A Passage North by Anuk Arudpragasam review – profound meditation on suffering
A young Tamil ponders the death of his grandmother’s carer in a hypnotic novel about ageing, longing and the aftermath of war
In Anuk Arudpragasam’s remarkable debut, The Story of a Brief Marriage, set in the north-east of Sri Lanka during the final months of the civil war, his young protagonist is, in the midst of conflict, trying to survive against all odds. His latest novel, A Passage North, is another profound meditation on suffering but, this time, Arudpragasam’s Tamil narrator is at a distance, struggling with survivor’s guilt and war’s aftermath.
In 2009, Krishan is studying for a PhD in Delhi and watching the news unfold in his home country: “he immersed himself in all the images and videos he found … to reconstruct the situation from which he’d been spared.” The end of his relationship with Anjum, an activist, prompts him to return to work in Jaffna, where he had “envisioned participating in some kind of dramatic change … after all the pain and grief”. Instead, Krishan discovers “some forms of violence penetrate so deeply into the psyche that there was simply no question of fully recovering”.
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