This is a very unique writing style and unfortunately it didn’t work for me.
The chapters are so long which makes it seem so slow paced.
The story itself is heartbreaking. But the style just wasn’t to my taste

I loved Anuk’s descriptions of Sri Lanka and felt transported there by his words. The writing was exquisite and the story felt intensely personal. Will be on the lookout for Anuk’s next book.

A Passage North is a book rich in the description of a journey from the capital of Sri Lanka (Colombo) to the Northern Province, which is still affected by the Civil War.

Krishnan is on his way to the funeral of his grandmothers carer and companion. She had returned to visit her daughter in the North, and had died after tripping, falling down a well and breaking her neck. However, after we learn some of her background, there is some doubt that it’s actually accident. Rani had suffered a great deal during the war, and had been left with mental health problems. Krishnan thinks about how her losses affected her life.

Krishnan has experienced loss as well. His father during the war, and the breakup of a significant relationship that he had whilst studying in India.

There’s no dialogue in this novel, it’s all Krishnan’s thoughts about his past and present and Rani’s past. When I started reading, I honestly didn’t think I’d enjoy this. But I was happily mistaken. I’ve never been to Sri Lanka, but it sounds beautiful. The funeral was moving and was a reminder of the deaths of many, many innocents during the civil war, and also those who survived them.
This is a powerful novel, that I still think about after reading it.

An interested but overly flowery book about post civil war Sri Lanka. AThe main character is at a crossroad in his life, and a journey to the war-torn Northern Province to pay respects of his grandmother's former care-giver, provides time for meditation of the past, his own and his county's. t times beautiful, but at times like an exercise in overwriting. Overall, ok.

For those readers who did follow the hype of the Booker Prize, my thoughts might not be particularly novel!
I found this an interesting book more than an enjoyable book. If you're after something to read before bed, this book is not it.
If you want to sit with something, think about ideas almost academically, and don't mind putting some work in, this might be a good book for you. There are lots of ideas about belonging, memory and memorializing and about the traumatic past of Sri Lanka. The book is very dense - there's no dialogue and every image is rendered in minute detail, quite similar to Arudpragasam's last book. This seems very intentional though - I read in an interview that the author was not interested in writing an 'easy' book and also didn't want to put English words into the mouths of characters who would not be speaking it, which is fair enough.
I think I'm a bit torn with this book. I didn't enjoy reading it, in the same way I wouldn't enjoy reading a textbook, say. I did find it interesting and I did want to read on. All in all, a very unique reading experience.

They say that childbirth is painful but you forget the pain afterwards. It must be true or we'd be a world of single children and bitter mothers. I find long train journeys in exotic countries share some of the characteristics of childbirth because I suffer horribly and then a couple of years later, I completely forget how terrible they were and book more. I am a fool to myself and now jump at the chance to take domestic flights when the chances arise but in Sri Lanka, the choice is road or rail and on balance, rail is a bit safer.

I have taken several long train journeys in Sri Lanka - first during the Civil War and more recently just a few years ago. Each time I looked forward to them, imagining the views of the lush countryside as I chugged through. Each time, without exception, the journeys were slow, rambling and deeply uncomfortable. 8 hours in a luggage compartment; not great. Another 6 or 7 hours in an 'observation' car going backwards - seeing where I'd been, not where I was going chilled to the bone by overactive air conditioning. 3 hours standing crushed in a coastal train on a Friday evening, unable to see a thing and with my nose too close to a lot of armpits.

Why do I mention this? Because that's what I was thinking of as I listened and read Anuk Arudpragasam's book 'A Passage North'. Slow, rambling, uncomfortable and with an overwhelming sense that I'd never get those hours back again.

Krishan, a Tamil living in Colombo with his grandmother, receives a call that Rani, a woman who looked after his grandmother for several years, has died, found at the bottom of a well with a broken neck. He decides to go to the funeral, worrying that perhaps Rani's family will blame his family for taking her away from them for so long. On the train, he ponders events from his life, things he's read, films he's watched, and his relationship with the enigmatic Indian woman, Anjum.

I really wanted to love this book, so much so that (without realising I'd done it), I requested both the ebook and the audiobook from Netgalley. I even loved the cover - feeling sure I'd seen that stretch of railway track. I wanted to dive in and experience this tale of a journey through the heart of Sri Lanka. I've read quite widely about Sri Lanka, through the colonial era, Civil War and Tsunami themes. This is not my first time at this particular rodeo. But, I fear it's probably my last time trying to read this particular author.

I don't want to be dismissed as insufficiently 'intellectual' to love this book. I read one comment on a review that had called the book 'boring' and found that the feedback given was that readers who think something is boring should look to themselves and not the book to understand why. I'm sorry to disagree; this book is dull to such an extreme that I'm not prepared to take the blame on my own shoulders for not liking it. Heck, I got through it - about three-quarters on audiobook and then finishing off with the ebook when I realised that I couldn't take any more of the former. Almost everything that happens could have been so much more interesting if it had happened in half the pages and with five times as many full stops. Sentences run on through multiple sub-clauses. Paragraphs take pages. No sentence starts with a clear sense of where it's going to end or what tangents it will take along the way. I take my hat off to the narrator who, despite a rather monotone deliver, cannot have found it easy to breathe adequately through some of these superlong sentences. Actually, it was only when I saw them on the screen that I realised quite what a challenge he'd taken on.

This book is like getting stuck in the corridor with the office bore whom you've casually asked if they had a good weekend and still being there 2 hours later whilst he rambles on about his historic reenactment battle and tells you all about how to make a suit of armour and how to roast a pig over an open fire whilst taking diversions into telling you which A-roads were congested and how he's 'hyper-miled' his 10-year old Ford to maximise the fuel efficiency.

The tangents this book takes are extreme. Want a rather long synopsis of the life of the Buddha? Yep, that's in there. Want an account of a Tamil leader who got his eyes gouged out? You can have that too. There's even a point where he's off the train but following a funeral procession where he recognises the scenery and then recounts (in unnecessary detail) not only the plot of a documentary on female suicide bombers but also a sex-laden trip to Mumbai with his bisexual girlfriend where they watched the documentary and then took a walk along the seafront. This felt like the longest three hundred and something pages of my life.

I'm grateful to Netgalley and the publishers of both the ebook and the audiobook for their kindness in sending me copies but I can't bring myself to endorse this book. There may well be a pretty good 100 page book hidden among an extra 200 pages of what Greta Thunberg would probably call "blah blah blah".

This is not exactly a coming of age story, neither is it a tale that clarifies the situation that the country of Sri Lanka finds itself at the tail end of a long, tumultuous period. It is a mix of both of those above descriptions and a little more.
A young man is trying to do his bit at long last after being concerned about his identity and how he is contributing to the rebuilding of his country and himself. The intention and how it is introduced to the reader make it easy for anyone unfamiliar with the conflict to get a feel for the basics. The problem for me was that he was nursing a broken heart. This emotional reason is a predominant factor for his return to his country (or so it seemed), and it eclipsed his other ruminations for me.
His stay in India, the kind of life he led and the discriminations he faced along with the lady in question are all shown in pieces during flashbacks. The writing was great in conveying emotions which is why it was harder to focus on the other parts of his journey. Although this relationship (or the lack of it) is a significant part of Krishan and his understanding of himself, I enjoyed the other adventure more. He is getting his bearings of being part of a family once again, living within it and dealing with the day to day hurdles. These parts are highly relatable since I come from a south-Indian family, and little but the ocean differentiates some of the familial arrangements.
He journeys away from the city to attend a funeral of a woman he thought he was helping and grows along the way. I may not have enjoyed the story completely, but parts of it and the writing makes me sure that I would pick up another book by the author if given a chance.
I would recommend it to anyone who finds the blurb interesting!
I received an ARC thanks to NetGalley and the publishers but the review is entirely based on my own reading experience.

Now longlisted for The 2021 Man Booker Prize!

‘The specific path a life took was often determined by accidents, it was true, by the situation into which you were born, by an unexpected encounter or an unexpected loss, an unlikely glimpse or an unlikely wound, but people also carried their own clandestine trajectories inside them, trajectories whose origins were unknown and whose modes of operation were often invisible to the eye, but which were sometimes strong enough to push people in certain directions despite everything that took place on the surface of their lives.’

I’m afraid I won’t be able to do justice in my review of this book, especially since I haven’t read that much into the Sri Lankan Civil War, but this is one of the few books I’d like to give 5 star-rates this year. One thing that particularly stands out in A Passage North is the overuse of flashbacks. However, it’s not without reason that Anuk Arudpragasam utilises flashbacks in his story. Our main character, Krishan, is described as living a life remote from the conflict that was fought in Sri Lanka for more than 20 years between 1983 and 2009. He grew up in Colombo, then spent a considerable amount of his life in Delhi to do college and finally worked for several years during which he finally formed some political opinions and started to gain consciousness of his previous biases about the place he grew up in.

In those formative years, he felt the distance between the comfort of living in India with the devastation that happened in the northern part of Sri Lanka where the ongoing conflict between the Sri Lankan army and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) took place. At the same time, he also started to form an intimacy with Anjum, a woman he encountered by chance during one of his mutual friend’s meetups. Anjum was his obsession for quite a while, leaving a deep influence on how he finally saw his life and formed his sense of purpose. He was infatuated by Anjum’s political activism and other notable qualities that impressed him, while also cherishing moments of intimacy that they had spent together, having sex, tossing and turning in between the night and day, sharing thoughts and ideas, before finally realising the distance between them.

Distance is a really striking feature that this story is built upon. Through the meditation offered by Anuk Arudpragasam, I came to recognise there are several ways to interpret distance. First of all, there is the physical distance that strikes us as a real distance, and we can leave the further discussion on this. There is also the temporal distance, in which we recognise something has happened in a place some time ago, but for some reason, we could not participate due to our absence at the designated place at the given moment. But the distance that is being discussed in length in this story is the psychological distance, which happens to various factors. Each person consists of different history, was raised in a unique environment, with some qualities that sometimes belong only to that person alone.

Flashbacks, as I have said earlier in this review, are used frequently to explain this psychological distance. The title–A Passage North–is a direct reference to the journey that Krishan made from Colombo to areas formerly controlled by the Tigers in the northern part of Sri Lanka. He was on his way to attend the funeral of Rani, his grandmother former’s caretaker who just died the day before. Taking the seven-hour train journey, he reminisced over the time he had spent in India as a student and later academic researcher, which at that time seemed remotely out of place from the reality he faced in Sri Lanka. It was at that time, he only finally considered the direct consequences of the Civil War, which manifested itself through Rani’s bizarre death. Even though he’s spent some time working for an NGO in Jaffna, there is still some sensibilities lost to him about the events around him that seemed to happen far away. Krishan is, in all fairness, someone who exhibits characteristics of a person that is out of place, untouched by the events around him, unaffected by the time that passed in the place where he stands.

It was at the funeral, triggered by the scene of a lake on the way to Rani’s cremation place, that he was reminded of a documentary that he once saw during his study in India. Another interesting fact about this book is that it relies on intertextual information that does not limit itself to other books. There was a fair share of account about the life of Buddha taken from a translation from the Sanskrit by Patrick Olivelle. In some part of the story, Anuk also recounts the life of Kuttimani who was one of the leaders of the Tamil militant organisation—TELO. But what is striking here is the use of a documentary as a way to expand the author’s vision of the northeastern landscape, by providing context on the resemblance between what drove many people into Buddhism teaching in the past and what drove some Tamil women into participating in Tamil guerilla organisation during the Civil War.

The documentary in question is My Daughter the Terrorist which was released in 2007 and directed by Beate Arnestad. It highlights the story of two twenty-four years old women, Dharsika and Puhalchudar, who fought side by side as part of the Black Tigers—the suicide squad of the LTTE. War itself is a traumatic experience for many, leaving scars that might exist for generations, as was the case of Dharsika who lost his postman father in one of the bombings carried out by the Sri Lankan army.

‘Krishan had been struck by that scene the first time he saw it, by the way it so vividly captured Dharsika and Puhal’s relationship and situation, something simultaneously so moving, challenging, and disconcerting about how these two women had abandoned everything to join the Tigers, their homes and villages, families and friends, about how they’d formed, in exile from their previous lives, such an intimate bond, and how, despite waking together almost every day for seven years, they were ready to give each other up for the cause they’d joined, even to kill each other if the need arose.’

In some ways, the documentary provides a desired parable between the rise of Buddhism and the guerilla movement in northeastern Sri Lanka. The vivid account of Dharsika and Puhalchudar in the author’s paraphrasing compensates for those who lack knowledge about the historical background of the Civil War which is the most important backdrop of the story. It is also a creative way to combine the cinematic reference with beautiful prose as demonstrated here.

‘… Krishan no longer felt any particular sadness at the thought of Rani’s body being reduced, perhaps because he could no longer hear the actual sound of the burning, perhaps because he understood now that Rani had already left the world. He watched as the scarlet glow of the fire grew brighter in the darkening evening, as the air around it warped with strange clarity in the intensity of the heat, watched as the substantiality of a human life was transmuted, like a mirage or hallucination or vision, into thick clouds of smoke billowing up into the sky, thinning as they rose and then disappearing into the evening, a message from this world to another that would never be received.’

Title - A Passage North

Author - Anuk Arudpragasam

Genre - Historical Fiction

Every year when the Booker Prize longlist gets announced, my instinct is to try picking up as many of them and pick out some of the best ones from it. The difference here with ‘A Passage North’ was I had got my hands on it way ahead of the announcement since I was intrigued by the author's previous offering and with the setting in Sri Lanka (one of my favourite South Asian settings), I couldn’t help but read this as soon as possible.

The Plot:

The entire book is narrated from the perspective of Krishan who is dealing with two different events in his life. Krishan who had returned to his hometown after the civil war ended had received a phone call from Rani’s daughter about Rani’s demise. Rani was Krishan’s grandmother who had a traumatic experience while travelling to her brother’s place abroad and Rani helped her recover from it. Rani who herself was trying to recover from the horrors of her sons’ death became an integral part of Krishan’s grandmother’s life.

Krishan jogged his memories to his past while travelling to Rani’s hometown. His relationship with Anjum which he realised was ending in a train journey kept coming back to him. Krishan met Anjum in one of the meets in Delhi and instantly fell for her. Their relationship though intense together seemed to move to different paths after a while as they were looking for different things and Krishan couldn’t stop thinking about it.Krishna's thoughts throughout the journey till Rani’s last rites is what makes up the entirety of the plot that promises an experience that is surely intense yet provoking.

My Thoughts on the book:

The book is pretty short compared to what I have read in recent times and yet it does take a lot of time to process the thoughts that follow. Anuk’s description of the various horrors faced by Sri Lankan citizens is portrayed so tightly throughout the book that the readers have no choice but to experience it along with the protagonist of the book. The readers are faced with only four central characters and yet we are served so many shades that at times it does get overwhelming at times.

With so many strong points about the book, there are certain shortcomings that one cannot tend to overlook. The abrupt end to a lot of character arcs leaves the reader asking for more as they tend to not bring closure. A lot of us would surely ride into this beautiful journey and yet the craving for more would still be there. Some of my favourite moments from the book though were the stories of what actually transpired during the civil war like Krishan thinking about the documentary of the female LTTE member or the horrors of Black July, they somehow seem to etch in your mind. Also, the short snippets on how the relationship between Rani and his grandmother developed does bring a smile to your face.

So, is it a worthy contender to the Booker Prize that is to be announced soon? Pretty much, yes but we would have to wait for the time to see whether it would be first included in the shortlist and then go on to win the prize. For everyone out here, I would recommend picking this one up to experience a heart-wrenching journey.

“The present, we assume, is eternally before us, one of the few things in life from which we cannot be parted.”

To be honest I struggled to get through this book. Although beautifully written, some sentences never seemed to end. Very philosophical. I can’t seem to decide if the book is just not for me of of I wasn’t in the mood for it..

I really enjoyed spending my time in Krishan's company, listening to his meditations on life & death, ageing & violence, love & attachment, trauma, memory and letting go of them.
This book felt mature and timeless and not concerned at all with the mores observed by current creative fiction writers. While the story and stories were distant from my reality, the tentative exploration of what to make of a life lived felt universal and personal at the same time.

My only question mark was around the narrator's sparing references to his father and brother in the book - I wasn't sure whether there was a specific intent in that (e.g, women instead feature a lot in the book) or whether it it just simply did not serve the purpose of the narration.

I would highly recommend this book to everyone. It will stay with you and will provide you with beautiful images, nourishing thoughts and profound emotions.

Many thanks to Granta Publications and NetGalley for sending me a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Longlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize.

This is a philosophical novel yet one which is very readable if approached at an appropriately thoughtful manner and slow speed.

It is one which places us deep in the mind of a third party character and which largely (and deliberately) eschews each of:

Action (this is a novel of the interior not the exterior – much of it deliberately taking place on a long and solitary journey);

Classical Character Development (replaced instead by introspective reflection);

Spoken Dialogue (the book is more interested in reflecting on conversations – in you might say their legacy – than in the immediate experience of them – which actually matches the book’s treatment of its core subject). (The author has also effectively said that reported speech has greater fidelity anyway given he is often writing Tamil dialogue in English).

It is one that could not be described as autobiographical - but one where it is clear that the author has projected many of his own ambiguities and obsessions onto his third party character as well as one as well as one where sometimes as a reader one feels that the author has rather bypassed his character to include his own research for the book directly.

The author is a Sri Lankan Tamil who grew up in the capital Colombo, rather distant from the direct fighting in the Civil War. He wrote the book in the US while studying for a PhD in Philosophy at Colombia University. Interestingly given my comment about this being a philosophical novel he has argued that the Western study of Philosophy is rather abstracted and formal and divorced from an “introspective or essayistic” approach and instead he was more inspired by Robert Musil and “A Man Without Qualities” and the idea of using fiction to “place philosophical questioning and response in a kind of living, bodily situation.”

He has said that he is “obsessed” with the Sri Lankan Civil War and particularly its legacy as the Tamil diaspora came to terms with the allegations of the government atrocities which led up to the defeat of the Tamil Tigers – and all his novels have addressed this in some way. This book, compared to his other writing, is both a more oblique treatment of the war itself which remains in the background, but also a more direct treatment of the war’s legacy both for those involved and for those, like the author and his narrator, whose involvement was after the event.

The book’s third party character Krishnan is also a Sri Lankan Tamil – again with a family base in Colombo (where he loses his father to a bomb attack but is otherwise relatively unaware of the details of the conflict in the North): who also went abroad to study – in this case Political Science in Delhi. There the shock end to the war and the subsequent Channel 4 “Killing Fields in Sri Lanka” documentary opens his eyes and he becomes obsessed with researching and mentally recording the war.

In Delhi he later met and fell in love with an Indian activist Anjum and is challenged by her devotion to women and labour cause activism – and when she makes it clear that she is focused on her causes more than him and breaks off their relationship, he decides to quit his studies and return to Sri Lanka – working with a small NGO working in the North East with those affected by the war. Later he returns to Colombo with a better-funded, more desk-based overseas NGO, living with his mother and ageing Appamma (Grandmother). After the latter has a number of falls Krishnan arranges for someone he met in his work – Rani, a Northern based Tamil lady who traumatised by the loss of her two sons (one in combat, one killed by shrapnel), is undergoing electric-shock therapy – to be his grandmother’s carer.

The book itself takes place over a couple of days: after a number of years of silence Krishnan receives an email from Anjum; on the same day he gets a call to say that Rani (who some time since returned to her family in the North) has died after an apparently accidental fall into a well. He travels to the funeral to represent his family and on the lengthy train journey and then at the funeral reflects on the events of his life.

The author has talked about the different ways of remembering the war – and his contribution being via his novels and this idea comes up also in the book

"People would remain who insisted on remembering, some of them activists, artists and archivists who’d consciously chosen to do so but most of them ordinary people who had not other choice … who, in the most basic sense, simply couldn’t accept a world without what’d they’d lost, people who’d lost the ability to participate in the present and were this compelled to live out the rest of their lives in their memories and imaginations, to build in their minds, like the temple constructed by Poosal, the monuments and memorials they could not build in the world outside"

In this quote I would say that: Anjum is the activist (as are those, in a Tamil context, who take part in protests around the world); the author is the artist; Krishnan a mental archivist who tries to move towards activism; Rani the lost person without choice.

And this quote also includes one of the most interesting and allegorical aspects of the novel – the Sri Tamil legend of Poosal and the idea of building a “castle in the mind” – something that Krishnan realises he was doing himself with his post-documentary, pre-Anjum reaction to the end of the war and which much more poignantly he realises Rani is doing.

This is a book of very deliberate juxtapositions of two concepts and then an examination of them together. These include:

The inexorable passage of time and the intensity of the present moment – this is key to the novel’s opening;

Desire and yearning – this is key to the novel’s ending;

And also: The past and the present, Absence and longing, Activism and academia, Action and introspection, Agency and obsession, Gaze and touch; Sleep and Waking, Travel and Exile.

A repeating (and all the more notable for being slightly unusual even at time discordant) image is of not just vision and sight – the author has even said that “Visions” was a working title for the book – but also the book looks at the physical elements of eyes themselves.

And this is most striking and shocking in the true story of the arrest, death sentence and then prison riot murder of the Tamil militant Kuttimani – his wish for his eyes and their eventual fate.

Overall this was a very welcome addition to the longlist which very much deserves to go further.

I came to this novel because of its inclusion on the 2021 Booker Prize longlist. I have to confess to complete ignorance of this author and this book so I went into it not knowing what to expect. It took me a few pages to get into the style, but once I did, the whole book was a pleasure to read.

What is it that might take a few pages to get used to? Firstly, this is a very reflective, interior novel that describes the thoughts and emotions of a young man. It has to be said that not much happens in the book, so don’t come to it expecting a detailed plot and story arc. In essence, a man receives two pieces of news (an email and a phone call), makes a train journey, and attends a funeral. That’s what happens, but saying it out loud here is not a spoiler because this book isn’t about plot. It’s also a discursive novel consisting of lots of long (and beautifully written) sentences: you have to concentrate as you read because it can sometimes be tricky to remember how you got to the topic you are reading about - there were several points where I had to skip back a few pages to see what it was that had reminded our protagonist of something and set him off thinking about the current ideas in his head. Thirdly, although people talk to one another, there is no dialogue in this book and all the spoken words are just reported speech: this creates its own atmosphere in the book which seems to fit very well with the overall tone.

For context, the novel is set in Sri Lanka a few years after the defeat of the Tamil Tigers. Large parts of the narrative concern the impact of that fighting and its legacy.

If you are prepared to concentrate a bit and don’t mind a novel where not much action happens, then this is a very luxurious experience. It sort of feels like you are being taken on a journey in the first class compartment when you are used to travelling second or third class: everything feels that bit more comfortable, that bit smoother. There are lots and lots of beautifully put together sentences and I think that it is the writing here that will stick with me most even though it was interesting to learn a bit more about Sri Lanka along the way.

For my personal tastes, I hope this novel takes the next step onto the Booker shortlist. My thanks to the publisher for an ARC via NetGalley.

When I started reading this book, it deeply resonated with me-like the narrator ( and seemingly, the author), I’m Tamil, but my circumstances could not be more different from those of Tamils in the northern and eastern parts of Sri Lanka, where most of the Sri Lankan Civil war played out. Like the narrator, again, I followed the movement for an independent Tamil state for Sri Lankan Tamils, very closely, initially through the newspaper, and later on, through all the resources on the Internet. Living in a state that was sympathetic towards Tamil self-determination in Sri Lanka, I’ve practically grown up reading about it, the times when a breakthrough seemed achievable, to the devastating years from 2010 onwards, when the movement was crushed by a belligerent government, and the ultimate defeat, and decimation of all that hope and courage. However, I was following this from a position of immense privilege, and while it was deeply affecting, there was always an emotional remove that my completely different circumstances brought. I would have liked that to have been addressed with more depth in this book. The book seems to cast the narrator, a privileged Sri Lankan Tamilian, Krishnan, as a modern-day Prince Siddhartha, who undergoes personal growth through experiencing the break-up of a relationship, and decides to work in the areas most affected by the conflict, and has to deal with coming in close contact with someone for whom this wasn’t happening far away, but to their home and family. Real-world genocide, however, does not occur to provide a backdrop for solipsistic privileged men, which is ultimately how this book feels. The narrative choice is whiplash-inducing- the narrator explores a non-fictional facet of the Sri Lanka Civil War, where the writing is very good. The writer, however, chooses to juxtapose this with the narrator’s musings that read like a teenager’s exploration of existentialism and heartbreak (these parts reminded me quite strongly of AJ’s privileged emotional crises in The Sopranos). It makes for a very jarring reading experience-harrowing accounts of custodial torture, followed by completely unconnected navel-gazing. This might be the way the human mind works, but when faced with real-world humanitarian tragedies, musing on the unfairness of rejection by a partner seems rather shallow. The narrator’s ageist as well, and if his views on the tragedy of the decay of the human body had been to highlight the parlous state of affordable assisted living, that would be commendable. The sections on his grandmother, and ageing in general, read like accounts of the narrator’s impatience with his grandmother, for not shrugging off her mortal coil quickly enough for him! The narrator also states with apparently no irony at all, that his mother is occupied with all the housework and the burden of care-giving
, apart from her career-which begs the question: why doesn’t the narrator chip in at all?! The Buddha’s views on ageing weren’t that you might as well die before you get old! ( the writer and singer of that, incidentally, are perfectly healthy well into their late 70s, and leading far more interesting lives than the narrator of this book who is seemingly in his late 20s/early 30s). The book has some powerful writing on the male gaze, that’s unfortunately undone by the writer’s own male gaze- an account of a documentary on 2 women members of the Black Tiger unit of the LTTE( the cadre trained for kamikaze missions) starts with an entire paragraph on how the woman seemed “divinely ordained” to be in this “elite cadre”, because of her beauty and goes on to describe physical attributes such as “darkly lustrous skin” ( the 4th or 5th time a woman is described that way). This would be hilarious if it weren’t so depressing to think that a man watches a documentary on women discussing why they’ve chosen such a harsh lifestyle, and the first thing that strikes him is how hot she is. It’s even more depressing that not a single editor found that problematic.
The writer’s in a unique position to tell a great story, in more depth- what is the situation like for him in Sri Lanka? Does privilege insulate them in Colombo to such an extent? What reserves of strength have the people who lived in the North-eastern parts of Sri Lanka drawn on to rebuild their lives and go on? And ultimately, do those most affected by the Civil war feel it was all worth it because it gave them stories of courage and inspiration to draw on? Stream of consciousness and a lack of paragraphs do not always mean profundity, ‘The God of Small Things’ and ‘ Midnight’s Children’ managed quite well, without resorting to gimmicks of formatting ( or the lack of it).
If this is the only work you've read about the Sri Lankan Civil War, please don't make this the last. Samanth Subramaniam's compelling non-fiction book, 'THis Divided Island", and the movie 'Dheepan' are recommendations I can make.

(Twitter post)
Swept straight into the beautiful storytelling and philosophical reflection in
@TheBookerPrizes nominated 'A Passage North' by Anuk Arudpragasam. Recommended
@GrantaBooks

A Passage North is a beautiful, understated novel which I was very keen to read after it was longlisted for the Booker Prize.

On the surface, this is a very simple novel: in the first section of the novel, Krishan, a young man in Colombo, Sri Lanka, receives news that Rani, his grandmother's carer has died in the northeast of the country. The second section describes his journey north to attend her funeral, and the third section describes her cremation. There is no other real action in the present day, and most of the novel really takes place within Krishan's head as we follow his thoughts on Rani, his grandmother, and his relationship with his former lover Anjum.

Rani has lost both of her sons in the Civil War and has been receiving regular psychiatric treatment; Krishan is surprised that she finds some measure of contentment in caring for his belligerent grandmother, whose gradual and reluctant withdrawal from the world is movingly described. Rani's experiences also seem to force Krishan to confront the losses of the Tamil people, from which he has felt relatively insulated (in spite of having lost his own father during the war), as he has been studying in Delhi where he met Anjum. This asymmetric relationship is well-drawn - Krishan is consumed by desire for Anjum, but Anjum is very clear that the pursuit of her political ideals will come first and that their relationship will not outlast their time together in Delhi. In some ways, Krishan himself registers as a bit of a blank in comparison to these three women, but it is his clear-sightedness and self-awareness that allows them to be so clearly delineated.

What makes this novel so impressive is the sheer beauty of its writing. Arudpragasam writes in long sentences (frequently as long as half a page), but these feel graceful and fluent rather than convoluted and torturous, and they lend themselves to the extended and precise exploration of ideas such as time, memory, loss and desire. The novel is full of staggeringly insightful observations. For instance, describing Krishan's grandmother, Arundpragasam writes that "Krishan had always thought of death as something that happened suddenly or violently, an event that took place at a specific time and then was over, but thinking now of his grandmother as he sat there on the rocks, it struck him that death could also be a long, drawn-out process, a process that took up a significant portion of the life of the dying person." Or, writing about Krishan's initial infatuation with Anjum: "It was funny how similar desire was to loss in this way, how desire too, like bereavement, could cut through the fabric of ordinary life, causing the routines and rhythms that had governed your existence so totally as to seem unquestionable to quietly lose the hard glint of necessity, leaving you almost in a state of disbelief, unable to participate in the world." There are many other examples.

The novel does not flinch from the horrors of the Sri Lankan Civil War, in particular when describing the torture of Kuttimani and his fellow separatist leaders, and when recounting a documentary about two young female members of the Black Tigers. (It is worth mentioning that I had virtually no knowledge of the Sri Lankan Civil War before I started reading and this wasn't a problem - the novel makes everything very clear.) However, there is something almost redemptive about the Krishan's growing understanding out the lives of others as he journeys northward, so that the novel leaves us feeling tentatively hopeful about the future.

Overall, I found this an excellent and quietly moving novel, which I would warmly recommend to others.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for giving me access to an online copy of this book to review.

A fascinating novel, heavily influenced by Thomas Bernhard and, the author's favourite novel, A Book of Memories by Péter Nádas, simultaneously political and philsophical.

On a Booker longlist that seemed to prize readability and accessibility, it was great to see the author here resisting the standard traits of novel writing, as indeed the judges recognised in their citation (A Passage North is quiet by serendipity, possessing its power not on its face, but in hidden, subterranean places. It has a simple conceit which revolves around the philosophy of the present as a disease of the past. It is in subverting our sense of time and even of how a story should be told that this novel achieves its strongest effect and strikes an indelible mark on the reader's soul.)

From an interview in the Paris Review:

"INTERVIEWER

What are some aspects of novel writing that you don’t pay as much attention to?

ARUDPRAGASAM

Story. Creating a well-rounded character. Setting. Dialogue. Historical context. I try to pay attention to these things—I do try—but they’re always afterthoughts.

I have in my mind that the reader expects the character to be believable or the story to be interesting. I have this little voice in my head that says I need to try—but those elements of novel writing are not what I am interested in."

A Passage North opens as it goes on with an extensive philosophical musing on the nature of the present.

"THE PRESENT, WE assume, is eternally before us, one of the few things in life from which we cannot be parted. It overwhelms us in the painful first moments of entry into the world, when it is still too new to be managed or negotiated, remains by our side during childhood and adolescence, in those years before the weight of memory and expectation, and so it is sad and a little unsettling to see that we become, as we grow older, much less capable of touching, grazing, or even glimpsing it, that the closest we seem to get to the present are those brief moments we stop to consider the spaces our bodies are occupying, the intimate warmth of the sheets in which we wake, the scratched surface of the window on a train taking us somewhere else, as if the only way we can hold time still is by trying physically to prevent the objects around us from moving. The present, we realize, eludes us more and more as the years go by, showing itself for fleeting moments before losing us in the world’s incessant movement, fleeing the second we look away and leaving scarcely a trace of its passing, or this at least is how it usually seems in retrospect, when in the next brief moment of consciousness, the next occasion we are able to hold things still, we realize how much time has passed since we were last aware of ourselves, when we realize how many days, weeks, and months have slipped by without our consent.

Events take place, moods ebb and flow, people and situations come and go, but looking back during these rare junctures in which we are, for whatever reason, lifted up from the circular daydream of everyday life, we are slightly surprised to find ourselves in the places we are, as though we were absent while everything was happening, as though we were somewhere else during the time that is usually referred to as our life. Waking up each morning we follow by circuitous routes the thread of habit, out of our homes, into the world, and back to our beds at night, move unseeingly through familiar paths, one day giving way to another and one week to the next, so that when in the midst of this daydream something happens and the thread is finally cut, when, in a moment of strong desire or unexpected loss, the rhythms of life are interrupted, we look around and are quietly surprised to see that the world is vaster than we thought, as if we’d been tricked or cheated out of all that time, time that in retrospect appears to have contained nothing of substance, no change and no duration, time that has come and gone but left us somehow untouched."

The novel is set in Sri Lanka around 5-6 years after the 2009 defeat of the Tamil Tigers by Government forces.

Our first-person narrator is Khrishan, a Tamil from Sri Lanka, who had been studying in Dehli at the time of the Tigers defeat. The break-up with his girlfriend Anjum, who prioritised her social activism over their relationship, and then seeing the post-war suffering of the Tamil people led him back to Sri Lanka. He first gets involved in reconstruction work in the north-east of the country, but soon realises that the mental trauma of the conflict will persist much longer than the physical, and that the reconstruction is a form of erasure, and returns to his family home in Colombo, which he shares with his mother and his elderly paternal grandmother (his father having been killed by a bomb in the civil war).

"The purpose of all the government’s demolition and renovation in the northeast had, of course, been to erase any memory that might spur the Tamil population back toward militarism, and in this it had been more or less successful, for one hardly heard ordinary people talking about the Tigers in the northeast now, one hardly heard anyone giving them more than a passing thought. It was strange to consider, since for decades the Tigers had been the central fact of life in the northeast, but it also made sense to a degree, for memory requires cues from the environment to operate, can function only by means of associations between things in the present and things in the past, which meant that remembering became far harder when all the cues that an environment contained were systematically removed. Without the physical objects that allowed it to operate organically, memory had to be cultivated consciously and deliberately, and how could the average person in the northeast afford to actively cultivate their memory of a world now gone when there were so many more urgent concerns, how to make ends meet, how to rebuild their homes, how to educate their children, concerns that filled up all their mental space? The truth was that eventually most people would have ceased remembering the past anyway, even if all remaining traces of the Tigers had been left untouched, for the truth was that all monuments lose their meaning and significance with the passing of time, disappearing, like the statues and memorials in Colombo dedicated to the so-called independence struggle against the British, into the vast unseen and unconsidered background of everyday life.
...
Deliberately or not the past was always being forgotten, in all places and among all peoples, a phenomenon that had less to do with the forces that seek to erase or rewrite history than simply the nature of time, with the precedence the present always seems to have over what has come before, the precedence not of the present moment, which we never seem to have access to, but of the present situation, which is always demanding our attention, always so forceful and vivid and overwhelming that as soon as one of its elements disappears we forget it ever existed."

As the novel begins he has just returned from the office (he now works in an administration role at an NGO on more administrative matters) to contemplate an email he had received from Anjum, the first since their break up almost 4 years earlier. But as he is about to re-read the email he receives a phone call informing him that Rana, his grandmother's carer until recently, had died. Khrishan had first come across Rana, a Tamil, when visiting a hospital, where she was undergoing electroshock therapy for the mental trauma caused by losing both of her sons during the civil war, and had invited her to live with the family as a way to both solve their care issues and to help with Rana's mental healing.

Arudpragasam originally aimed to write a novel in the style of Bernhard's stunning Extinction, attempting to replicate the "the sustained engagement with a single consciousness in a constrained space" (from the Literary Friction podcast) in Bernhard's novel, although he found it difficult to achieve that in his own writing in a "bearable" way, eventually expanding the locations and characters (the novel was originally going to be the main character and his grandmother).

"The outside world in Extinction is like scenery, it’s like a backdrop in the theater, where it’s so obvious that you’re not supposed to pay attention to it—it’s really just there so that what is happening in the foreground can happen. I wanted to write a book like that, one that involved sustained engagement with a single consciousness at a kind of intense level. I tried very hard, and I couldn’t do it in a way that anybody who wanted to read my writing or any friends of mine were willing to tolerate. In fact, I couldn’t do it in a way that I could tolerate. I had difficulty following this ideal, and slowly, over the course of years, the world began to seep more into the novel."

That said, the novel's action is still relatively limited, taking place over a few days, with Khrisnan going for a walk, and then taking a train to Kilinochchi (which was the de facto capital of the Tamil Tigers territory) where he attends Rana's funeral, all the while pondering deeply on thoughts provoked by the email and phone call that open the novel as well as on the effects of the civil war (here, the narration can seem rather one-sided, but then this is a first-person narrative).

Although the setting of the novel is wider in practice, as his thoughts extend the narrative scope via some flashbacks to his time with Anjum, and indeed the thoughts he had then. This from a train journey he and Anjum took after they had been separated for some weeks, as they prepare for bed in a sleeper carriage:

"He would think, listening to the Sivapurānam, of the sea in Sri Lanka as it was during the calmer months, specifically of the sea in Trincomalee as he’d seen it once on a warm, late June evening, the water a calm, waveless sheet of glimmering, glistening blue that stretched out silently toward the sky. He would think of how the water unfurled itself so softly across the gentle slope of the beach, how it swept over the smooth, polished sand with such tenderness and how reaching its full extension, just as it was losing all its momentum, it would pause as if taking a breath in a last brief embrace of the earth, clasping the land for as long as it could before being drawn back with a sigh into the sea. He would think of the sea, rolling and unrolling itself softly and placidly across the edges of the earth in this way, coming into contact with the shore so lovingly and gratefully and then, when it was time, withdrawing so gracefully, and he would wonder whether it was possible for him too to be in Anjum’s presence and then return to himself with such grace and equanimity, to attach himself to the thing he loved and then detach himself without each time ripping apart his soul, though the truth, he knew, was that such a stance was only possible at certain moments, at least for him, moments in which he was, for whatever reason, briefly in possession of himself, for it was difficult to be philosophical in the midst of desire, it was difficult to be as removed from the world as religious devotees claimed to be when you were caught up in the bliss of union or in the desperation of being parted."

There is a certain irony here in that Khrisnan is very much being philosophical in the midst of desire - he is hoping to have sex with Anjum in their compartment. And that speaks to one potential issue with the novel - at times the philosophising is somewhat artificial, but then Arudpragasam isn't aiming for realism.

Bernhard's influence is also clear in the long sentences and paragraphs, and the recollected reported speech (there is no dialogue in the novel).

Another differentiating element is how Arudpragasam incorporates various literary works in translation including the Tamil Periya Purānam, the Sanskrit The Cloud Messenger, a Sansrkit version of the Life of the Buddha and some Pali Buddhist women’s poetry.

Overall - a worthwhile inclusion on the longlist and a potential shortlist contender.

On the surface it's easy to summarize what happens in “A Passage North”. Krishan, a young man who has returned to live and work in his native country of Sri Lanka after the recent Civil War, travels to the war-torn Northern Province to pay respects at the funeral of Rani, his grandmother's former care-giver who died suddenly. This journey comprises the bulk of the action in this story. Readers who prefer a novel with a lot of plot-driven physical drama won't find it in this novel. The power of this book and the complexity of its tale comes from Krishan's meditative process. He was absent from the genocide which resulted in the death of many thousands of fellow Tamils. Though his father was a casualty of one of the Tiger bombings in Colombo, he didn't directly witness or feel the effects of this calamity. However, Rani was a witness to these horrific events and experienced tragic losses which left her severely traumatized. The question for Krishan is how to reconcile what he knows with what he has not directly seen and what steps should be taken to positively contribute to his country which has been ravaged by war. While he is contending with this enormous issue he's also simply a young guy who likes to hang out with his friends and smoke. He spends long periods of time wandering while staring out at the horizon and pines for his lover Anjum who's become a committed activist. Through the course of this novel we get a poignant sense of his state of being at a significant crossroad in life.

The author is a student of philosophy and this is heavily reflected in the narrative which meaningfully considers a number of dilemmas to do with the nature of life, time and reality. This is clear from the opening page which begins with the question of inhabiting the present moment. His meditative process offers a moving and new perspective on a number of issues. For instance, the world now witnesses significant conflicts online through first-hand footage shared by individuals embroiled in the action. However Krishan is cautious about granting these images legitimacy: “his initial reluctance to acknowledge the magnitude of what had happened at the end of the war, as though he'd been hesitant to believe the evidence on his computer screen because his own poor, violated, stateless people were the ones alleging it, as though he'd been unable to take the suffering of his own people seriously till it was validated by the authority of a panel of foreign experts, legitimized by a documentary narrated by a clean-shaven white man standing in front of a camera in suit and tie.” The question of authority is now a difficult one as we're wary of being manipulated, but also want to empower the real experience of individuals and resist being swayed by subliminal racial biases. This signifies a difficult modern issue we now all face that is not just to do with the act of witnessing but about the validity of what we see, who we choose to believe and how we interpret it.

Krishan considers issues which are both universal and specific, but his point of view does feel very rooted in his youth and this is acknowledged: “thinking as he lay there, in that naïve and moving way of adolescents”. Obviously, he does not have all the answers – nor should he – but some of his diatribes are more meaningful than others. I found his insights into migration particularly striking - especially how the trauma of war means some citizens can't bear to live in their native country any longer. Equally, I appreciated his sensitivity in considering not only his own perspective as a young man in a heterosexual relationship but that of women, queer people and hijras. A scene where he makes eye contact with another man on public transport also gives a dynamic perspective on masculinity and how men respond to one another. However, I found some other meditations he indulges in less enlightening such as the meaning of sight loss as one grows older and an extended lesson in the difference between desire and yearning. His musings do occasionally stray into overly-ponderous and pedagogical Alain de Botton territory. His ruminations aren't wrong, per say, but I don't read novels to be lectured to. Similarly, some sections recount versions of mythology or folklore and, later in the novel, the stories of dissident political figures. These stories are interesting and have points which relate to the dilemmas Krishan faces, but aren't very artfully blended into the overall narrative.

Where this story comes most alive and feels three-dimensional is when it describes the characters of his grandmother Appamma and her carer Rani. Krishan's interactions with Appamma are funny and endearing so I wish we were given more of that in the story. Equally, Appamma and Rani form a unique relationship impacted by Appamma's failing health and faltering mental state as well as the serious trauma which Rani struggles to live with and the electroshock therapy she regularly receives to treat it. The descriptions of these characters and their scenes are very powerful and I'd have been glad to read a whole novel just about them. Krishan's dilemma is significant and he offers a refreshing point of view which I'm very sympathetic with, but I felt his detailed and extensive thought process often prevented me from really getting to emotionally connect with him as a character. His most endearing scenes concern the timid formation of his relationship with Anjum and the conflict they face as a couple where their motivation to make an impact in their country overshadows their ability to be together. Krishan's melancholy over this state is conveyed in a moving way, but felt secondary within a narrative that sometimes drifts into overanalysis. There are many sensitive and considered insights in this book, but I'm not sure Arudpragasam has yet found the sweet spot where his philosophical perspective blends with the art of storytelling.

A Passage North is a reflective, sombre novel, set in Sri Lanka following the end of the civil war. A young man, Krishan, takes a long journey across the country to attend a funeral. The deceased is his grandmother’s carer, Rani, who had been suffering PTSD after her two sons were killed in the war. Despite losing his own father to the conflict, Krishan contends with the guilt that his own losses were meagre when compared to others, to people like Rani.

The protagonist, Krishan, is the least interesting of the characters and, perhaps not coincidentally, the one with the greatest relative privilege and the only male. The female characters—in addition to Rani there is Appamma, Krishan’s infirm grandmother, and Anjum, his politically active, queer former lover—who are complex and fascinating, are only really presented via Krishan’s perspective.

The novel is written in a discursive style, filled with long sinuous sentences that often appear to be saying the same thing three times over, the prose often coming across as portentous and high-minded. Even so, once ensconced in the book I found its reflectiveness absorbing, and enjoyed its digressions and philosophizing. The style might be off-putting or distancing for some readers, but I think it works, mainly because the topics covered are serious ones, weighty enough to carry such a prose treatment, and because Arudpragasam’s intellect is up to the task.

‘We experience, while still young, our most thoroughly felt desires as a kind of horizon, see life as divided into what lies on this side of that horizon and what lies on the other, as if we only had to reach that horizon and fall into it in order for everything to change, in order to once and for all transcend the world as we have known it, though in the end this transcendence never actually comes, of course, a fact one began to appreciate only as one got older, when one realized there was always more life on the other side of desire’s completion, that there was always waking up, working, eating, and sleeping, the slow passing of time that never ends, when one realized that one can never truly touch the horizon because life always goes on, because each moment bleeds into the next and whatever one considered the horizon of one’s life turns out always to be yet another piece of earth.’

The impression throughout the novel is one of Arudpragasam himself, as opposed to a character or fictive ‘narrator’, ruminating on his chosen themes: desire and yearning, liberation and constriction, trauma carried within and trauma forever imprinted on the terrain, memories and absences. An impressive and powerful work.

Though A Passage North opens after the end of the Sri Lankan Civil War, which lasted almost twenty-six years and killed an unknown number of people – estimates range between 40,000 and 100,000 – the conflict is very much at the centre of the novel as the cause of trauma, displacement and fragmented identities. While Krishan is fully aware of the war’s existence, and indeed returned to Sri Lanka from India specifically to work in the former conflict zone, he knows too that he is lucky to have grown up in Colombo, largely protected from the fighting. Having not experienced it first-hand, he is ‘obsessed’ with learning as much about it as possible, unable to look away from the horrifying photos of massacres he researches online. This appetite for images of destruction may also explain his almost magnetic attraction to Rani, who lost her two sons during the conflict – one as a soldier, one to a sniper – and has never since recovered.

As Krishan travels by train to the north of his country, to a ‘cremation ground at the end of the world’, Arudpragasam weaves a narrative that jumps back and forth in time, exploring memory, relationships and the relentless progression of life. The novel is a slow drift, mirroring the natural movement of thought, and so it is that Krishan’s love affair with Anjum is intertwined with his grandmother’s decline into old age, his attempts to understand what it is to live with trauma interspersed with meditations on freedom and desire. The long, comma-ridden sentences and effortless shifting from one topic to the next have a mesmerising effect on the reader, allowing us to sink in deep to a world that on the surface may be unfamiliar. For all it examines hard-hitting themes, there is nothing confrontational about this novel; we are eased into the story and a realisation also afforded to Krishan – that all lives and experiences are more connected than we thought, that ‘whatever one considered the horizon of one’s life turns out always to be another piece of earth’.

When he isn’t being philosophical, or tracing his way along the rabbit warren of his characters’ thoughts, Arudpragasam does a fine line in bringing Sri Lanka to life. The smallest scenes are deeply evocative – a woman from a village standing on a night-wet pavement in Colombo, overwhelmed by the traffic streaming past her – and at times his very specific sense of setting is magical, as when Krishan remembers staring into the darkness from a moving night-train window. Both these memorable scenes and many others besides do in fact play out in the night, but perhaps because of the gloom that hovers around the novel, Arudpragasam’s writing seems all the more luminous.

[extract from the full review available on my blog]