Romesh Gunesekera

Short stories from an expat Sri Lankan who I enjoy generally quite a bit. He’s written close to a dozen books and I’ll admit that I have found a clunker or two among them, but when he hits it, he writes wonderfully. These stories have a thread in common: they all share a narrator taking people (generally foreigners) to different parts of the island. The narrator tends to see things that one might expect to be familiar through new eyes—the eyes of those he is accompanying. The show more commentary is thus about both the visitors and the narrator and, inevitably, the island. Gunesekera has always been concerned about the price of the civil war; this volume is no different and he always manages to find a poignancy, a deep hurt that he expresses more by omission than anything else. Recommended. show less

Brilliant. A first novel and a Booker finalist. Writing that captivates. Gunesekera is, to my mind, an absolute master of those moments in life that are fleeting and indescribable; of a moment between two people. Of the evanescent, as I wrote above. I cannot think of anyone I have ever read who does it better. There is an exquisiteness, a tenderness, a stunning beauty to his images. Ostensibly the story of a houseboy in Sri Lanka, it becomes the story of two lives inextricably woven into the show more tragedy of the civil war in that country. As with Sandglass, above, it is a deep, unforgettable reflection on the passage of time, chances taken and chances lost, on identity, and of exile. Just stunning. show less

This historical novel is basically the love-child of A passage to India and Paul et Virginie. An idealistic young Englishwoman (named Lucy!) brought up on Romantic poetry and Enlightenment politics arrives in the repressive, colonial society of 1820s Mauritius and is thrown together with a Sri Lankan intellectual, interpreter to a prince who has been exiled there by the British. The island is full of (justifiably) discontented slaves, convicts and indentured Indian labourers, the show more French-Creole settlers distrust the arrogant new British administrators, and the handful of free black Africans and Indian traders expect to be caught in the middle as soon as any trouble starts, so everyone is very much on edge.

There is plenty of local colour, with several disastrous picnics and garden-parties, a lot of Mauritian botany, a slave-revolt, and the obligatory hurricane-chapter. Maybe a few details of dialogue that don't quite ring true for the period, but overall a very competent and entertaining historical novel, just a little bit too predictable, perhaps. Certainly interesting reading if you don't know much about the history of Mauritius, but it didn't seem as witty and original as what Amitav Ghosh does with similar settings and periods. show less

Cricket is one of the odder legacies of British imperialism. In this story of the Sri Lankan diaspora in the Philippines and Britain, Gunesekera uses cricket matches - at one end an amateur game between teams of expats, at the other a test match and a one-day international - to provide the defining moments in the narrative, much as the British schoolboy fiction of the great days of New Imperialism used to. His central character, Sunny, feels disconnected from life - living in places he has show more no real connection with and without any obvious family network. It's only the collective experience of the match that - ironic though its colonial origins are - helps him to regain a sense of belonging and realise that he is loved and capable of loving.
I enjoyed the detail of this book, and I liked the way Gunesekera keeps cheating us of neat narrative resolutions, but I felt it was straining a bit too much to make the cricket thing work effectively. show less