A Passage North

"Shortlist"

"It’s by a quite young novelist—this is Arudpragasam’s second book. One of the things that really captured us from the first page is its incredibly wise, meditative voice. It’s looking at the legacy of a conflict that is not that well known to many people. The Sri Lankan civil war was an incredibly violent, some would say genocidal, conflict. The story is told from the point of view of a young man who has grown up in its aftermath. The book asks a question that I haven’t seen addressed in fiction, or not that I can think of, which is: what happens to all of those people who are just trying to process what happened, even if it didn’t happen directly to them? That’s something that we’re all going through in finding our own ways of processing this incredible experience of the global pandemic. “One of the magical things about novels is that they’re able to enter experience from so many different vantage points on so many different scales” Anyway, I think the way in which he’s able to tack between this young man’s very personal coming-of-age struggles with his ex-girlfriend and what that relationship signified, and then this larger sort of society-wide question of how the society finds its way out of this devastation, a society suffering PTSD , is really magnificently handled. He does it by zooming in on a particular moment: his trip to the funeral of his grandmother’s carer, who has just died. So this whole story is framed against a journey taken from the southern part of the country to the northern part of the country, and that becomes a kind of spine for this series of extended meditations. When I think about each of these books, I think each of them does something distinctive with narrative structure. But this one shares with the Galgut a seamless, sinuous quality of processing things through a very interior gaze. In this one, there’s a movement across the country, which becomes a movement across time and a processing of experience. It’s interesting. Other books don’t really have big wodges of dialogue either. Galgut doesn’t use quotation marks. Lockwood is written in fragments. They come in different forms. Honestly, I didn’t even notice that it had no dialogue until one of the judges pointed it out. That’s where there’s an incredible richness in having a variety of judges because people respond to things in different ways. But the ability that he has to create a feeling of exchange between characters despite not breaking it up with dialogue is itself a narrative accomplishment."