Love Marriage - V.V. Ganeshananthan

I wanted to complete reading 'Love Marriage', necessarily as 'get-to-the-author's style' kind of exercise before starting on the highly rated 'Brotherless Night', and I wanted to complete both books in 2024. But what I managed was only to complete the former. 

It is written from the perspective of a person, who is safely away from the calamity of civil strife in Sri Lanka, which lasted till 2009.  But only physically safe -if that, for one's roots have long reach, to change penetrate into your thin cocoon of distant mental safety.

There were two main ethnic groups involved in the long dragged troubles in Sri Lanka -  three if you are to be exhaustive in your interpretation, and the author presents from the perspective of the one who had to undergo and endure the most suffering - that is not to say that the other groups didn't, clearly. Some, the majority here call it a war against terrorism, while for others it was a war, a losing war always (as per the narrator here), but causing enough damage to take notice of the grievances and irreparable damage done to the other ethnic group.  I found the author's narration a reasonable one - a view more wider than what I found in 'A Passage North', for instance. In that itself I find the book relatively dear to me - the criticisms of the narrator's own ethnic group, the honest accounts of the caste systems, how damaging some of the more extreme diaspora based actions are, was appreciated - while never shying away from exposing  small mindedness of politicians of the majority ethnic group, the continuous suffering they had to endure starting from 1958, to 1983, and during the escalated war fare in the 1990s, and the 2000s.

While the above political account was like an unmistakable sound track that lasted across the book, it was not what the book was fully about. We have a four tier generation of people to handle, and at times the reader's mental faculties are challenged to keep track of who was who. Maybe there was no other way for VVG to tell her story, and am not even sure if I can call it a failing, but as a reader I can only mention the challenge I had to endure - and I know that I am not the only one.

In summary, it was a good book to read, as a reminder of what we as a country had gone through ( though not a day passes by, in which we who lived our younger days in a bomb exploding Colombo, where purely by chance we were always at least  300m-400m away, when some innocents never saw their loved ones again - and I personally have innocent relations who endure the darkness brought upon them, whose meaning to life was taken away during one fateful train journey). It is because the haunting is  too stark for many other countrymen, that VVG, ( and Anuk Arudpragasam) wrote their books. Maybe some of these authors will never write a book that will not have dark shadows of what robbed them a peaceful life with their community - and I can fully concur with that. And I will possibly read all those accounts, as my limited time allows me.

Rating: ***1/2