Customer Reviews

Bringing Tony Home

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Bringing Tony Home by Tissa Abeysekara is a collection of four interrelated stories set in Sri Lanka. Each story may be read and enjoyed individually, but read together they provide a broader perspective and deeper understanding of the main character, who narrates the stories. The narrator recounts key periods in his life - his life as a child, as a young adult, and as a man. His stories recall memories of family, loss, and growing up; events that influenced the person he would become. By recalling these memories and examining them to try and separate things real and imagined, the narrator begins to understand himself better. He learns that images from memory are often illusory and constantly changing and yet, no matter how difficult they are to pin down, something true and meaningful can be culled from them.

Although I would not have said so after the first several pages, Bringing Tony Home is a richly engaging book. I was initially distracted by so much description of the setting in the first story, and got a bit lost along the Old Road, High Level Road, gravel path, cart track, thick leafy veralu trees, and elbow bends, etc. But the disorientation was short-lived and I was rewarded with a highly original story that I won't soon forget. Because the book contains four stories, it seems natural to choose a favorite. I have two: Elsewhere: Something Like a Love Story and Hark, the Moaning Pond: A Grandmother's Tale. These are the last two stories in the book. Please don't short-change yourself, though. You will want to read the book cover to cover

By way of full disclosure, I was the acquisition and developmental editor of this collection, so this review is in no way "objective."

Tissa is a film maker of some renown in Sri Lanka; Sinhalese by birth, but a writer who adopted English as his "mother tongue" early in his writing career. He's the producer, director, and/or script writer of dozens of films and television shows, and the recipient of numerous awards in his country.

What drew me to Tissa stories was his use of language--long, flowing, sensual sentences and challenging syntax that combine to create an undeniable feel for the trails and people of his youth. The setting is 1940s and 1950 Sri Lanka. At its heart, this is a collection of stories by a man, written in his later years, who is trying to make sense of his life through the retelling of these stories.

A young boy loves a dog, loses him, then risks his life by walking miles to find him again, only to once again lose him, this time forever. And in the retelling years later he realizes that it was much more than the dog that he had both found, and lost ("Bringing Tony Home"). That same young boy, a few years later, finds "forbidden love" in the form of an outcast girl, only to have her tragic story unexpectedly come back to him decades later ("Elsewhere: Something Like a Love Story").

In the story that has brought tears to my eye in every reading, "Hark, The Moaning Pond: A Grandmother's Tale," the narrator recounts his relationship with his grandmother -- a story the like of which that's been told a million times -- only under Tissa's spell, it quickly leaves the realm of a typical grandmother's tale and opens its wings into the mythology of Sri Lanka itself. As I said, I'm not objective. "Hark" was one of the most moving experiences I've had in my reading life.

When experienced as a whole, BRINGING TONY HOME is a beautiful, beautiful read, evoking in cinematic detail a time and place lost to everything but memory, and literature.

I found this book a rather tough nut to crack, and I think part of my difficulty was simply a cultural divide. Sri Lanka is a long way from Michigan, after all. But my biggest problem was with the density of the descriptions and the impossibly long run-on sentences, particularly in the title story, "Bringing Tony Home." There was, I thought, a kind of "bait and switch" at work here, both in the title and in the cover picture of a dog. Because when people read about a little boy looking for his dog left behind in a family move (of decidedly downward social mobility), they quite naturally think, oh boy, a good "dog story." But it's not. There is, in fact, precious little here about poor Tony the dog. No, this is a very thinly disguised memoir of Abeysekara's boyhood, which was not, apparently, a very easy or happy one. And the story itself - what there is of it - is very nearly strangled by the very "details" that author Michael Ondaatje praises in a cover blurb.

The one story of the book's four which I found most accessible was "Elsewhere," a moving tale of adolescent sexual awakening and then adult disappointments, serial marriages and adultery. In this story, which shifts skillfully and easily back and forth between past and present, there were fewer irrelevant details to detract from the story. I wished "Elsewhere" had been longer and had been more central to the book, because it was the only piece which successfully sustained my interest.

Bringing Tony Home is not a bad book, but neither is it one I could heartily recommend to the casual American reader. As I said earlier, it could be a cultural thing, but I have read many books set in other countries and found most of them much more accessible than this one. - Tim Bazzett, author of SOLDIER BOY: AT PLAY IN THE ASA

I survived the reading of this book only because I needed to know what the narrator felt at the end of his journey to his past. Only 224 pages long, constant attention was essential to capture the nuances of the Sri Lankan culture, remember the times frames, and yet at times, lay the book to rest, exhausted by its words. The interrelated stories offer vivid, though somewhat streaming descriptions of landscapes interlaced with family, friends, enemies, and begin with his dog Tony. As his family descends from the stature that wealth in this culture brings, the narrator experiences his first bitter taste of loss: his dog Tony. It was difficult to read of his extreme efforts to regain his dog, only to realize, memories attached to Tony would no longer grow pleasantly in his new environment, so he releases the dog to his own destiny.

Each story offers a glimpse not only of his memories, but also his reaction to the differences that have transpired since he last travelled from the present to the past.

Beautifully written and embellished with personal ambiance, this author has demonstrated a highly emotional level of style in his remembrance of one man's journey to revisit his childhood.

Life has a strange habit of throwing curve balls. "Bringing Tony Home" is a collection of short stories from Tissa Abeysekara, who provokes the strange coincidences of life. Winning many awards, the stories range from lost dogs, rediscovering past flames, parents, ancestry, and more. Using the written word as a beautiful paintbrush, "Bringing Tony Home" is unique and highly recommended reading for fans of short fiction.