The project of the first novel was for an urban, bourgeois, bilingual writer who never lived in the war zone to imagine what it would be like to inhabit such a situation. The war was still my subject, so much so that it even occurred to me to call the narrator of my second novel Dinesh. I’m thinking of how, in the first chapter of A Passage North, the narrator mentions his fanatical consumption of news about the war from abroad, which made me wonder about the progression of your thinking from the first to the second book, and if you see these projects in a cohesive way.ĪNUK ARUDPRAGASAM: At the outset, my second novel wasn’t meant to be related to my first novel, it wasn’t meant to be about the war at all, but as I continued writing - I think I spent five years writing the novel - it became more and more apparent to me that it was not possible to make a clear break between writing about the war and not writing about the war. KION YOU: So, I read your two novels back to back, which was somewhat of a jarring experience in that the first novel involves a visceral, direct encounter with the Sri Lankan Civil War, while the second approaches the memory of the war at a remove. Arudpragasam spoke fluidly on themes arising from his latest novel, including historical memory, Anglophone writing, novelistic digressions, and the power of the gaze. I talked with the author via Zoom on a summer evening. These plaudits are a testament to the way Arudpragasam bestows meticulous attention on the bodily and psychological impact of violence. A Passage North has recently been shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
The Story of a Brief Marriage was lauded by critics, winning the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature and being shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. The story focuses on Krishan, a young man living in Colombo, who rides a train to northeastern Sri Lanka to attend the funeral of his grandmother’s helper, Rani.Īrudpragasam’s meditations on the Sri Lankan Civil War in A Passage North call back to his debut novel, The Story of a Brief Marriage ( 2016), which follows the tragedy of a young couple in a refugee camp that faces constant bombardment. This reflective, sweeping tone carries throughout the novel, which flows into a diverse set of themes, such as the memory of the Sri Lankan Civil War, classical South Asian literature, and the ways in which diasporic populations grieve violence in their homelands. “THE PRESENT, WE ASSUME, is eternally before us, one of the few things in life from which we cannot be parted,” begins Anuk Arudpragasam’s A Passage North.
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