Teardrop

     My thanks to Weidenfeld & Nicolson for an unusual and accomplished first novel which is due out soon. "Voyage inside a family, and there will always be something unknown, a masked love or hatred, an unexplained death, the exact fragrance of the temple's air at the last wedding", and V.V. Ganeshananthan's Love Marriage is such a voyage: the story of a Jaffna Tamil family, told in an episodic manner through their various marriages against the backdrop of Sri Lanka's ethnic violence.

     Yalini is a student in America, the land her parents went to when they left their own troubled country, but it's to the Tamil community in Toronto she and her family go now, summoned to the deathbed of a long-disappeared uncle with a story to tell. As Yalini listens and learns about her uncle's life as a Tamil Tiger and the far-reaching effects of his allegiance and militant past on the rest of the extended family, she discovers that nothing is clear-cut.

     While the scope of the novel is great, its scale is also small and intimate with set-piece scenes of fable-like quality, details which relate the political to the very personal, and skillful portraits of the family members. Despite Yalini's being culturally far from her Sri Lankan roots, the country and its customs as told to her play a major part in the book: take tea, for example - "This is a civilizing thing...tea brings order and calm to a place of chaos", and "...she was welcomed at one house... with tea in a broken cup - a small but unspeakable rudeness in a country where all hospitality and love begins with tea."

     That a nation and a people seen as gentle and peaceable should be riven by terrorism, divided by their differences is tragic, but not, of course, unique. The book is sadly topical and widely relevant, but also an assured piece of writing and a commentary on a situation many of us may know little about.

     Dovegrey has been reading "Love Marriage" too and you can see what she has to say about it here.