The Story of a Brief Marriage

July 11, 2016
Arudpragasam’s first novel vividly captures a day in the life of Dinesh, a kindhearted young man who chooses to stay behind in an evacuee camp during the Sri Lankan Civil War in order to help the injured and dying. Early in the morning, Dinesh receives a proposal from a stranger named Somasundaram to marry his only surviving daughter, Ganga, as a form of protecting her when the aging man dies, whether of age or during an attack on the camp. Dinesh accepts the offer only to quickly learn that getting to know and sustain a relationship with his new wife during the war will be more difficult than he imagined. In a world scarred by daily shellings and explosions, Dinesh spends his sleepless nights obsessing over how things will be better with his new wife. In Dinesh, Arudpragasam creates a wholly empathetic and doting character, though at times the writing is a bit slow. Still, the author crafts flowing, beautiful sentences that put readers in the middle of the camp with Dinesh and Ganga. Dinesh finds beauty in the worst of situations, which contributes to making this debut deeply moving and hopeful.

July 1, 2016
Orphaned by the Sri Lankan civil war, a young man hopes an arranged marriage might make his last days in a refugee camp more meaningful.Under constant fire, Dinesh tends to the wounded in a makeshift clinic, where amputations occur as often as bombs--and without the niceties of anesthetic or surgical tools. As troops surround the camp--pushed to the edge of the sea by fighting--Dinesh meditates on what he feels may be his last moments: "All his life he had used his hands and feet, his fingers and toes, and knowing that soon he'd no longer be able to rely on them made him feel abandoned suddenly and alone." His world, like the world of his fellow refugees, shrinks to the size of the camp: its trenches, an occasional bowl of rice, the wounded and dead and dying. When a desperate father approaches Dinesh with an offer of marriage to his only surviving daughter, Ganga, Dinesh accepts, hoping to ease the isolation caused by war and offer what little protection he can. "What they would do together, he didn't know," Dinesh thinks. "How husbands and wives spent their time he had no idea, but at the very least he would be able to sit beside her, to eat beside her, and think beside her." With care and precision, Arudpragasam delivers a deeply contemplative, psychological portrait of war and how quickly language and memory fall away in the face of constant terror. Even the simplest acts--washing clothes and the body, walking--become opportunities for Dinesh to mourn the death of his mother or celebrate his new life as a husband. Arudpragasam writes in long, breathless passages, following the trail of Dinesh's apprehensions about sex, survival, and intimacy. For all the bombs that devastate Dinesh's country, this novel offers instead the "strange, weightless stillness" of trauma's emotional aftermath. An incisive glimpse into the brutality of war and the tender, human urge to connect in the face of death and destruction.

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August 1, 2016
The title summarizes the plot of this haunting novel, which takes place in a Sri Lankan civil-war-evacuee camp. The opening scene in which a young boy's shrapnel-damaged forearm is amputated with a kitchen knife prepares readers for what is to come, as newlyweds Dinesh and Ganga, who barely know each other, try to navigate the intimacies of marriage in the midst of great brutality. Debut author Arudpragasam writes in beautifully descriptive language, whether describing Dinesh washing his clothes for the first time in months or the young couple, their lives reduced to physical needs and actions, taking brief respite in the discovery of each other's bodies. As Ganga says, Happiness and sadness are for people who can control what happens to them. This gorgeously written novel is similar to Vaddey Ratner's In the Shadow of the Banyan (2012) in the way it captures intimate human experiences in the face of war.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)