Krishan, a young Sri Lankan man, grasps the insidiousness and enormity of the civil war that raged on for 30 years only in its aftermath, devoting himself to understanding the way the worst massacres had happened through mental timelines, trying to construct, through his act of imagination, a "Kind of private shrine to the memory of all those anonymous lives" lost during the war. Arudpragasam does precisely the same through the novel, which is a eulogy for the thousands of Tamils who lost their lives during the last two years of the war; a eulogy, and not an elegy - the novel does not so much lament the dead as it commends them. It's no wonder then that his writing in the novel is structured around the different ways in which time passes
This structure in his rendering of consciousness was also evident in his spectacularly assured debut novel, The Story of a Brief Marriage, which he wrote when he was pursuing PhD in philosophy at Columbia University. His second novel, in contrast, concerns itself with indirect experiences of violence - an account of people living and dying in the aftermath of war: "The psychic repercussions of trauma or the spectatorship of violence from a distance." At 33, Arudpragasam is precociously observant and perceptive. The novel opens with a call informing Krishan - who lives in Colombo with his grandmother, Appamma, who is gradually withdrawing from the world, and his widowed mother, a teacher - that Rani, his grandmother's caretaker, has died. The novel's philosophical musings unspool in long sentences; some paragraphs run into two pages, and there are no dialogues. While reading the novel, I kept thinking of Peter Nadas, especially his novel A Book of Memories (1986) and its microscopic analysis of the subtleties of social interactions - mundane, but somehow endowed with meaning.
source: https://www.hindustantimes.com/books/review-a-passage-north-by-anuk-arudpragasam-101632324285255.html
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