist in a state of animal-like barbarity that precludes thinking and feeling in ways that the reader might recognise. There is a need, on the part of the well-adjusted reader reading about the horrors of life from a position of relative comfort, for a certain degree of suffering that they can pass judgment on and deem sufficient; it enables them to give themselves, as readers of harrowing things, a pat on the back.

Arudpragasam has bypassed the usual conventions of writing about war. This book is small in scope, distilled into the course of one day featuring a single and singular point-of-view. This is a novel of integrity, in the sense that Virginia Woolf refers to in A Room of One’s Own: “What one means by integrity, in the case of the novelist, is the conviction that he gives one that this is the truth. Yes, one feels, I should never have thought that this could be so; I have never known people behaving like that. But you have convinced me that so it is, so it happens.” This book affords its characters, especially the central character through whom we see this slice of war-ravaged world, dignity.

The full review is available here.

 

Addendum to Coca-Colanisation

I wrote a brief post about Coca-Cola in Sri Lanka a few months ago and came across this picture by Yannik Willing. It’s part of his ongoing photography series titled “Before Tomorrow”, which in his website he describes as a project that is concerned with “the imminent radical changes of tourist regions in Sri Lanka after the end of the civil war in 2009 that had lasted almost thirty years.”

It’s a perfect picture, I think, because the war is over but the army apparatus is ubiquitous in most of the places we visited in Sri Lanka—almost as prevalent as the Coca-Cola signs.

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Coca-Colanisation

I came across the piece “Coca-Cola in Africa” a few days ago and was reminded instantly of one of the many observations I made while travelling through multiple cities and towns in Sri Lanka: Coca-Cola is everywhere. Well, not everywhere everywhere, but almost. This post on the ubiquity of Coca-Cola in Kenya (both in branding and in business) is interesting because it frames it within the “corporate responsibility” framework, which no doubt is one way of looking at it. Meanwhile, in full-on responsible mode, Coca-Cola will do the heroic thing of changing its recipe to avoid giving you cancer.

As for Coca-Cola in Sri Lanka, people I asked didn’t really have an answer for the prevalence of the brand name everywhere beyond, “Well, it’s Coca-Cola!” (The people I asked being mainly extended/distant relatives. Clearly, I need new relatives.) No matter, back in 2010 Coca-Cola was “excited” by Sri Lanka’s potential. Post-war economies are so exciting, etc.!

Also, I thought I took plenty of pictures of Coca-Cola in Sri Lanka, but I could only find three. Clearly this was a case of “I need to take a picture of that Coca-Cola sign and I am going to do it right no–OOOH LOOK AT THAT BIG SHINY BUDDHA!” because I have about a kabillion Buddha pictures but not enough Coca-Cola signage.

Coca-Cola in Colombo

Coca-Cola in Jaffna

Coca-Cola in Trincomalee

Also, Panadol branding everywhere. Again, I thought I had taken pictures of Panadol-everywhere-in-Sri-Lanka but it turns out I have only one:

Panadol in Jaffna

I always thought that you shouldn’t mix your Panadol with your Coca-Cola, but the good folk of Yahoo! Answers say, no, go right ahead.

Apropos of nothing, a goat, pretending not to know me.

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