Winner of the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature and the Shakti Bhatt First Book PrizeThe Wall Street Journal Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR, The Guardian, The Boston Globe, BuzzFeed, The Financial Times, The Globe and Mail, and Entropy Magazine —The New York Times Book Review T he Wall Street Journal —Ari Shapiro, NPR (Best Books of 2016) —Colm Tóibín, Bookforum The Story of a Brief Marriage is a devastating account of political violence that refuses the grand abstractions of political discourse and dwells instead in complicated moments of intimacy—and in the ragged, luminous particulars of physical experience. It brings Ezra Pound’s notion of periplum —the shoreline as seen by the sailor, not as it appears on the map—to the terrain of war. It’s the merciless, unsurrendered song of what it means to live in the midst of death. This novel changed my sense of how a novel can draw its own borders, and what it can do inside them.”—Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams The Story of a Brief Marriage written with subtlety, tact and intelligence. Every image in the book, including the most desolate, is rendered with precision and an aura of pure truth and tenderness. It is a great achievement, one of the best books I have read in years.”—Colm Toibin, New York Times bestselling author of Brooklyn —Garth Greenwell, GQ —The New Yorker —Paul Yoon, The Millions —Barnes & Noble Review —Financial Times (Best Books of 2016) —Los Angeles Review of Books The Story of a Brief Marriage got under my skin like few other books did this year. It's written with a stunning precision, and there's a powerful tension between Arudpragasam's sometimes lyrical use of language and the horrors of the war around which this book is set."— Tobias Carroll, Vol. 1 Brooklyn (Favorite Books of 2016)—Book Riot —Guernica —Rohini Mohan, The Hindu The Story of a Brief Marriage strikes at the core of sacrificial love when the heart has nothing left to give.”—Ploughshares —Vogue (Books People Are Talking About) The Story of a Brief Marriage takes a fraught political-historical moment and creates out of it a fable-like novel.”—The Guardian —The Rumpus —Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney, The Millions —BookOxygen The Story of a Brief Marriage seems destined to be remembered.”—Pacific Standard If This Is a Man. ”—Irish Times —Elle —The Globe and Mail (The 100 Best Books of 2016) —Bustle Tinkers …Arudpragasam shows that one can write a deeply felt story coming from a place of imagination—showing the humanity of the brutalized civilian in a situation where nobody is granted the freedom to be innocent.”—The Wire —The Buffalo News The Story of a Brief Marriage ] turns our focus not only on the brutality of war, but also on the blessing of life.”—Washington Independent Review of Books The Story of a Brief Marriage is an immersive portrait of life touched by war and despair that will be sure to move you.” —BuzzFeed (Incredible New Books You Need to Read This Fall) The Story of a Brief Marriage strips a relationship of those comforts, speaking to something more essential shared between two humans.”—Huffington Post (20 New Books You’ll Need for Your Shelf in Fall 2016) —Kirkus Reviews —Publishers Weekly In the Shadow of the Banyan in the way it captures intimate human experiences in the face of war.”—Booklist —Garth Greenwell , author of What Belongs to You —Dinaw Mengestu , author of All Our Names is . To read this book is to feel the abomination and the holiness of life, together in every moment, and to understand what literature is for.”—Merritt Tierce , author of Love Me Back —Kevin Brockmeier , author of The Illumination The Story of a Brief Marriage is astounding. Anuk Arudpragasam has done something so brilliant and so simple I’m still reeling. He’s written a book about the great subjects, love, war, life, and death. But he’s done it through the lens of the body. So close you will feel it in your own body. I’ve been waiting decades for this book. I think I started writing because I wanted to read this book.”—Nayomi Munaweera , author of What Lies Between Us and Island of a Thousand Mirrors The Story of a Brief Marriage . I loved the delicacy in the language, which seemed to me to have the quality of thought unfolding. This novel is written with such care, such devoted noticing.”—Sunjeev Sahota , Man Booker Prize-shortlisted author of The Year of the Runaways —Shyam Selvadurai , author of Funny Boy The Story of a Brief Marriage , the smallest, most granular acts of the human body and the heart take on the aura of the miraculous—an ode to the essential, unbearable battle to salvage one’s humanity while existing inside the grotesque and pitiless march of war. This novel is the debut of a lifetime.”—Laura van den Berg , author of Find Me The Story of a Brief Marriage contains a series of mesmerizingly visceral scenes. It’s short and riveting, but I had to read it slowly to give its deep power time to unfold, the sublime beauty of love and the stark cruelty of war evoked through the truths of the body. It’s an amazing novel. I can’t forget it.”—Kate Christensen , PEN/Faulkner Award-winning author of The Great Man The Story of a Brief Marriage opens with some of the most extraordinary pages I have come across in recent years and then continues to amaze. Unafraid to look its huge subjects—death, war, life, love—straight in the eye, it nonetheless remains marvelously, miraculously light on its feet. Anuk Arudpragasam writes with courage, precision, and tenderness. You feel it in every sentence. Read this novel. See what he has done.”—Laird Hunt , author of Neverhome “Anuk Arudpragasam’s novel is a report from that far, unnamed country called the human soul. I cannot remember when I last read such a powerful excavation of the silence that survives the explosions of language and time. The Story of a Brief Marriage is one of the most meaningful, and imaginative, literary works to come out of our wretched, war-torn decades.”Amitava Kumar , author of A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb
Arudpragasam captures the vernacular while sustaining a startling lyricism…[The Sri Lankan Civil War] dislocated a nation, irrespective of ethnicity, but the most helpless were the poorest Tamils, caught behind battle lines, prevented by the rebels from leaving, whose choice was "either be killed in the shelling, or conscripted and then killed in the fighting." Arudpragasam gives those innocents a place in history as ordinary citizens, with dreams and belief in salvation, who hold on to privacy, dignity, pride and ritual. He makes it impossible not to stand skin-to-skin with them as they huddle in fragile dugouts, their refuge found beneath overturned boats and their scant belongings like paperweights that hold them on earth. This is a book that makes one kneel before the elegance of the human spirit and the yearning that is at the essence of every life.
The New York Times Book Review - Ru Freeman
07/11/2016
2016-06-22
