Island of a Thousand Mirrors

June 9, 2014
The paradisiacal landscapes of Sri Lanka are as astonishing as the barbarity of its revolution, and Munaweera evokes the power of both in a lyrical debut novel worthy of shelving alongside her countryman Michael Ondaatje or her fellow writer of the multigenerational immigrant experience Jhumpa Lahiri. Munaweera’s modern-day protagonist, Yasodhara Rajasinghe, recounts her Singhala grandparents’ origins—what she calls “one possible narrative of my island.” To show how different those narratives can be and how frequently they intertwine—as Munaweera writes, this is a “war that will be waged between related beasts”—she also tells the stories of the Tamil boy who goes on to fight in the revolution and a young girl who will be driven by violence to martyr herself to it. But not all episodes in the story are violent: in the 1950s, Yasodhara’s mother’s family shares their Colombo home with the Tamil Shivalingham clan, and, even as the two families wage catty upstairs-downstairs battles, a steadfast love grows up between them. Munaweera’s prose teems with delicious descriptions of food (coconut flesh “gelatinous as egg white, creamy as ice cream,” avocados mashed with condensed milk, pumpkin curry) and flora (gardens where there are “orchids spilling from trees to brush our faces, ferns uncurling tenderly, bird chatter, and the unbroken line of coconut trees”). The book leaves the reader with two lingering smells that perfectly capture the conflict that nearly destroyed Munaweera’s home country: gasoline and jasmine.

August 1, 2014
The Sri Lankan civil war's traumatic effect on the island nation's people-and one family in particular-is the subject of this verdantly atmospheric first novel. After a graphic post-coital prologue, Sri Lanka born California resident Munaweera begins her family saga in 1948, when the British leave their former colony Ceylon, where the Tamil majority is looked down on by the lighter-skinned Sinhala ruling class. Nishan and his twin sister, Mala-children of an ambitious Sinhala teacher and a laid-back doctor of uncertain bloodlines-leave their coastal village to attend university in Colombo. Free spirit Mala falls in love with another student and marries without traditional arranged nuptials. Nishan, an engineer, is deemed acceptable to marry aristocratic Visaka, the daughter of an Oxford-educated Sinhala judge, only because the judge's expenditures while renovating his home shortly before his death have left his family financially strapped. Visaka's mother has recently had to rent out the upstairs of her house, and Nishan does not know that Visaka marries him while pining for Ravan, one of her mother's Tamil tenants. Ravan and his new wife live upstairs while Nishan and Visaka move in downstairs, where they raise daughters Yasodhara and Luxshmi. Yasodhara's closest playmate and soul mate is Ravan's son Shiva. The children live there in innocent bliss until 1983, when Mala's husband is brutally murdered by an angry mob during increasing Tamil-Sinhala unrest. Nishan and Visaka react by moving to America, where their daughters soon assimilate. But after a college relationship ends badly, Yasodhara allows her parents to pick a husband for her. As Yasodhara's marriage falls apart, successful artist Luxshmi returns to Sri Lanka to teach children wounded in the war. Meanwhile, in northern Sri Lanka, a young Timor girl is drawn into the intensifying civil war until her life's destiny crosses those of Luxshmi and Yasodhara. Compared to the expressive, deeply felt chapters about Yasodhara's family, Munaweera's depiction of war-torn Sri Lanka, though harrowing, seems rushed and journalistic, more reported than experienced.

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Starred review from August 1, 2014
In a story spanning generations, three families face the heartache and terror of nearly 30 years of civil war in Sri Lanka. The story begins before the war's onset, and the beauty and magic of the island are realized through the eyes of Yasodhara and her traditional Sinhalese family. Yasodhara and her sister, Lanka, swim in the warm ocean and revel in the splendor of their island with Shiva, the Tamil boy who lives upstairs. Hostility is rising between the Tamil and Sinhala people, though, and as war erupts between them, Yasodhara's family flees to the U.S., and Shiva's family to England. But for others, escape is not possible. While Yasodhara is learning a new way of life across the ocean, Saraswathi, a Tamil girl of similar age, remains in Sri Lanka with her family, only to see her dreams shattered and end up fighting a battle she had long tried to avoid. Munaweera's first novel is a breathtaking work of lyrical prose and vivid, transporting imagery. Part historical fiction, part family saga, it is most of all an ode to the Sri Lanka of the past and a hopeful wish for the country's future.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)

September 15, 2014

Originally published in Sri Lanka in 2012, debut novelist Munaweera's story of families, caste, culture, and war in that country won the Commonwealth Book Prize for the Asian Region the following year. In Part 1, a distinguished Sinhalese family on hard times reluctantly rents the upper floor of their home to a Tamil family. When Yasodhara is born to Visaka on the same day that Shiva is born to the wife of Visaka's ex-lover, living upstairs, the story shifts focus to Yasodhara's bond with her male "twin," Shiva, and her younger sister, Lanka. The three children are inseparable until Yasodhara's family moves to Los Angeles to escape the war. Part 2 picks up with the story of Saraswathi, a girl with a promising future still living in Sri Lanka during the civil unrest in the 1980s; eventually, Sarawathi becomes an elite soldier for the Tamil Tigers. At this point, the lives of the adult Yasodhara, Lanka, Shiva, and Saraswathi tragically collide. VERDICT Munaweera's storytelling and lyrical writing easily pull readers into the world of her characters (all strongly drawn, especially the females), and the book as a whole is an eye-opening look at lives and cultures intersecting during a turbulent and disturbing historical period of civil unrest. [See Prepub Alert, 3/17/14.]--Shirley Quan, Orange Cty. P.L., Santa Ana, CA

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