A Passage North
Hogarth (Verlag)
978-0-593-44678-2 (ISBN)
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A novel of tragic power and uncommon beauty. Anthony Marra
One of the most individual minds of their generation. Financial Times
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY TIME AND 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.
lt;b>Anuk Arudpragasam was born in Colombo, Sri Lanka. He studied philosophy in the United States, receiving a doctorate at Columbia University. His first novel, The Story of a Brief Marriage, was translated into seven languages, won the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, and was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. He currently divides his time between India and Sri Lanka.
1
The present, we assume, is eternally before us, one of the few things in life from which we cannot be parted. It overwhelms us in the painful first moments of entry into the world, when it is still too new to be managed or negotiated, remains by our side during childhood and adolescence, in those years before the weight of memory and expectation, and so it is sad and a little unsettling to see that we become, as we grow older, much less capable of touching, grazing, or even glimpsing it, that the closest we seem to get to the present are those brief moments we stop to consider the spaces our bodies are occupying, the intimate warmth of the sheets in which we wake, the scratched surface of the window on a train taking us somewhere else, as if the only way we can hold time still is by trying physically to prevent the objects around us from moving. The present, we realize, eludes us more and more as the years go by, showing itself for fleeting moments before losing us in the world s incessant movement, fleeing the second we look away and leaving scarcely a trace of its passing, or this at least is how it usually seems in retrospect, when in the next brief moment of consciousness, the next occasion we are able to hold things still, we realize how much time has passed since we were last aware of ourselves, when we realize how many days, weeks, and months have slipped by without our consent. Events take place, moods ebb and flow, people and situations come and go, but looking back during these rare junctures in which we are, for whatever reason, lifted up from the circular daydream of everyday life, we are slightly surprised to find ourselves in the places we are, as though we were absent while everything was happening, as though we were somewhere else during the time that is usually referred to as our life. Waking up each morning we follow by circuitous routes the thread of habit, out of our homes, into the world, and back to our beds at night, move unseeingly through familiar paths, one day giving way to another and one week to the next, so that when in the midst of this daydream something happens and the thread is finally cut, when, in a moment of strong desire or unexpected loss, the rhythms of life are interrupted, we look around and are quietly surprised to see that the world is vaster than we thought, as if we d been tricked or cheated out of all that time, time that in retrospect appears to have contained nothing of substance, no change and no duration, time that has come and gone but left us somehow untouched.
Standing there before the window of his room, looking out through the dust-coated pane of glass at the empty lot next door, at the ground overrun by grasses and weeds, the empty bottles of arrack scattered near the gate, it was this strange sense of being cast outside time that held Krishan still he tried to make sense of the call he d just received, the call that had put an end to all his plans for the evening, the call informing him that Rani, his grandmother s former caretaker, had died. He d come home not long before from the office of the NGO at which he worked, had taken off his shoes and come upstairs to find, as usual, his grandmother standing outside his room, waiting impatiently to share all the thoughts she d saved up over the course of the day. His grandmother knew he left work between five and half past five on most days, that if he came straight home, depending on whether he took a three-wheeler, bus, or walked, he could be expected at home between a quarter past five and a quarter past six. His timely arrival was an axiom in the organization of her day, and she held him to it with such severity that she would, if there was ever any deviation from the norm, be appeased only by a detailed explanation, that an urgent meeting or deadline had kept him at work longer than usual, that the roads had been blocked because of some rally or proces
| Erscheinungsdatum | 24.12.2021 |
|---|---|
| Sprache | englisch |
| Maße | 133 x 202 mm |
| Gewicht | 261 g |
| Themenwelt | Literatur ► Romane / Erzählungen |
| Schlagworte | Asian • Asian American • asian american fiction • Asian American Literature • asian drama • asian fiction • best book club books • best books for book clubs • book club recommendations • Civil War • Contemporary fiction • Courage • Death • Drama • Family • gifts for men • gifts for women • Grief • Healing • Hope • literary fiction • Literary gifts • Literature • Love • Love Story • Memory • realistic fiction • realistic fiction books • relationship books • relationships • Resilience • Sri Lanka • summer reading • summer reads • Survival • Trauma • war • war books |
| ISBN-10 | 0-593-44678-X / 059344678X |
| ISBN-13 | 978-0-593-44678-2 / 9780593446782 |
| Zustand | Neuware |
| Informationen gemäß Produktsicherheitsverordnung (GPSR) | |
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