In a moving, elegant reading of Ashvaghosha’s “The Life of Buddha,” Krishan elevates Rani’s trauma, and thus the suffering of so many like her, to Siddhartha’s disillusionment. But in long digressions on various Tamil and Sanskrit poems, he claims another literary heritage. His resemblance to those writers is only more pronounced in this novel. “The Story of a Brief Marriage” earned Arudpragasam comparisons to W. But, more often, because he precedes these claims with such precise observation, they feel revelatory. Sometimes sentences strain under this heavy burden.

The bombs may have stopped, the capital may be thriving, but for those in the country’s ethnic minority, recovery can only be “partial and ambiguous.”Īrudpragasam also makes numerous sweeping, universal statements about the human condition and what we share with even those who seem most distant from us. Arudpragasam captures Krishan’s sensitive, roving intelligence as he meditates on the conflict, from its idealistic beginnings, when insurgents dreamed of an independent Tamil state, to its “ unimaginable violence” and irreparable psychological damage. The self-loathing that attends this guilt is both cause and result of Krishan’s enduring obsession with the war. Middle-class and highly educated, Krishan is “possessed by guilt for having been spared” the fate of people like Dinesh. “A Passage North” takes a longer and more distant view of the conflict, which raged from 1983 to 2009. In this novel, to listen and to notice are moral acts.Īrudpragasam’s mesmerizing debut, “ The Story of a Brief Marriage,” narrated a single day in the life of Dinesh, a displaced Tamil man living in a refugee camp. Krishan, like Arudpragasam, sees it as his duty to fathom her unfathomable anguish.

Rani, who died suddenly and possibly by suicide, was “irretrievably traumatized” by the loss of both of her sons - the first lost his life fighting for the Tigers, and the second, only 12 years old, was killed by shrapnel on the penultimate day of the war.

A Passage North by Anuk Arudpragasam