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Sri Lanka

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book status: A Passage North — Anuk Arudpragasam

music status: incomplete

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cover for A Passage North

A Passage North

Anuk Arudpragasam

date read: 2024/01/08

author from location book set in location
What did I learn? I admit I knew very little about Sri Lanka before this aside from it being a teardrop-shaped island south of India. I learned that there was a long and traumatic civil war in the country, with reverberations to this day. I learned that the island is much bigger than I imagined, big enough for long train rides through the country. I got a glimpse of the climate, though that didn’t stay with me as much. Framed through the narrator’s relationships with a cast of complex and emotionally-rich characters, this book offers thought-provoking philosophical musings on romantic and familial love, forgetting (of the forced and natural kinds), aging and death and the burden of surviving

Also read:

  • Wave — Sonali Deraniyagala
    • A memoir set around the author’s experience of the 2004 tsunami that devastated Southeast Asia, and her life. Deraniyagala’s account of the disaster, which she lived through in Sri Lanka, brought to life the absolute terror and chaos of an event I’ve found so hard to imagine, despite having strong memories of many of the affected locales. A heartwrenching, brutally honest read.
    • The power of place, of grief and love and memory and meaning and what it’s like to lose everything and then choose keep on living, permeate this story, and my admiration and respect for Deraniyagala’s resilience, authenticity, and strength grow with each chapter— guilty, that her tragedy somehow giving me hope for the human condition.