Contemporary Authors

• The Story of a Brief Marriage ( novel) Flatiron Books (New York, NY), 2016

1. The story of a brief marriage LCCN 2016020830 Type of material Book Personal name Arudpragasam, Anuk, author. Main title The story of a brief marriage / Anuk Arudpragasam. Edition First edition. Published/Produced New York : Flatiron Books, 2016. Projected pub date 1111 Description pages cm ISBN 9781250072405 (hardback) CALL NUMBER PR9440.9.A78 S86 2016 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms

• LOC Authorities -

  LC control no.: n 2016033083

  Descriptive conventions:
  rda

  LC classification: PR9440.9.A78

  Personal name heading:
  Arudpragasam, Anuk

  Found in: The story of a brief marriage, 2016: ECIP t.p. (Anuk
  Arudpragasam) data view (from Colombo, Sri Lanka, and is
  currently completing a doctoral dissertation in
  philosophy at Columbia University. He writes in Tamil
  and English. The Story of a Brief Marriage is his first
  novel)
  June 17, 2016: (As per this title's editor, THE STORY OF A
  BRIEF MARRIAGE was originally written in English)

  ================================================================================

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS AUTHORITIES
  Library of Congress
  101 Independence Ave., SE
  Washington, DC 20540

  Questions? Contact: ils@loc.gov

• Department of Philosophy, Columbia University Web site - http://philosophy.columbia.edu/directories/student/anuk-arudpragasam

  Graduate Student | Ph.D. program in Philosophy
  Student Year:
  6th Year PhD Student (Dissertation Phase)

  Anuk is from Colombo, Sri Lanka, and graduated with a BA from Stanford University in 2010. His dissertation is about the theorization and idealization of the individual in the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson, William James, and John Dewey. He is also a writer of fiction and his first novel, The Story of a Brief Marriage, will be published by Flatiron (MacMillan) in September 2016.

• From Publisher -

  Anuk Arudpragasam is from Colombo, Sri Lanka, and is currently completing a dissertation in philosophy at Columbia University. He writes in Tamil and English. The Story of a Brief Marriage is his first novel.

• Pacific Standard - https://psmag.com/a-small-window-of-consciousness-an-interview-with-anuk-arudpragasam-d7bda5e309f2#.c58wy25a0

  ‘A Small Window of Consciousness’: An Interview With Anuk Arudpragasam

  Chatting with the Sri Lankan novelist about civil war, art, and memory.

  By Jeffrey Zuckerman
  The Temple of the Tooth in Kandy, Sri Lanka. (Photo: McKay Savage/Flickr)

  Sri Lanka is easy to pinpoint on a map — it hangs like a teardrop off the subcontinent of India — but its recent history is far more difficult to describe. The Sri Lankan Civil War stretched from 1983 to 2009, splitting the island between the Sri Lankan government and the Tamil Tigers. By the war’s end, approximately 100,000 civilians had died, and even now the northern part of the island has many areas where mine removal is underway and buildings are still in ruins.

  Even the most horrific destruction, however, can give rise to unexpected beauty. The young author Anuk Arudpragasam was raised in Colombo, near the southern end of the island and far from the war’s heaviest shelling. These days he lives in New York City, where he is completing a dissertation in philosophy, and has published a debut novel, The Story of a Brief Marriage, which reveals a focused, passionate, and artful narrative of how a man and a woman are altered by their abrupt marriage of last resort. It’s set in a refugee camp, and, from the first line — “Most children have two whole legs and two whole arms” —it’s clear that the small space Arudpragasam describes is one without walls or windows or institutions to shield the refugees from the bombs falling all around them. There are few books that reveal the emotional complexities of unending warfare so thoroughly, and The Story of a Brief Marriage seems destined to be remembered as a window into a horrific historical moment.

  The Story of a Brief Marriage feels compact and firmly grounded. Arudpragasam focuses solely on the two characters, Dinesh and Ganga, as they enter a hurried marriage, and the book’s 193 pages span just a few hours in the war. Pacific Standard got in touch with Arudpragasam to talk about growing up in Sri Lanka, the reasons that drove him to write The Story of a Brief Marriage, and his relationship to the Tamil language.

  So, you’re in Sri Lanka at the moment. How long ago did you move away?

  I first left the country when I was 18, to go to university in the United States. I’m not sure I really ever moved away from Sri Lanka or this part of the world, though, partly because I’ve always planned to return (which I will do two or three years from now), and partly because I spend several months in Sri Lanka and India every year. In any case, I sometimes feel that moving back and forth for me isn’t so much moving back and forth between two countries as it is moving back and forth between two rooms, and that the only real difference between the rooms is the scenery visible through the windows.
  (Photo: Anuk Arudpragasam)

  Did you always see the same view outside your window growing up?

  Obviously, one can’t help but be affected by the world beyond one’s windows, if one has the fortune of being protected by windows and walls. Colombo is in the south of Sri Lanka, but I’m Tamil-speaking, and both my parents are from the Jaffna peninsula in the largely Tamil northeast of Sri Lanka. As Tamils, our lives in the non-Tamil part of the country were very much affected by the Tamil separatist struggle. Socio-economically speaking, my family is, in many senses, highly privileged — we are well-off, of high caste, etc. — and because of this we were insulated from many of the difficulties that most Tamils faced and continue to face in our country. But there was still the omnipresent fear of retributional violence of some kind, of being stopped and detained for no reason at any one of the numerous army checkpoints across the city. We would avoid the Tamil language in public places and, often, various Tamil identifiers.

  The civil war lasted almost 26 years, but you left for the U.S. before it ended. I’m wondering to what degree you drew on actual experience while writing the story — if you had seen nearly everything you describe with your own eyes, or if you had to undertake research in the aftermath.

  In everything I write, I think of the elements of the external world — people, places, histories, situations, events — as a kind of anchor that allows me to get close to the elements of inner life that most interest me. The external world, at least when I am writing, is like an anchored boat from which a diver enters the water, confident that however far or deep she dives there will be a reference point on the surface to which she can safely return.

  Obviously, I chose the constraints of the Sri Lankan civil war, in large part due to my history and my position vis-à-vis my community. And, both before and while writing this novel, I did spend much time thinking about those last months of the war, traveling to the places in which it took place, listening to interviews on South Indian television with survivors, reading testimonies of survivors collected by psychiatrists and independent researchers, and, above all. dwelling silently on all the pictures and footage from this time.

  I prefer not to call this “research,” though, because the term “research” suggests that this kind of inquiry or learning is merely a means to a separate and pre-formed aim, the writing of a novel. In fact, the same impetus that impelled me to write this novel also impelled me, simultaneously, to engage in this inquiry or learning or dwelling. It was not separate, and was not conceived of as a separate process, or as a means to some other end. It came from the same impetus, which has to do, as I said, with who I am.

  When you mention focusing on “the parts of the inner life” that you’re most interested in, that reminds me you’re a graduate student in philosophy. It’s so common for fiction writers these days to have an MFA that I’m curious what pulled you toward philosophy as an academic field.

  I was drawn to philosophy long before I was drawn to literature. From a young age I’ve felt an urge to distance myself from my surroundings — particularly from the ugly, elitist Colombo that was my primary social environment — and when I was in school, reading philosophy books that I found in a bookshop close to my house helped, though I wouldn’t have been able to explain it this way at the time.

  Philosophy gave me a language to separate myself from the world around me, and also gave me a sense that this world could somehow be transcended. I engaged in it libidinously, hoping, like many fools before and after me, that by reading philosophy I could reach some kind of truth that would rid me of my dissatisfactions and satisfy my yearnings. I studied it in university assiduously, and it was only once I finished that I realized the obvious truth that philosophy, or what is called philosophy in American and English universities, can’t provide such things. The most it can do is help you articulate and understand certain aspects of life better, which isn’t anything to scoff at, though in this respect I feel it is a discipline of diminishing returns. It is enriching to study for a few years, I feel, but the more time passes the less you get out of it, and you begin to tire of its colorlessness and its austerity, and to start seek something more solid.

  About this time I read a novel, the first novel I’d read in two or three years at that point, The Man Without Qualities, by Robert Musil, and I realized that what I wanted to understand about life could be better pursued through the novel, which, unlike most philosophy, is a form of writing that begins with the conditions of actual life, and which hopes, at the most, for solace within those conditions, rather than transcendence from them. Whereas I always thought of philosophy as a means to an end it could never provide, the activity of writing has been for me an end in itself, a solace within the world, not the only solace, but an important one.

  I’m reminded of a particular way in which you’ve described yourself: “He writes in English, but his true love is the Tamil language.” Do you see each language as performing a distinct function in your daily life?

  This is very difficult for me to answer. Tamil is my mother tongue — it is the language we speak at home, and the language that holds the most emotive resonance for me. English, on the other hand, is my first language — one I had almost my entire education in, from primary school through my doctoral studies. It is the language I most often socialize in, both inside Sri Lanka and outside, and the language I’m far more adept at handling.

  About six or seven years ago, as I was beginning this novel, I started to feel it was a moral failing to write solely in English. I was coming into contact with images and videos of the war in Sri Lanka, and understanding how my community was being disenfranchised and killed. I became politicized. I came to feel suspicious of how various currents of history had shaped me and my language. English is the language of aspiration and opportunity in Sri Lanka, as in many other former British colonies, and it is taught to those of us in Sri Lanka who have the privilege, even if our parents were educated in Tamil or Sinhalese. Very few people in South Asia are capable of writing and speaking in sophisticated English, but almost all South Asian writing disseminated internationally has been originally written in English, because it is financially and institutionally supported globally.

  A language like Tamil, on the other hand, is not only not institutionally patronized outside Sri Lanka and India; it is not patronized even within Sri Lanka. It is a colonized language, colonized first by the British, and then by the Sri Lankan state; the mechanisms that helped it flourish historically were destroyed by these colonial powers. I began to feel it was my duty, as a privileged member of a community that for many centuries has been in various states of subjugation, to change my writing practice. (Not that I have any illusions about the political significance of this action.) Since then I’ve been writing in Tamil as well as English, although for the time being I am still too embarrassed by what I write in Tamil to share it with others.

  One of the most remarkable techniques in the novel is when you slow time down to practically a standstill, where each minute stretches for pages and we can’t help but hold our breath in fear that a bomb might fall and annihilate everything you’re carefully describing. How did handling time in this way allow you to tell the story you needed to tell?

  The two main characters were highly traumatized, estranged from their own minds as a result of what they’d been through, so they didn’t really have access to their thoughts and feelings. As someone engaged in trying to understand, from a very different context, what being in such a situation is like, this posed a challenge: How can you try to glean the inner life of a person cut off from their inner life? So the novel begins where it does, with an old man suggesting that Dinesh marry his daughter. This proposal forces Dinesh to come to terms with all that has happened to him, to try to become intimate again with his thoughts and feelings. The novel takes place during a small window of consciousness within a much larger period of alienation from oneself.

  I’ve been thinking about the question of time a lot recently, actually, since the novel I’m writing now takes place over an even shorter period of time, over an afternoon. In most of our ordinary life we are often without consciousness. Not necessarily cut off from our thoughts and feelings, but blind to them because our activity is so governed by routine and habit. So it is only in certain periods where we come to understand our situation in the world, I feel. Such moments or periods are bounded on both sides by more conventional time, but within these moments or periods one forgets time, and ceases to exist within it, so that such moments and periods can be thought of as being within time only retrospectively. These moments or periods aren’t uniform, obviously, but I feel they are all characterized by a certain lucidity or clarity, a quietness, a sense that that the past and the future, all of life, are perfectly contained within them.

  You asked earlier about how I thought philosophy and literature were related. I’ve long since ceased to think of truth or understanding as coming in the form of a sentence, as I did when I was a seriously interested in philosophy; more and more I’ve come to see truth or understanding as consisting in a unified and concentrated mood or orientation or state in which everything is held together. These unified and concentrated moods or orientations or states don’t usually last very long — they are usually absorbed back into the partiality, blindness, and habituality that constitutes most of life — and that is why most of my writing also is set over a short periods of time, because that is where I think of truth or understanding as being located. With The Story of a Brief Marriage, though, it is not lifeless routine and habit that blinds one to oneself but trauma.

• Los Angeles Review of Books - https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/nothing-can-done-v-v-ganeshananthan-interviews-anuk-arudpragasam/

  Nothing Can Be Done

  V. V. Ganeshananthan interviews Anuk Arudpragasam

  291
  1
  3

  OCTOBER 6, 2016

  IN HIS DEBUT NOVEL, The Story of a Brief Marriage, Anuk Arudpragasam achieves something remarkable: he shows us a consciousness reshaped by the possibility of imminent death. How do we inhabit the body when we think we may be leaving it behind? The book is set in the final stages of the Sri Lankan civil war, which trapped an unknown number of displaced Tamil civilians between the Tamil Tigers and Sri Lankan government forces. The novel details neither setting nor the conflict’s complex politics, forcing us to focus on the mind and body of Dinesh, a young Tamil man dodging militant conscription and falling government shells. When an older man asks Dinesh to marry his daughter, Ganga, Dinesh must consider his mortality, hers, and how he thinks about the world. Arudpragasam’s book is rich with metaphor and unflinching in its look at life in a war zone. It also nimbly avoids the trap of exoticizing or beautifying war.

  Arudpragasam, who is completing his dissertation in philosophy at Columbia University, grew up in Sri Lanka’s capital, Colombo. He has also spent time in the Vanni, a part of Sri Lanka’s Northern Province deeply affected by the conflict. He went to Stanford and intends to return to South Asia after completing his doctorate in philosophy. In July, we had a long conversation about Sri Lanka, the novel, and what brought him to the subject of the human condition in war.

  The conversation has been edited and condensed.

  ¤

  V. V. GANESHANANTHAN: I would love to hear how you began this novel.

  ANUK ARUDPRAGASAM: In late 2009, early 2010, a lot of photographs and media footage came up on the internet from survivors of the war — people in the northeast during the final battle and also soldiers. I was aware of this stuff vaguely and then the documentary came out, No Fire Zone. I think it was actually a response to that documentary and a subsequent mining of like media on the internet.

  The book arose very much in response to contact with this material and this dangerous history. [I was thinking about] people who are in my community and who speak my language but for historical reasons and social reasons, their lives have become very different from mine. I think [the novel] arose as an attempt to understand or try to get a little bit closer to conditions and experiences that were far from my own.

  That video and the other images and footage that started coming out after the war — it’s kind of endless actually. When did you stop looking at it, or did you ever?

  I don’t like to use the word research. That suggests you have some goal from the outset and then what’s called research is a means to get it and it’s fairly disconnected from the end. Whereas for me, there was not such a structure.

  Most war photography you come into contact with, on the internet or in museums, it’s somewhat polished, it’s aestheticized, and it feels very outside the realm of ordinary life. It’s also something you generally see in newspapers. But a lot of the photographs of what happened during the war, because they were taken by civilians on digital cameras and cell phones, they had this grainy quality and were taken from arbitrary angles. It reminds you a bit of photos you might see on social media. And because of that there was a kind of directness in those photos that was very disturbing, especially given the kind of subject matter they depicted. I must have seen that documentary at least 10 or 15 times. After a while, I started to visit the Vanni and became friends with the only psychiatrist who worked there. I chatted with him and watched him do his work and so I have spent some time in the Vanni for past four years.

  I couldn’t really say when I stopped [looking] but I realized that at a certain point, I needed to finish my novel as soon as possible because it was probably not so good for me to continue working every day on this kind of material.

  The book is interested in the relationship between the body and consciousness, between the ways that people think and make decisions, the ways that they inhabit solitude and strive for connection with other people. It’s not a plot-y book. It felt a little like The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao in that there are spoilers in the title. There is going to be a marriage. It’s going to be brief. On some level that title announces that the book is not so much concerned with what happens as is it is how it happens and what the characters think about it.

  I knew what was going to happen: they are going to die and if they don’t die their lives are going to be different from this moment on. That is the condition of most of the people [involved in the final stages of the war], they have died or they continue living but have been ruined in various ways or in ways that a lot of them can’t return from. When I was writing it there was no question of redemption or coming back, there was no question of time after this time. If there is a plot, if there is suspense, if there is possibility, [then] there is the possibility of anything other than this. To pretend there was some way out of this would be dishonest. It was static and it was pervasive and it was inescapable.

  When one becomes aware of such things happening — especially if you share a community with the people who are suffering — there is a tendency to want to do something immediately. In the same way if you are with a friend and they fall and scratch their leg and start to bleed, our immediate response is to try to do something. It’s to try to sit the person down or get a Band-Aid. It’s a natural inclination to action when one is in the presence of the pain of another person. So if that’s the natural reaction in the case of an individual, when you are watching something happen to a community, the instinctive practical response is political. How many people died? What is the UN doing about this? How did we let this happen? Why can’t we take the people to court? It’s not like I’m against such a response at all but, at least for myself, [it speaks to] a kind of desire to avoid actually inhabiting the condition of the person. These kinds of facts, and even historical facts, situate us in a place and time so rage can express itself by saying this needs to be done or that needs to be done, and I think that being given that information allows for such a response.

  By withholding information, one is forced to be put simply in the presence of such a condition. Simply to observe or be aware of the condition without being able to do anything about it. You are not able to do anything about it and all you can do is observe and try to understand.

  I think that was important to me because by the time I had seen the footage that gave rise to the novel, all these people were already dead. Their lives have been destroyed, and in a sense that was part of my consciousness when I was writing it: well, actually nothing can be done. The sense of simply having to sit and watch as if you were having your hands bound was important in writing.

  You’ve said that one of the reasons to write in close third person, through Dinesh, is that he is different from you. And yet the metaphors you reach for here, to explain things to me, are very much of a piece with how Dinesh thinks. There are a lot of beautiful metaphors in the book. Within the larger situation of the war zone and Dinesh’s life there, you create so many of these mini-situations — “as if one had,” for example, and then the narrative dips into a clarifying metaphor. I was wondering how you thought about those metaphors, given what you’ve said about the importance of inhabiting the immediacy of the condition, because of course those metaphors can also serve as an exit. Relatedly, we know very little about Dinesh’s past, and sometimes these metaphors seem to provide a more abstract alternative to backstory — a different way to access his consciousness.

  There is some distancing that happens with a metaphor or with an allegory. The logical form of an analogy or a metaphor is: There are things you don’t know, here are things you do know, let’s get to know that through this. In a way though, it is appropriate because at various points I do try to mark the fact that this is a contemplative project by an author very far away in circumstance and privilege from what he is trying to understand or know. I guess it comes too with the constant usage of “perhaps.”

  I am trying to understand [this situation] and acknowledging that I am coming at this from very far away. It was something that I wanted to be explicit.

  I am much more interested in inner lives than in situations in the external world. I think of the external world as a kind of contextual framing device. Just as a diver needs to have a ship anchored so they know where to return, that’s how I’ve thought of the external world in my writing. [It’s there] to give context but a very minimal amount of context, because what’s above the surface is really not what I am interested in.

  Why did you come to the United States?

  I was born to a very privileged high-caste family. One of the aspirational marks of the elite is speaking English, so we were sent to school for only one year in Tamil. The rest of my education was in English and I went to what’s called an international school in Sri Lanka and most of the students who are rich tend to go study abroad. It was also taken for granted that parents would be able to afford to send their children to abroad.

  I am curious about what that experience has been like for you. How, if at all, has it influenced your work?

  I am very political but I am unable to be politically engaged by happenings in the United States. I feel that the world that I am particularly engaged with is in South Asia. For example, I find myself getting very interested in and very worked up about political issues in India. India is a very exciting place to be. It’s now a colonizing nation state … but the population has been a colonized population for the last four or five hundred years. It’s a place now that is beginning to have resources to understand itself and to ask questions about what it will be in the future.

  It’s very exciting as a South Asian writer to be a part of some moment in history when this part of the world is free to understand itself or create itself for the first time. I think the United States is fairly unexciting in these ways. I feel the United States has been the most influential country for the past hundred years and there’s little sense of new possibility here in terms of the future. I would be a fool to live in the United States when I don’t have to. I am just much more happy when I am in South Asia.

  You identify your upbringing very precisely. “I am from a wealthy family; I am from an urban family; I am from a high-caste family; I have been very privileged.” In some ways you have resisted pressure by not delving deeply into setting. But there is also a certain flattening to the biographical detail, and outsiders tend not to understand the social differences within countries. You were not raised in the Vanni; you speak the same language as these people but as you say, your life has forked away from theirs. Within Sri Lanka, you are coming from a very particular position, as you are part of the urban elite in Colombo — a position that may not be understood by those outside Sri Lanka.

  For example, there is lot of flooding in the hill country of Sri Lanka, so my friends from New York ask, “Is your family okay?”

  I have to tell them, if there’s anybody in my country that going to be fine it’s my family — don’t worry about it. At the same time I hate the school that I went to, I hate the society I grew up in, and I really have a lot of hatred for Colombo. In a way, I am very alienated from the medium in which I was born and raised. Not that I am a product of anything else. I am a product of that but I hate it.

  How often are you confronted, outside Sri Lanka, by this perception that all Sri Lankans who are Tamil are the same?

  I always make a point when I speak to Americans to explain things. Sometimes I have to say, if I am a Sri Lankan and I am doing a PhD in the United States at an Ivy League institution, it’s because I am really, really privileged. I always make a point to be really clear that I am from a very specific part of Sri Lanka.

  I do feel that I have a Tamil politics. But Tamil society is so vast. This is just talking about three million people in Sri Lanka, but then there are the 80 million people in Tamil Nadu, all with so many different ways of understanding their history and their present and their future.

  Your novel feels almost as if it emerged whole, in one continuous spurt of thought. At the same time, it engages in very formal questions of thought and consciousness. It also has a certain slow pace — and yet it’s a fast read.

  I wanted to just really force myself to dwell on the situation.

  I think it would feel less slow if it was about a subject matter that was less disturbing. It is the kind of subject matter that urges you to action, or urges you to find out, or to want to have a response, and it feels especially slow because you aren’t allowed to do that, because you are forced to care.

• Rumpus - http://therumpus.net/2016/09/the-rumpus-interview-with-anuk-arudpragasam/

  The Rumpus Interview with Anuk Arudpragasam

  By Liana Holmberg

  September 26th, 2016

  Anuk Arudpragasam’s bold debut novel The Story of a Brief Marriage condenses the twenty-six years of the Sri Lankan civil war into an intimate human story, told over the course of a day and a night. Dinesh is a young Tamil man who, like tens of thousands of other civilians, has fled his home and is now trapped between the advancing government forces, the Tamil Tiger resistance fighters, and the sea. He has lost everything and moves in a daze between erratic episodes of shelling and their bloody aftermath. But on this day, he is approached with an offer of marriage. What follows is a visceral meditation on suffering that is devastating, sometimes beautiful, and illuminating.

  Arudpragasam writes in both Tamil and English and is completing a dissertation in philosophy at Columbia University. The Rumpus spoke with him via video chat at his home in Colombo, Sri Lanka. Despite the time difference—it was late evening there—he spoke with animation and intensity. He is every bit the scholar and philosopher, sometimes pinching the bridge of his nose as he works to formulate an idea. But he also has a ready smile and a quick sense of humor that’s both sardonic and generous.

  ***

  The Rumpus: One of the things that struck me most about the novel is how little historical context is given. Instead, the reader is utterly immersed in the present moment of the main character Dinesh. So often, we read a book set in war which also gives the reader a history lesson. I’m thinking particularly of Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie about the Nigerian civil war. Why did you decide to leave out this kind of context?

  Anuk Arudpragasam: It is something I thought about, and there are a couple of reasons behind it. Because the subject matter of the novel is very graphic and it is so hard to be in the presence of, I think there is a natural tendency to find ways to divert one’s attention from these kinds of things.

  To use a simple example, if you see somebody in pain or you see somebody suffering in some way, there are usually, if the pain is ordinary—of a conventional kind where somebody’s fallen say or somebody has been bereaved—there are established ways of providing some kind of therapy for the person who is suffering. If somebody is hurt you ask them if they’re okay. You give them a bandage, you rub them on the back. There are all these ways of helping them out. And then, there are situations in which there’s obviously nothing you can do in response to somebody’s suffering or somebody’s pain, and we tend to find other ways to deal with the person. You can’t actually help the person out, so you say, “I know how it feels” or “I’ve been there before” or you try to be with them in other ways.

  There is an instinctive urge to act when confronted by the pain of another person, and I think this urge involves, in a way, a discomfort or anxiety about actually seeing that the other person is in pain. In trying to find a way to make their situation better, you’re doing something, and in doing something and in responding actively to someone’s pain, you are, in a way, free from having to contemplate the pain or reflect on the condition of the person. That’s not a bad thing at all.

  I feel, though, when it comes to the suffering or the pain of people who are far away or in situations that are very different from your own, that the analog to giving somebody a Band-Aid or rubbing them on the back or talking to them is what you could call a political response. It is to say, “Who did that?” or “What was responsible?” or “When did this happen? How did this happen? Why didn’t anybody do anything?” And then to say, “It was these people. These people need to go to jail” or “These people need to be tried or taken to the international criminal court.” By making these kinds of political diagnoses—and I am not against them at all, they are natural and very necessary—by responding to the suffering of people far away in time and space in this very instinctive way, with some kind of plan for action, I feel that something often gets lost. And I feel that, at least in my case, what gets lost in my instinctive reaction to suffering is an understanding or a contemplation of the condition of the people who are suffering. So, in this situation, I wanted to give very little historical context and social and political context, so that this condition is forced on the attention of the writer or reader.

  It has to do with me personally. It has to do with my background. I am also a Tamil person, but I grew up in very privileged circumstances in the south of the country far away from where war occurred. And so I was watching all of this. I was hearing about it happening at a distance. For me, the thing that I was most interested in was to come to some kind of understanding of the situation. To basically try to understand what it was like to be there. To understand the state or the condition of these people in whose situation I could have been had history been unkind to me. So, I wanted to remove all of these—I didn’t want to have history there because I didn’t want to give the reader or myself a chance to escape from the immediacy of that situation.

  9781250072405_fcRumpus: I wasn’t consciously aware of how that technique was operating on me as I was reading, but I can see now how, exactly because Dinesh is not fully labeled as this thing or that thing or in this particular context, I couldn’t other myself from him. Instead, I was so deeply inside of his head that I simply moved with him through the moments of his day, contemplating with him the experiences he had. It works very beautifully in the book and keeps me from letting myself off the hook with a rote response to another’s grief. “Oh, now I know something about your country and I know your history, and you know I care, and now we’re all comfortable again.” One of the most fascinating things about this book is how you force—force may not be the right word—but you force us into the point of view of this man.

  Arudpragasam: I realize that there is something, not just in the subject matter but about the text, that is violent. There is something violent—something imposed—on the reader in the course of reading the text. Obviously I wrote it, and obviously in some way I intended it to be this way, but it had to do with myself and my own desire to—I mean I wrote this as a novella that was not intended for publication. It was written in response to a lot of photographs and video recordings—grainy photographs and grainy cell phone video that were taken by people who were in the situation, by survivors, civilians—that started surfacing on the Internet months after this all happened. So, yeah, it was written out of guilt. Out of a desire to be violent with myself in a way. To force myself to be in the presence of it for as long as I could.

  Rumpus: When did you start writing it?

  Arudpragasam: I started it in September 2011. The novel happens in March 2009. Dinesh’s evacuation from the part of Sri Lanka he is from begins sometime in early-mid 2008, so he’s been on the move for just a little bit under a year. The war ends on May 18, 2009. Before this fourth phase of the war, the Tamil Tigers controlled most of northeast Sri Lanka except for the northeastern most part of the country, the Jaffna peninsula. Basically, what happened is the Sri Lankan government attacked from the north, from the north and from the southwest and the southeast. Over the course of the year or a year-and-a-half, the Tigers’ territory decreases, and they move with them all of these civilians. Until finally everybody is trapped in an area—about the size of Central Park, I guess—on the northeast coast of Sri Lanka, by the sea. It’s about 300,000 people, and they are trapped in a very small area. And they are being subjected to shelling. And 40,000 people died.

  Rumpus: Why was it called an evacuation when there was nowhere left for them to go?

  Arudpragasam: It’s complicated. The government was killing them. The government was bombing indiscriminately, and calling it a humanitarian operation. The Sri Lankan state was announcing certain areas as no-fire zones and civilians would go there and those places would be bombed. Or the UN would tell the state, “There’s a hospital over here at this location. Don’t bomb it,” and the next moment shells would start falling on the hospital. So it was part of an intentional policy. See the thing was, the LTTE—the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam—also did not let civilians leave. They kept civilians with them because they felt that, first of all, they wanted people. Secondly, they felt that if they had people with them and if they were among the people, then that would slow down the progress of the army because the army wouldn’t be able to just bomb them from the sky, which of course the army did. So the killing was something that the state did, but the LTTE was also complicit in.

  Rumpus: Were you living in Sri Lanka during this period in 2009 or were you in the States?

  Arudpragasam: I went to university on the West Coast in 2006, so I was in university in California at that time.

  Rumpus: It feels like you were both on the inside and the outside of the conflict, and this novel is a very personal response to that. What are you working on now?

  Arudpragasam: I decided after I finished this novel—you know, because I spent three years on it—I decided that I would try to write something lighter. So I’m writing a novel about masturbation—also set over the course of an afternoon, actually. But it’s not crude or masculinist. It’s not like a Philip Roth novel. It’s a novel about a young person who is somewhat sad and who lives in Colombo, where I grew up and where I am now, who decides one afternoon that he wants to masturbate, which he hasn’t done for a while. It’s basically about this young man and his relationship to his grandmother. I think it’s about yearning. It’s about this person who is disappointed with his life and he doesn’t have much to look forward to and wants to be elsewhere than where he is, and he decides he’s going to go home and masturbate and in the process of masturbating, create a kind of world in his mind, a world that won’t collapse once he ejaculates. And it’s about him basically being interrupted over the course of the afternoon constantly by his grandmother—who is increasingly immobile and whose eyesight and hearing are deteriorating and whose only access to the world is her grandson. Who she bothers constantly, like, “How much did the onions cost?” or “Who called?” or “Who rang the bell?” or “Why were you late from work?” She is becoming more removed from the world as she gets older but is trying to hold on to the world, and he is very much in the world, the so-called real world, and is trying his best to create some alternative to it in his mind. And it’s about the tension between these two different movements in and out of the world over the course of the afternoon as she keeps interrupting him.

  Rumpus: In A Brief Marriage, we only see a day and a night in the lives of Dinesh and Ganga, his wife. What do you think it is about this—I’m not sure whether to call it compressed or expanded time—this focus on a very small period of time that you find so intriguing as a writer?

  Arudpragasam: One very simple reason for my writing this way is that I’m not really very interested in creating narratives or in creating stories or in creating characters, and I think that I can avoid that by not having time or by having things happen in a very compressed period of time. It’s no accident that both of these characters are highly traumatized, and therefore I don’t really need to go into their histories because it’s a situation in which their characters have been destroyed.

  It is something I’ve been thinking about because I realize, okay, the second novel is just like the first one—or it’s even more compressed—and I have an idea for a third novel that’ll take place in a shorter period of time. It’ll be simply one person looking at somebody else in the eye, then looking away, and then looking back again. But the thing is that—how to say—I think that time—there are moments when it stops. There are moments in which you exist in a different kind of time. It’s not that I’m not interested in longer periods of time at all, but I feel that I’m interested in shorter periods of time because—okay, so, one of my favorite writers, Robert Musil, there’s a book he wrote called The Man without Qualities. Have you read it?

  Rumpus: No.

  Arudpragasam: He describes a main character who is talking to a lover who he wants to leave, or whom he has just left, but then a frenzy of passion erupts in him and they have sex. And then the character sits down, and he is tying his shoelace or smoking a cigarette as his lover sits on the bed and looks at him, and he suddenly feels very removed and very distant from the situation, from what just happened. And then there is a line—or a paragraph—where he talks about these states of heightened feeling or intense feeling that are always then absorbed back into the ordinary routine of life. There are moments in which the established way of doing things, or the thread that one follows along during the course of the day suddenly seems to be cut, or the world around you that you’ve taken for granted for so long suddenly falls away, and there are these certain moments in which suddenly things are seen more clearly.

  I think that it is difficult to maintain states of clarity for more than short periods of time. At least for me. Most of my time, you know, it’s routine, it’s habitual. I don’t really see what’s happening, and days pass one after the other, and then a month’s gone like that, or a year’s gone like that. But then there are these moments when I seem to be pulled out of that. As if I’ve suddenly come up for breath, as if all this time I’ve been underwater, and I suddenly come up for breath, and I can see the expanse of the body of water I’ve been immersed in all that time. I think that’s why I’m interested in these moments. Not that in each of these moments you feel the same thing—or they say the same thing or need to be consistent with each other or anything—but I think I prefer to see life through the lens of those moments.

  Rumpus: Speaking of water, it reminds me of when Dinesh goes to the beach early on in the book. It’s one of my favorite parts because it’s when I get fully immersed into the immediacy of his point of view and he enters a heightened awareness of himself that’s created by pushing out everything else—and that pushing has basically been from the shell shock. He’s so fully there inside this moment on the shore meditating on his own existence, and it’s around that point when another book started coming up for me as I was reading. Have you read The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann?

  Arudpragasam: No, but I’ve been told that I should—that I would like it.

  Rumpus: I’m not sure that I liked it necessarily, but it’s held up as one of the touchstone philosophical novels. It takes place in a European sanatorium and spans seven years. But what that novel does over seven years and some thousand pages, I think yours does in the course of a day. Your novel is asking questions about what is it to be alive, what is it to have no hope, what is it to suddenly have hope, what is it to confront your own death, and what is it to confront the choices life requires of you—all these minute little choices you have to make all the time. And there’s something really beautiful that you achieve in this compressed time because there’s so much intimacy in witnessing each small action Dinesh takes or that he sees Ganga taking. But I’m still very curious about her. Tell me more about Ganga.

  Arudpragasam: You know, I don’t think I can tell you much more about Ganga than is presented of her in the novel, or much more about Dinesh than is presented about him. Are you pointing to the fact that very little is said about her?

  Rumpus: Yes, but while little is said, I think important things are revealed about her. You said earlier that you are not very interested in character and narrative, but this book is full of character and narrative. Though the way that you get to them is very different from what we’re used to reading nowadays—stories where the little moments are elided over in the rush of plot and action. In this book, there’s both this incredible intimacy with these two characters and an unknowability.

  Arudpragasam: One of the hardest chapters to write was the chapter that gives some backstory about the beginning of the evacuation. I’m not given to, I guess, to this kind of exposition. Ganga, she doesn’t say much, and neither does Dinesh, but you’re in Dinesh’s mind for most of the novel. It was important for me to make it clear that she has an inner world that you don’t have access to—and maybe she doesn’t have access to either. Dinesh has this reverence for her. He feels that there is a person there behind the coolness, the reservedness—the hardness—of her demeanor. It’s not as if she actually really wanted to marry him. She married him because she was forced to, and he knew this and he said, “Yes, I will marry her,” despite knowing that might not be what she wanted. I didn’t want much to be said about her because I didn’t want her to simply give herself to Dinesh. I wanted her to be like, “Yeah, fuck you, I’m not going to be so nice to you. I’m not going to show myself to you.” She’s going through her own thing. I wanted it to be clear there was something there but at the same time not for it to come out.

  Rumpus: There’s a moment when they’re in the jungle, and Dinesh goes to investigate a strange sound nearby that they fear might be a threat. He comes back and tells her how he chose to handle it, and she gives him a look that says she disagrees but that it’s not worth talking about. That look kind of summarizes her character. That said, I did come into the novel with certain expectations. It’s a marriage. There’s going to be the desired female, the female that we’re going to get to know, that somehow at some point is going to become compliant and merge with the main character. You know, that’s the marriage trope. That’s the marriage narrative.

  Arudpragasam: Yeah. Yeah.

  Rumpus: And she so fully resists it. She’s so much harder than he is, and has accepted—or maybe not accepted but knows—what her fate is likely to be from the beginning. And it’s not worth talking about. It’s beautiful and brutal how you capture this. But I appreciated so much the way that she remains a discreet character outside of what Dinesh might want her to be—or what the audience might want her to be.

  Arudpragasam: The title was partly a parody of an endless number of English-language marriage stories that come from South Asia. Because it’s so obviously not a marriage. It’s a farce or a parody of a collapsing institution in a collapsing community. You know, I never spent time in the north because of the war until the war was over. I went up there, and you look at people and you see that the women are much harder, they are much stronger, and they carry on their shoulders whole families. Often it’s the men who are drinking, who are jobless. The women shoulder a lot of the things. I was really impressed, coming from the city, at the Tamil women in the north because they are—they’re really in control. They have a lot of say. They are powerful people. They are strong and they are proud and they don’t back down. It’s part of that society. Not that it’s not a patriarchal society, not that it doesn’t have its conventional forms of gender oppression, but a lot of those women are really impressive. So, Ganga is kind of like that. She’s uncompromising, and she doesn’t give in. There’s something strong about her in a way that Dinesh is not.

  Rumpus: And yet, Dinesh is such a curiously compelling character. He’s so sentimental, for example, about objects or a bird.

  Arudpragasam: It’s true he is a very sentimental creature, but, you know, it’s a situation where you feel things strongly when you suddenly become aware of all of the stuff that’s happening to you. But there are moments, at the beginning of the novel and the very end, when what we get of Dinesh are only his physical movements. We get his body, we get his shaking, we get the muscles in his legs. There are moments when the third person moves away from Dinesh—in moments of extreme stress. There’s a sense that you can’t go into his mind at these points—it’s inaccessible to us—and we only see what he is doing physically. The reason I chose this particular period for the book is that I was choosing a time when circumstances allowed him to become suddenly vulnerable and suddenly conscious to everything. It’s not that he stops being traumatized during the course of the novel, but he starts to become aware and sensitive to certain things. And, it’s not that Ganga couldn’t come to have feelings—feelings that ordinary people would. It’s just that they are traumatized, you know. They’re numb. They are numb. But it takes place in period in which Dinesh suddenly becomes aware of his numbness.

  Rumpus: There’s a passage where you describe what it’s like to be in the shelling. The noise is so loud on the outside, but everything becomes quiet for Dinesh. He doesn’t go running in fear like other people in the camp. Instead, the quiet triggers a heightened sense of awareness. It’s a microcosm of what the book is doing as a whole. It’s quite lovely. So, what happens next for you? What will you do after finishing your dissertation at Columbia?

  Arudpragasam: I really love India. I’ll probably spend the rest of my life somewhere between Sri Lanka and India. My plan right now is that I want to live in the north of Sri Lanka for a while and teach at a university there. I also want to live in either Bombay or New Delhi. I don’t know, things are fairly open for me but it’ll be somewhere in India or Sri Lanka.

• Financial Times - https://www.ft.com/content/e88203b0-baf7-11e6-8b45-b8b81dd5d080

  Q&A with author Anuk Arudpragasam

  ‘The last thing I read that made me laugh out loud? A surely factitious passage from Herodotus’s ‘Histories’’
  Read next
  The End of the Asian Century by Michael Auslin
  © Halik Azeez

  Share on Twitter (opens new window)
  Share on Facebook (opens new window)
  Share on LinkedIn (opens new window)

  2
  Print this page
  December 9, 2016

  Anuk Arudpragasam was born in Colombo, Sri Lanka, in 1988. He studied philosophy at Stanford University and is working on a PhD in philosophy at Columbia University. The Story of a Brief Marriage is his first novel. He writes in English and Tamil, and lives in New York.

  What is the last thing you read that made you laugh out loud?

  A surely factitious passage from Herodotus’s Histories, where he describes how Persian leaders make policy decisions. They usually make important decisions drunk, but wait until they’re sober the next day to confirm they’ve made the right decision. If they make a decision sober, they get drunk afterwards to make sure the decision seems right in that state.

  What books are currently on your bedside table?

  I don’t have a bedside table, but I do place books on the floor beside my bed before going to sleep. At the moment those books are Euripides’ Orestes and David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress.

  What book changed your life?

  Probably Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, which I read for the first time when I was 20. It made me decide to give up wanting to be an academic philosopher, and to pursue writing instead.

  Where do you write best?

  In my room, at my desk.

  What music helps you write?

  Silence.

  When do you feel most free?

  Travelling on my own in India.

  How do you relax?

  Intoxicants, strenuous exercise, going for walks and sleeping.

  Do you keep a diary?

  I do have a notebook I frequently write in, but I don’t call it a diary. I don’t write in it every day, nor do I often write about events that have happened in my life, so I don’t call it a diary. I prefer the word “journal”, which apparently referred to a kind of daily prayer book in Middle English, and therefore feels a little closer to the use my notebook has for me.

  What are you most proud of writing?

  If I ever write a book I’m actually proud of writing, I will stop writing.

  Who are your literary influences?

  Andrei Platonov, Robert Musil, Marcel Proust, Nathalie Sarraute, Thomas Bernhard, Clarice Lispector and Peter Nadas.

  Where is your favourite place in the world?

  The Jaffna peninsula and the Vanni, in northern Sri Lanka.

  What book would you give your child to introduce them to literature?

  The poems of Bharathiar.

  What does it mean to be a writer?

  It means that a significant part of the time you have available to you is spent stringing words together in such a way that you are somehow brought closer to yourself.

  Anuk Arudpragasam’s ‘The Story of a Brief Marriage’ is published by Granta

• Guernica - https://www.guernicamag.com/anuk-arudpragasam-within-the-bounds-of-the-body/

  January 24, 2017
  Anuk Arudpragasam: Within the Bounds of the Body
  The novelist on imperialism, detachment, and articulating the inner life.
  By Sarah Hoenicke
  Share
  Tweet
  E-mail
  Photograph of Anuk Arudpragasam by Halik Azeez.

  Anuk Arudpragasam’s debut novel, The Story of a Brief Marriage, takes place over a single day near the end of the Sri Lankan civil war. The novel’s protagonist, Dinesh, has been pushed, with fellow beleaguered citizens, to the coast. When we meet him, he is living in a camp, helping tend to the wounded and bury the dead, his existence overwhelmed by the needs of those around him. Civil war raged in Sri Lanka from 1983 to 2009, but the novel doesn’t detail the history of the war. Instead, it is driven by Dinesh’s internal life, like this moment during a wave of shelling:
  It was a loud, unbearably loud explosion, followed immediately by others, so loud that as soon as the first one came, the rest could no longer be heard. They could be registered only as the pervasive absence of sound, as a series of voids or vacuums in the sound sphere so great that not even the sound of thinking could be heard. The world became mute, like a silent film, and as a result the bombing often brought about in Dinesh a sense of calm.

  While keeping us anchored in Dinesh’s body and immediate experience, Arudpragasam is able to talk more broadly about the nature of life in a war zone. Bombing wouldn’t usually be thought of as a calming experience, but for Dinesh it brings mental silence, a break from the constant work of existence within a foundering country. While this isn’t a true story, it reflects behaviors observed near the end of the war. It became common for families to marry their children quickly—especially their daughters—in hopes of saving them from the violence, sexual and otherwise, of the army. Such a marriage gives the book its title, and imparts on Dinesh a renewed sense of his future amid the ever-pressing present.

  Arudpragasam grew up in southern Sri Lanka, insulated from the war by his family’s affluence. The novel, he admits, “was written out of guilt.” He writes in English—the language of his education—and has been well received in the English-speaking world. In the New York Times, Ru Freeman wrote: “This is a book that makes one kneel before the elegance of the human spirit and the yearning that is at the essence of ­every life.” A PhD student in philosophy at Columbia University, Arudpragasam has shifted away from the interests that led him to the program, but remains there since it is funded and allows him time to write. And though he doesn’t intend to go into academia, philosophical thought suffuses his fiction.

  When we spoke over the phone, Arudpragasam was affable and polite yet unsparing in his critique of the literary establishment and the relationship between colonialism and the English language. He’s a writer attuned to, and unafraid of, discomfort—an essential quality in our current moment.

  —Sarah Hoenicke for Guernica

  Guernica: How did you approach writing this book?

  Anuk Arudpragasam: Everything that happens in it is pretty accurate to actual events, but the story and characters are completely made up. I didn’t think much, to be honest, about the story. I don’t care for stories, for creating characters and writing about events, so I tried to think about that as little as possible. When I was writing, if I had to think about it, I would, but it was in the form of a concession rather than something I did out of actual interest.

  Guernica: That’s an interesting thing to hear from a writer. What do you care about when writing?

  Anuk Arudpragasam: I care about articulating states or conditions that we don’t have easy language for. I care to find ways to articulate aspects of the inner life. I’m interested in writing as a form of introspection. You have psychology of the mind, psychology of the body, to articulate the inner life. I must decide about events that happen outside a person’s body, because we have language to describe things that happen in the outside world. You can only get to the inner through the outer. So, I do have to talk about things that happen, but what I want is within the bounds of the body.

  Guernica: When did you begin working on The Story of a Brief Marriage?

  Anuk Arudpragasam: I started it in July or August of 2011 and finished in October of 2014. It’s about things that happened in my country to people in my community that I did not myself experience. I grew up in the south of Sri Lanka in a well-off family, as insulated as someone could be from the war. It was an attempt to cross certain kinds of differences in experience between myself and these many other people in the north of the country who I had become separated from. It was very much an attempt to understand a certain condition very far from my own. It was written out of guilt kind of. Not guilt really. Yeah, guilt.

  Guernica: Have people been upset that you didn’t directly experience the war, but still wrote about it?

  Anuk Arudpragasam: I have not met anybody who feels this way. The responses I’ve heard have been positive, and I’m sure there will be negative responses, but I simply haven’t come across them yet. Part of the writing of the novel was that the author is writing from a position of distance. Towards the end of the novel, there is a passage in which the narrator wonders what Dinesh feels, and says, “Well, it’s impossible to know, really.” On the one hand, it has to do with the trauma Dinesh has gone through that makes him inaccessible, but it also has to do with the fact that the narrator is writing in a different language, and the narrator has not gone through such an event himself. I tried to make that explicit. This novel is not the novel of a person in such a condition. It’s a novel of somebody attempting, from a distance, to understand the condition of a person in such a situation.

  Guernica: Could you talk about your writing process?

  Anuk Arudpragasam: I don’t want to talk about my actual process of writing because it’s something personal. The thing I can say is—because of the subject matter, and because it involved me engaging with a mood and materials that were very, very dark—that writing the book involved a disjuncture. It involved a sharp disjunction between my writing life and my non-writing life.

  For several hours every day, I would be in this world, in this mindset. After, I would leave the house to go to campus to teach a class or to meet my adviser. I would go out in the evening to meet a friend. The mood required by these interactions outside my room, outside my writing life, was very different from the mood required during the hours in which I wrote. It involved a very strong sense of two highly juxtaposing worlds within me when I was writing. Moving constantly in and out of these worlds—my inner life, my outer life—caused a lot of strain. It was difficult for me not to be aggressive or resentful towards people around me, or, in general, the world around me. Also, I was mainly living in America while I wrote, where people don’t know or talk about Sri Lanka, even though Americans are part of the same imperialist order that played a big hand in the conflict in Sri Lanka and what’s going on in conflicts all over the world. It created this strain of participating in these two worlds. At a certain point, I realized that I needed to finish dwelling on this material sooner rather than later, so I hurried the second part of the novel. I gave myself three or four months to finish the last four or five chapters.

  Guernica: After finishing, did you experience a change in yourself?

  Anuk Arudpragasam: A huge change. Just not having to deal with this material, not having to look at all these photographs of broken bodies, at these pictures of people who aren’t quite looking you in the eye. It was just not pleasant, and I was glad to be done with it. I’m not trying to say that it was any kind of experience, or that I went through anything that deserves pity. I’m just saying that I was glad that it was over.

  Guernica: Your writing is very straightforward and easy to understand, while also putting forth big ideas about what it is to be a person. Do you think that will carry over into your next project?

  Anuk Arudpragasam: Yes. My next book—I’ve written about a third of it—will be similar. The situation and conditions are going to be very different. It’s about masturbation, basically, this novel. Not in a crude way, or in the way that Philip Roth would write about it. It’s an exploration of desire and yearning. It’s also, obviously, a very intimate subject matter, and the body will be involved in some way, but really, it’s more about fantasy life, and the life of images in the mind. The tone, distance, and authorial quality of the narrator will remain. It’s interested in questions of desire—what is desire; what is the difference between desire and yearning; what is the connection between the inside and the outside, the imaginary and the real.

  Guernica: Are there authors who, or books that, influenced your writing? Or your interest in writing?

  Anuk Arudpragasam: Yeah, definitely. I’m a very slow reader, so that has an effect. I would say about a third of my reading is books I’ve already read. I read very little that’s written originally in English. I try to read one novel that’s written in English per year, but other than that, most of what I read is in translation. The novel that made me want to become a writer was The Man Without Qualities, an unfinished novel written in the 1930s by an Austrian writer called Robert Musil. It’s amazing. I love it. It’s unfinished, in three volumes. It’s huge. It’s a modernist work. He’s introspective, and uses a lot of metaphors. He has a direct way of talking about inner life. When I read that, I realized that what I was interested in in philosophy could be better pursued through novels. I’d never seen a novel like that before.

  One of the writers I love the most is a Soviet writer called Andrei Platonov. There’s a novella he wrote that’s translated into English as Soul, which I’ve read several times. He’s just a beautiful person, I feel. He writes with this real tenderness. He has a simultaneously earnest and yearning sensibility that is very conscious of the suffering of others.

  There’s also a Hungarian writer whose work I love, Péter Nádas. In particular, A Book of Memories. I found this psychology of the body in his work. He discusses a lot of the corporeal elements of the inner life—gaze, gesture, posture, gait, eye contact, urination, defecation, sex, hesitation, pauses. He has an amazing way of talking about the mind through the body.

  The Unnamable by Samuel Beckett. I read and reread that several times while I was writing this novel.

  Guernica: You had a library of sorts from which to draw while you were writing.

  Anuk Arudpragasam: Yeah. Part of why I only read one novel a year that was originally written in English is that I found these things I like, and I can spend all my time rereading them. I questioned at a certain point—why do I keep feeling this need to be reading new novels? I decided I just wasn’t going to read new novels, and to spend much more of my reading life rereading. I’ve been doing that for a couple years now.

  Guernica: It’s almost like you’re getting your PhD in literature.

  Anuk Arudpragasam: I would never do that because I think a PhD has a way of alienating you from what you love. I never took a class in literature or creative writing. I did feel that I needed to study texts, and to think about them, and to learn how to write them. I would, at one point, try to rewrite passages on my own that I’d read. I’ve studied, and I still study, books. I feel that that’s the only way to learn, really. Well, I don’t know. I guess people have different ways of learning. But I feel that was important for me, to study the texts, to study what I loved.

  I was born and raised in Colombo, in the south of Sri Lanka. I had almost my entire education in English. My parents were from middle-class families but they did better, and now we’re part of the urban elite [in Colombo], a community I have a lot of hatred towards because of its elitism. I had my entire education in English, but in the last six or seven years, I’ve been educating myself in Tamil, and I hope eventually to write in Tamil. I feel that it will take five or ten years before I will feel that I have enough mastery of the written part of that language to feel confident with what I do in it. But that’s something that’s important to me because I feel that English is a colonial language. It’s the language of aspiration in Sri Lanka. It’s the language that is a mark of making it. It’s something I hate—I hate the English-speaking communities of Sri Lanka, India, and South Asia. It’s important to me, eventually, to write in my mother tongue.

  Guernica: I understand that. It’s got to be somewhat conflicted though, since a lot of the opportunity that is available to people still in Sri Lanka and in India—at least to my understanding—requires English.

  Anuk Arudpragasam: Yeah. If you want to make it to the top of, say, the business world in Sri Lanka, or India, you must be able to speak English. There are various worlds in which to speak English is to be at the top. Sri Lankan literature is all written by English-speaking people from the elite, or people from the middle class who have assimilated into the elite and who move in very small circles in Sri Lanka. They have come to occupy the role of representing Sri Lanka for people outside of Sri Lanka. I’m one of those people. I would never say that I’m not. It’s not that I’ve somehow transcended that position. Writing in Tamil, for a Tamil-speaking audience, feels like an important political position for me.

The Story of a Brief Marriage
Peter Whittaker
.497 (Nov. 2016): p38.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 New Internationalist
http://www.newint.org

The Story of a Brief Marriage by Anuk Arudpragasam (Granta, ISBN 9781783782376)

This striking debut novel is set during the blood-drenched last days of the Sri Lankan civil war. In a civilian enclave trapped between the Sri Lankan army and the Tamil Tigers is Dinesh, a helper in a field hospital tending to the wounded casualties of the indiscriminate bombing by both sides. In defence against the daily horror of the death and destruction surrounding him, Dinesh has retreated into himself, feeling little emotion and barely eating or sleeping. He is jolted out of his protective numbness when he is approached by an older man who asks him to marry his daughter, Ganga, in a desperate attempt to afford her some protection against the marauding soldiers. Expecting imminent death and seeing little point to any of his actions, Dinesh agrees and slowly, tentatively, he and Ganga embark on establishing human contact in the bowels of hell.

The author spares the reader nothing of the visceral, graphic violence inflicted on his characters--the book opens with a particularly harrowing amputation performed on a child --and the arbitrary, casual nature of death is a constant presence in the book. However, Arudpragasam writes with a delicacy and precision that cuts against the horror of his subject matter and underscores the basic humanity of his doomed protagonists. We are left, in the final analysis, with rage against the horror of war, certainly, but also with an affirmation of the possibility of care and tenderness even in the worst places imaginable.

**** PW

grantabooks.com
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Whittaker, Peter. "The Story of a Brief Marriage." New Internationalist, Nov. 2016, p. 38. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA469209224&it=r&asid=7f77317d8ac1d4328c036f6307cb85d0. Accessed 28 Feb. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A469209224
The Story of a Brief Marriage
Kathy Sexton
112.22 (Aug. 1, 2016): p29.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm

The Story of a Brief Marriage. By Anuk Arudpragasam. Sept. 2016. 224p. Flatiron, $24.99 (97812500724051; e-book, $11.99 (9781250074751).

The title summarizes the plot of this haunting novel, which takes place in a Sri Lankan civil-war-evacuee camp. The opening scene in which a young boy's shrapnel-damaged forearm is amputated with a kitchen knife prepares readers for what is to come, as newlyweds Dinesh and Ganga, who barely know each other, try to navigate the intimacies of marriage in the midst of great brutality. Debut author Arudpragasam writes in beautifully descriptive language, whether describing Dinesh washing his clothes for the first time in months or the young couple, their lives reduced to physical needs and actions, taking brief respite in the discovery of each other's bodies. As Ganga says, "Happiness and sadness are for people who can control what happens to them." This gorgeously written novel is similar to Vaddey Ratner's In the Shadow of the Banyan (2012) in the way it captures intimate human experiences in the face of war.--Kathy Sexton

Sexton, Kathy
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Sexton, Kathy. "The Story of a Brief Marriage." Booklist, 1 Aug. 2016, p. 29. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA460761651&it=r&asid=2d6dafcdcfe33425dc2caeb7e359fa2d. Accessed 28 Feb. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A460761651
The Story of a Brief Marriage
263.28 (July 11, 2016): p39.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/

The Story of a Brief Marriage

Anuk Arudpragasam. Flatiron, $24.99 (224p) ISBN 978-1-250-07240-5

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Arudpragasam's first novel vividly captures a day in the life of Dinesh, a kindhearted young man who chooses to stay behind in an evacuee camp during the Sri Lankan Civil War in order to help the injured and dying. Early in the morning, Dinesh receives a proposal from a stranger named Somasundaram to marry his only surviving daughter, Ganga, as a form of protecting her when the aging man dies, whether of age or during an attack on the camp. Dinesh accepts the offer only to quickly learn that getting to know and sustain a relationship with his new wife during the war will be more difficult than he imagined. In a world scarred by daily shellings and explosions, Dinesh spends his sleepless nights obsessing over how things will be better with his new wife. In Dinesh, Arudpragasam creates a wholly empathetic and doting character, though at times the writing is a bit slow. Still, the author crafts flowing, beautiful sentences that put readers in the middle of the camp with Dinesh and Ganga. Dinesh finds beauty in the worst of situations, which contributes to making this debut deeply moving and hopeful. (Sept.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Story of a Brief Marriage." Publishers Weekly, 11 July 2016, p. 39+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA458915298&it=r&asid=9c94c744802aaa17252ee006c52ec75b. Accessed 28 Feb. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A458915298

Whittaker, Peter. "The Story of a Brief Marriage." New Internationalist, Nov. 2016, p. 38. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA469209224&asid=7f77317d8ac1d4328c036f6307cb85d0. Accessed 28 Feb. 2017. Sexton, Kathy. "The Story of a Brief Marriage." Booklist, 1 Aug. 2016, p. 29. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA460761651&asid=2d6dafcdcfe33425dc2caeb7e359fa2d. Accessed 28 Feb. 2017. "The Story of a Brief Marriage." Publishers Weekly, 11 July 2016, p. 39+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA458915298&asid=9c94c744802aaa17252ee006c52ec75b. Accessed 28 Feb. 2017.

• London Guardian
  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/oct/22/story-brief-marriage-anuk-arudpragasam-review
  Word count: 789

  The Story of a Brief Marriage by Anuk Arudpragasam review – love and war in Sri Lanka
  A debut novel which raises timely questions about how we regard the suffering of others
  Government troops in the war zone near the town of Mullaittivu, Sri Lanka, in 2009.
  Government troops in the war zone near the town of Mullaittivu, Sri Lanka, in 2009. Photograph: Ho New/Reuters

  Shares
  74
  Comments
  6

  Randy Boyagoda

  Saturday 22 October 2016 09.30 BST
  Last modified on Monday 6 February 2017 14.07 GMT

  The opening sequence of Anuk Arudpragasam’s debut novel, in which a six-year-old child with a shrapnel-shredded arm is brought to an open-air operating theatre, feels horribly timely. The young man carrying the listless little 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 mind the images of stunned, bloodied children now coming out of Syria and other war zones. The novel both implicitly and explicitly raises crucial questions about the aesthetic and ethical stakes involved in regarding the suffering of others.
  Sign up to our Bookmarks newsletter
  Read more

  Arudpragasam uses placid, 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 place over a few days during the harrowing final months of the island’s vicious civil war. Recalling José Saramago, 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.

  Accepting the impossibility of his own survival, Ganga’s father decides to do what best he can for his daughter and proposes that Dinesh marry her. Given their collective horrible situation, Dinesh is surprised by this offer. But in keeping with the muted feeling and fatalism that mark every character in the book, he accepts, as does Ganga, though neither seems particularly excited about it. The carnage surrounding them is too much for a newlywed couple to overcome, given how much each has already lost: “But if they couldn’t talk about their pasts, what could they say to each other at all, given that there was no future for them to speak of either?”
  Advertisement

  They try to make a shared life, and their efforts produce the novel’s most moving material. Never mind the constant probability of death, wounding, forced conscription, starvation and rape: Ganga and Dinesh are shy, uncertain and tentative – just as any other sudden new young couple would be. He proposes a stroll, which they take silently; she makes him a small meal of rice and dhal that he revels in, not least because she made it for him. Arudpragasam describes each gesture and thought, all the way down to the “shape and taste of the soft grains” that Dinesh savours, “cleaving the rice into separate sections in his mouth”. Only at chapter’s end does Arudpragasam reveal that all this haute literary deferring enacts the young couple’s own unspoken interest in delaying the inevitable: “Dinesh licked the last grains of rice off his fingertips … aware that it was time now for them to spend their first night together.”

  Soon enough, Dinesh and Ganga’s bleak expectations are fulfilled, though it’s here that the novel’s aesthetic and ethical ambitions fail to cohere. Shells fall once more, and amid the infernal “smoke and sulphur”, Dinesh searches and searches for Ganga. Eventually, he discovers her: “Her left eye was half-open and the right corner of her parted lips was kissing the dirt.” The cheaply evocative wording of this image suggests a literary immaturity at odds with the restraint and poise found elsewhere in this often formidable novel.

  Randy Boyagoda’s Beggar’s Feast is published by Penguin.

  • The Story of a Brief Marriage is published by Granta. To order a copy for £10.65 (RRP £12.99) to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.

• New York Times Book Review
  https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/09/books/review/anuk-arudpragasam-story-of-a-brief-marriage.html
  Word count: 743

  A Brave Debut Novel About the Sri Lankan Civil War

  By RU FREEMANOCT. 7, 2016
  Continue reading the main story
  Share This Page

  Share
  Tweet
  Pin
  Email
  More
  Save

  Photo
  Anuk Arudpragasam Credit Halik Azeez

  THE STORY OF A BRIEF MARRIAGE
  By Anuk Arudpragasam
  193 pp. Flatiron Books. $24.99.

  War is a constant wellspring of literature, and the best of it looks not for the obvious and sensationally violent, but instead searches for the subtle ways that life unfolds regardless. While Sri Lankans writing in Sinhala and Tamil have long borne nuanced witness to the country’s three decades of civil war, writing in English has been much slower to respond. And too much of it has taken the easy route, giving a foreign readership what it desires: a voyeuristic, and ultimately unengaged, affirmation of what it believes is true of savage peoples in other countries.

  Anuk Arudpragasam’s brave debut takes the higher road. In language that is often poetic, he describes a single day and night in the life of a refugee fleeing both the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelem and government forces. Dinesh is a young man who finds himself transporting the wounded and helping to bury the dead at a camp in the northern province during the final months of the war. In the middle of this carnage, a girl is proposed to him in marriage by a father facing his own incapacity to care for the remaining member of his family. Over a brief few hours, Dinesh experiences the sudden intimacy of marriage — the desire to improve oneself, to be more deserving, to be both vulnerable and courageous, to parse both silence and speech. And he feels the loss that might still be sustained even after resigning oneself to having nothing left to lose.

  Arudpragasam captures the vernacular while sustaining a startling lyricism. A “settlement of tents” gathers around the beleaguered hospital “like a massive temple that was being erected around a small, golden shrine.” Insects — probably last immortalized by Donne — in this case flies, are exquisitely described as worshipers who “rub their little hands together silently as if in fervent prayer” before feasting. A dying priest takes the shortest of breaths in order to avoid the pain of breathing out. And both held and heard breath are brought together in a scene where the author imagines that those experiencing trauma of irreparable magnitude allow their life to escape “in an otherwise unremarkable exhalation.” Even silence in the midst of war is rendered with bracing clarity.
  Book Review Newsletter

  Sign up to receive a preview of each Sunday’s Book Review, delivered to your inbox every Friday.
  Receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services.

  See Sample Manage Email Preferences Privacy Policy

  The reverence that is paid to the minutiae of refugee life, a brilliant choice, is sometimes undermined by too much fixation on detail — the protagonist repeatedly turns his head to observe too closely his own feces; his wife; the clippings of his filthy hair; the smooth stump of an amputee; a dying bird; a dying gecko, etc. Young Dinesh also has a tendency to ponder all with the flair of an educated philosopher rather than a high school student battered by war. Still, these are forgivable missteps. This is a war that dislocated a nation, irrespective of ethnicity, but the most helpless were the poorest Tamils, caught behind battle lines, prevented by the rebels from leaving, whose choice was “either be killed in the shelling, or conscripted and then killed in the fighting.”

  Arudpragasam gives those innocents a place in history as ordinary citizens, with dreams and belief in salvation, who hold on to privacy, dignity, pride and ritual. He makes it impossible not to stand skin-to-skin with them as they huddle in fragile dugouts, their refuge found beneath overturned boats and their scant belongings like paperweights that hold them on earth.

  This is a book that makes one kneel before the elegance of the human spirit and the yearning that is at the essence of ­every life.

  Ru Freeman is the author of the novels “A Disobedient Girl” and “On Sal Mal Lane,” and the editor of “Extraordinary Rendition: American Writers on Palestine.”

Word Count