Anuk Arudpragasam’s debut, The Story of a Brief Marriage, was set during the final months of Sri Lanka’s civil war. This second novel, longlisted for this year’s Booker prize, inhabits a haunted, uneasy peacetime. There is a restlessness — not to its subdued, ruminative writing, but in its drawn-out descriptions of physical and introspective journeys.
It begins in existentialist reverie. Krishan has been tugged from his day-to-day “thread of habit” by a telephone call informing the family that his grandmother’s depressed carer, Rani, has died. Earlier Krishan received an email from his former girlfriend Anjum, an activist he met during abandoned postgraduate studies in Delhi. On a walk along Colombo’s Marine Drive, and then on the long journey to Rani’s funeral, Krishan considers how he recruited Rani after encountering her in a hospital he visited through his NGO work. He also reflects on his intimate relationship with Anjum. Individual and collective trauma is explored.
Arudpragasam, a Sri Lankan Tamil, holds a doctorate in philosophy, and this is a politicised, profoundly contemplative novel, more akin to Albert Camus’ The Plague than most contemporary fiction. Concentration is required: Arudpragasam often writes in dense, discursive sentences of 80 words or more. But there is rare beauty in the novel’s evocation of scarred physical and emotional landscapes, and a deeply considered effort to explore the interior life.
A Passage North by Anuk Arudpragasam
Granta £14.99 pp290
