The Story of a Brief Marriage by Anuk Arudpragasam review – love and war in Sri Lanka
A debut novel which raises timely questions about how we regard the suffering of others
Randy Boyagoda
Sat 22 Oct 2016 09.30 BST
T
he opening sequence of Anuk Arudpragasam’s debut novel, in which a six-year-old child with a shrapnel-shredded arm is brought to an open-air operating theatre, feels horribly timely. The young man carrying the listless little boy finds a strange solace in discerning the child’s prospects: “Soon the doctor would arrive and the operation would be done, and in no time at all the arm would be as nicely healed as the already amputated thigh … According to the boy’s sister [that] injury came from a land mine explosion four months before, the same accident that killed their parents also.” It brings to mind the images of stunned, bloodied children now coming out of Syria and other war zones. The novel both implicitly and explicitly raises crucial questions about the aesthetic and ethical stakes involved in regarding the suffering of others.