“A novel of tragic power and uncommon beauty.”—Anthony Marra
“One of the most individual minds of their generation.”—Financial Times
SHORTLISTED FOR THE DYLAN THOMAS PRIZE • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR—Time, NPR
A Passage North begins with a message from out of the blue: a telephone call informing Krishan that his grandmother’s caretaker, Rani, has died under unexpected circumstances—found at the bottom of a well in her village in the north, her neck broken by the fall. The news arrives on the heels of an email from Anjum, an impassioned yet aloof activist Krishnan fell in love with years before while living in Delhi, stirring old memories and desires from a world he left behind.
As Krishan makes the long journey by train from Colombo into the war-torn Northern Province for Rani’s funeral, so begins an astonishing passage into the innermost reaches of a country. At once a powerful meditation on absence and longing, as well as an unsparing account of the legacy of Sri Lanka’s thirty-year civil war, this procession to a pyre “at the end of the earth” lays bare the imprints of an island’s past, the unattainable distances between who we are and what we seek.
Written with precision and grace, Anuk Arudpragasam’s masterful novel is an attempt to come to terms with life in the wake of devastation, and a poignant memorial for those lost and those still living.
“A novel of tragic power and uncommon beauty.”—Anthony Marra
“One of the most individual minds of their generation.”—Financial Times
SHORTLISTED FOR THE DYLAN THOMAS PRIZE • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR—Time, NPR
A Passage North begins with a message from out of the blue: a telephone call informing Krishan that his grandmother’s caretaker, Rani, has died under unexpected circumstances—found at the bottom of a well in her village in the north, her neck broken by the fall. The news arrives on the heels of an email from Anjum, an impassioned yet aloof activist Krishnan fell in love with years before while living in Delhi, stirring old memories and desires from a world he left behind.
As Krishan makes the long journey by train from Colombo into the war-torn Northern Province for Rani’s funeral, so begins an astonishing passage into the innermost reaches of a country. At once a powerful meditation on absence and longing, as well as an unsparing account of the legacy of Sri Lanka’s thirty-year civil war, this procession to a pyre “at the end of the earth” lays bare the imprints of an island’s past, the unattainable distances between who we are and what we seek.
Written with precision and grace, Anuk Arudpragasam’s masterful novel is an attempt to come to terms with life in the wake of devastation, and a poignant memorial for those lost and those still living.
Critiques-
-
February 1, 2021
Traveling by train from Colombo to Sri Lanka's war-ravaged Northern Province for the funeral of his grandmother's caretaker, Krishan reflects on the consequences of his country's 30-year civil war. He also recalls the remote activist with whom he fell in love four years previously, just back in touch. Following Arudpragasam's multi-best-booked debut, The Story of a Brief Marriage.
Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
-
May 10, 2021
A young man ruminates about Sri Lankan history and his own life in the introspective latest from Arudpragasam (The Story of a Brief Marriage). After leaving a PhD program in India and spending two years as an NGO worker in Sri Lanka following the end of the civil war, Krishan returns home to live with his mother and frail paternal grandmother in Colombo. He then learns that his grandmother’s caretaker, Rani, has fallen into a well and died while visiting her family in the north. As Krishan wrestles with the appropriate response to the news, he also mulls over an email from Anjum, a bisexual Indian ex-girlfriend with whom he shared an intense relationship. Krishan decides to travel north for Rani’s funeral, and reflects on Rani’s life as the mother of two sons killed in the war, while he still fixates on his time with Anjum. He interrupts these reminiscences with lengthy summaries of poems and a documentary film, the latter providing historical background on the civil war in a way that sometimes feels forced. Overall, though, the elegant descriptions of Krishan’s sentiments helps smooth over the slow pace and spare plot (on cigarettes: “the present more bearable even when he wasn’t smoking because it meant the present was leading to something good”). Readers who enjoy contemplative, Sebaldian narratives will appreciate this. Agent: Anna Stein, ICM Partners. -
June 1, 2021
In his second novel, Arudpragasam uses a deeply introspective and philosophical lens to examine themes of war, displacement, and grief, as he did in his first novel, The Story of a Brief Marriage (2016). Krishan has returned home to Sri Lanka to help his mother take care of his grandmother. On the heels of receiving an unexpected correspondence from Anjum, with whom he had a brief but intense affair, Krishan hears from the daughter of his grandmother's former caretaker, Rani, who informs him that Rani died in a tragic accident. Heading north by train to pay his respects, toward the lands devastated by the Sri Lankan civil war, Krishan reflects on his relationship with Anjum and Rani's life, which was marked by tragedy, losing both her sons to the war. He uses poetry, literature, and film to sift through his feelings, and his detailed retellings result in several stories within the story. Long, contemplative passages make this best suited for those who relish lovely writing and philosophical musings, who will thoroughly enjoy it.COPYRIGHT(2021) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
-
Starred review from May 15, 2021
Arudpragasam, whose first novel, The Story of a Brief Marriage, made a critical splash in 2016, is back with an intelligent, quite often moving novel of meditation and aftermath. The plot of this book, conventionally speaking, would fit on a cocktail napkin: Krishan, a young Sri Lankan man who lives in the southern city of Colombo and works for a nongovernmental organization there, receives a phone call; takes a long walk, during which he stops to smoke a few cigarettes; makes the titular train journey into the recently war-ravaged north, during which he recalls a love affair now over; attends a village funeral. That's it. And yet the novel is charged throughout with tension and excitement. Part of that derives from Arudpragasam's fierce intelligence and his total commitment to plumbing Krishan's psyche, to following his thoughts patiently, relentlessly, with exquisite subtlety. Not many writers can successfully invite comparison to W.G. Sebald's slow, inward, thoughtful--yet somehow pulse-pounding--novels, but Arudpragasam can and does. The rest of the novel's tension comes from the powerfully evoked historical context. This isn't just the aftermath of a love now over, or of a young man's idealistic early 20s, or even of the life of a grandmother's caretaker now dead in what appears to be an accidental fall down a well (the funeral to which Krishan is headed); beneath them all, agitating the water to which the book returns again and again, is the long, still-rippling wake of Sri Lanka's bloody three-decade civil war, in which the grandmother's caretaker, Rani, lost both her sons (and in which Krishan's father was killed). The result, if such a thing be possible, is a novel of philosophic suspense, one whose reader shivers in anticipation not of what will happen next but of where the next thought will lead. A luminously intelligent, psychologically intricate novel--slow in always rewarding ways.COPYRIGHT(2021) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
-
June 1, 2021
Arudpragasam's first novel, The Story of a Brief Marriage, set during the Sri Lankan Civil War, intimately detailed the life of a newlywed couple nurturing a matrimonial bond during a prolonged and violent conflict. Taking place over the course of a single day, the novel illuminated the beauty of our ephemeral existence. Here, Arudpragasam processes the war's lingering effects through Krishan, who must travel to Sri Lanka's Northern Province to attend the funeral of his grandmother's caretaker. The story unfolds exclusively through Krishan's memories and musings while he sits on a train speeding through scarred terrain. Ruminating on his family's experience of the war, the Tamil diaspora and its creation of silent communities of trauma spread across the globe, and his limited knowledge of Sri Lanka's history, Krishan philosophically ponders the permanence of grief passed down through generations. Arudpragasam's writing is purposefully dense, intentionally layering tangential stories with minute details to illuminate the interconnectedness of past and present. VERDICT Intricately written prose that navigates sorrow, exclusion, and national identity.--Joshua Finnell, Colgate Univ., Hamilton, NY
Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
