Book Review of A Passage North by Anuk Arudpragasam

UPDATED: 2/5/2023

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304 pages, published July 2021 (I received an advanced copy of this book through the publisher on NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.)

YOU MAY ENJOY THIS BOOK IF YOU LIKE:

Literary Fiction * Fiction Set in Sri Lanka

TRAVEL INSPIRATION:

A Passage North is set in Sri Lanka with some reference to time the narrator had spent in Delhi, India. Large portions of the novel take place in Colombo, the capital city of Sri Lanka, and the book spans the distance between there and the northeastern portion of the country as the narrator, Krishan, travels the route (hence the title: A Passage North).

Sri Lanka has always fascinated me. I remember seeing it on a globe my family owned when I was a child. The country is a small teardrop-shaped island, situated just over 30 miles off of the southeastern tip of India. Under British Colonial rule, which ended in 1948, the island was known as Ceylon. But that fascination of mine has remained incredibly remote until reading this novel. I have not read anything about or set in Sri Lanka before and found myself fascinated by some of the history I gleaned through reading A Passage North.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Anuk Arudpragasam

Anuk Arudpragasam, like the main character in this novel, is from Colombo, Sri Lanka. Anuk went to college in the United States. He attended Stanford for his undergraduate degree and then earned a PhD in Philosophy from Columbia University. After graduating in 2019, he returned home and resides in both Sri Lanka and India.

A Passage North is Anuk’s second novel, following The Story of a Brief Marriage , which was published in 2016 and is also set in Sri Lanka during the country’s civil war.

Anuk writes in both English and Tamil, the official language of Sri Lanka that is also spoken in southern India and a few other spots globally, such as Singapore.

REVIEW OF A passage north BY anuk arudpragasam

Language of loss and love suffuce the novel with poignant descriptions that cut to the bone of life. The unstated question which echoes throughout is: What is worth dying for? Is it love, is it loss, is it a belief in a political state? Krishan, the main character, may be on the verge of asking a new question: What is worth living for?

When A Passage North begins, Krishan is between places in his life, stuck with a yearning for something unknown. He is haunted by memories of his first love, Anjum, whose passion for her activism overshadowed any connection with Krishan. He has both moved on and hasn't. A bland, simple email from Anjum is enough to send his head spinning back in time to relive their moments together through the knowledge of where it would end up.

When the novel begins, Krishan is living with his ailing grandmother and his own mother back home in Colombo, Sri Lanka. After he returns from work in the evening, his grandmother tails him like a child in search of a familial connection after a long day alone. She is fading in that slow way that is its own season in life.

Krishan's life shifts when he receives a phone call informing him that Rani, his grandmother's former caretaker, has died suddenly after a tumble into a well in the country's northeastern corner. Rani had lived in their home with Krishan's grandmother for a couple of years; in fact, Krishan's interactions with Rani had been far less intense as he had come and gone from life's adventures. But even so, he is stilled by the fact that Rani, this woman who lived in the same room as his grandmother for all that time, is simply no more.

He wonders whether it was suicide because who dies by falling into a well? While Rani had been brought into the home for the purpose of caring for Krishan's grandmother, the relationship was truly more symbiotic. The role was as much to save Rani's life, haunted as she was by the death of two of her children during the Sri Lankan civil war.

Since I had no prior knowledge of the Sri Lankan civil war, I think it is worth a short tangent to provide the backdrop against which A Passage North is set.

The Sri Lankan civil war, which lasted from 1983 to 2009, was an insurrection led from the minority population, the Tamils, in response to the treatment they faced from the Sinhalese, the dominant group which led the government. The Tamils, known as the Tamil Tigers during the war, sought to establish an independent state in the northeastern part of the country, where Rani was from.

Because the conflict ended with the insurrectionists admitting defeat, the same group retained power and did not create any sort of independent review of the conflict. As a result, there is not good data on the true cost in human life, but estimates suggest that between 40,000 and 140,000 civilians lost their lives. The Sri Lankan government has received negative attention for the tactics they used, including what would fall under the category of war crimes such as intentionally bombing citizens. For their part, the Tamil Tigers used brutal tactics, including child soliders and suicide bombers.

Author Anuk Arudpragasm was born in 1988 and moved to the United States somewhere in the late aughts, which means he grew up in a country that was in a state of a brutal civil war. I got the sense in reading this novel that it is the result of Anuk both trying to make sense of how his memories impacted individual people and to bring to light this conflict that, upon arriving in the United States to attend undergraduate and graduate programs, he must have realized was not on the radar of so many.

In the novel, Krishan struggles with how to square Rani's sudden death in a random accident with those killed brutally in the war and especially Rani's own two children. So, he decides to make the trek to the northeast of the country to attend Rani's funeral and meet her daughter.

Train rides through the open countryside are a wonderful time to be lost in thoughts, and that is exactly how Krishan spends his journey. It is through his memories that the reader learns more about his relationship with Anjum, Rani's background, and some heart-rendering history of the Tamil Tigers.

What Krishan finds on the other end of his journey helps him start to heal and connect himself with his own country's history and perhaps send him on his next life's journey.

Both literary, cultural, and chronological history are gently woven into the novel in a way that enrichens the story and the reader. The novel is told without any dialogue and at times was reminiscent of Proust's ruminations but in a more accessible way.

I really enjoyed this novel for its own sake, and I also appreciate the lens into Sri Lanka that I didn't know I was missing.