The action of the novel which lasts only one day revolves around the couple’s brief story of closeness. When a marriage proposal comes from an old Tamil man to marry his pretty daughter things began to change. The most precious things in their possession is little rice and lentil for a hurried meal, cooked when there is a lull between army shells raining down from the skies.ĭinesh is the only able-bodied young man in the crowd facing the threat of being conscripted any moment by the movement which faces a serious manpower crisis or becoming an easy target of the army if seen within their range of fire in the open or out on the nearby beach where he used to go to wash after call of nature. The novel, told in deft, evocative prose is based on the harrowing ordeal of a young man and a woman stranded on a strip of narrow land lodged between the advancing government security forces and the last few rebels of the decimated LTTE that was once believed to be the most powerful terrorist organization of the world.ĭinesh, the accidental grave digger, gatherer of severed body parts and volunteer help at a clinic which is short in medical supplies, lives in an open camp with several dozens of refugee families taking shelter under upturned boats, tangled canopy of branches and precariously dug bomb shelters with their life’s worth packed into small plastic bags.
It is not surprising why Sri Lankan writer Anuk Arudpragasam debut novel, A Story of Brief Marriage, emerged as the best fiction of South Asia at the DSC Literary Prize ($25,000) beating the likes of Arvind Adiga who won the Man Booker Prize in 2008 and few others quite well known in the region.
0 kommentar(er)
