Customer Reviews

Love Marriage: A Novel

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

If I was going to write a novel about my experience as a Sri Lankan American and the two cultures, this is exactly what I would hope it would be like in both content and writing style. Actually that's an understatement: this is more than what I could possibly hope such a novel to be. Ganeshananthan's story-telling skill is superb and her literary voice is honest, sincere, intelligent, and eloquent. This is a FANTASTIC first novel and I am eagerly awaiting the second, go VV! Definitely read this book, I sense a budding Arundhati Roy in this woman....

Yes, there are a fair number of rhetorical flourishes in this first novel that may not suit everyone's taste, particularly since the story would draw the reader in effectively even if they weren't there. Yes, it may seem odd that the story's protagonist is arguably its least compelling character (although she is redeemed somewhat through her link to another character late in the novel), or that for a substantial part of the later chapters, not much actually happens. But there's so much good happening here that I recommend V.V. Ganeshananthan's "Love Marriage" wholeheartedly.

The episodic, almost staccato manner in which the story is told works effectively, both as a way of flitting between points in time and vividly rendered spaces in the characters' hearts and as a way of muting the effect of the aforementioned rhetorical flourishes. The limning of the two worlds Yalini straddles is skillful, with the Sri Lankan parts being particularly effective (I actually found myself wanting more of the Sri Lankan story, particularly the Tigers, than we get). The stories of a number of the supporting characters in this novel--aunts and uncles and cousins--are three-dimensional and compelling, and the place Yalini and her family's arc ultimately takes us is not to the clear conclusion that one might expect (and that some of the marketing material curiously hints at) but it is a place that I found consistent with the story's realism and nuance and the substantive themes woven throughout.

Solid stuff, overall.

Love Marriage is the story of Yalini, a recent college grad who is a first generation Sri Lankan-American. The book is not so much her story, as it is the story of her Sri Lankan family and the trials and tribulations they experienced as a result of Marriage. It is not just internal family squabbles that run through the book, it is also the recent history of Sri Lanka and the Tamil Tigers that really make this book a gem. While there are plenty of books about India, Sri Lanka is often overshadowed; the country's history isn't nearly as well known. While most people have heard of the Tamil Tigers, few know who they really are or what it means. That is the strength of this book - the history it reveals to its readers. While the story of the people and relationships is somewhat less compelling, overall it is still a book that is very much worth reading.

When Murali, a Sri Lankan Tamil practicing medicine in the U.S., met Vani, a girl who had grown up in a village near his and had fled to the states in search of her life, they decided to marry. By Tamil tradition, their marriage was a Love Marriage, frowned on in a Hindu society that relied on adherence to traditions.
"In this globe-scattered Sri Lankan family, we speak only of two kinds of marriage. The first is the Arranged Marriage. The second is the Love Marriage," says Yalini, their American-born daughter and the narrator of this delightful first novel.
A Love Marriage is by definition an Improper Marriage. In Sri Lanka, Vani's brother Kumaran was a leader of the Tamil Tigers, a rebel group fighting for independence from the country's ruling Sinhalese majority. When he heard of the couple's marriage plans, he raged against Murali's family and threatened to kill them. Now, almost 30 years later, Kumaran is dying and he turns to Murali for help. He travels with his daughter Jenani to Canada, where Murali and Vani rent a house on the outskirts of Toronto's Sri Lankan community to care for him until the end comes.
Yalini, who complained earlier that "no matter how American I was, I was also the only Sri Lankan" in school, is forced to realize that, in the words of her cousin, "I can already see that you do not know anything about" Sri Lanka. She encounters the reality of Tamil life through the stories of her uncle, through the uncovering of her family's history, and her interactions with the Tamil community in Toronto.
First-time author V.V. Ganeshananthan has crafted an absorbing tale that carries the reader through the plot twists -- present and past -- effortlessly. Her writing style consists of short bursts of exposition; some sections are only a few lines long. Yet, at the end of the narrative, the reader feels a new sense of familiarity with a strange, far-off land and the people, who in spite of their roots, are not much different from the rest of us.

I almost immediately fell in love with the staccato rhythm of the blunt sentences and short chapters in V. V. Ganeshananthan's first novel, Love Marriage. Love Marriage is the aggregate love story of narrator Yalini's Sri Lankan ancestors, a compare and contrast of the many different forms the social contract of marriage can take. The stories of each pair of relations form a series of lovely vignettes, many of which have a beautiful internal symmetry: in one story Yalini's father grows up thinking he has a broken (diseased) heart, only to discover that his heart is healthy and his true love in America, in another a young girl replaces her sister in a school championship after her sister suffers a freak accident, inadvertently appropriating the injured sister's future as well.

However, I was unable to find this order and grace within the larger story of the novel. Yalini begins the novel with ambiguous feelings about her heritage, and spends the bulk of it learning her family's stories from her dying uncle, a former Tamil Tiger. In the end she seems to be deteriorating emotionally, perhaps suffering from depression as she deals with her Uncle's death and her cousin's questionable arranged marriage. Yalini is almost a side-note in her own story, and it is difficult to understand what she has gained from her increasing awareness of her Sri Lankan history. The novel has almost no real-time action (as opposed to action occurring in historical flashbacks and stories) and ends abruptly. Obvious themes include the lack of rigid social guidance in America as compared to Sri Lanka, and the hatred and forgiveness that can emerge from long ethnic wars, but again neither of these themes is expounded much in the actual life of Yalini.

I was honestly slightly disappointed with the novel, as a novel, but I really enjoyed the individual vignettes and writing style. I was excited to learn a little about the Tamils and Sri Lanka, and would happily pick up another book by Ganeshananthan to see how her style evolves in her future novels.

This is a very promising first novel. The format is a mixed blessing, though. It's written like a memoir or journal entries, and the end result is a bit repetitive at times. This stunning and eye-opening look into the hidden society of ex-pat Sri Lankans, particularly the Tamils of the diaspora, is both heart breaking and full of hope. It showcases a people desperately trying to hang on to what is good about their lost country's culture while attempting, not always successfully, to leave behind old enmities and prejudices. I do hope the author leaves behind this format when writing her second novel.

I reread this work in a later context of the end of the tiger saga and the travails of the Tamizh ...the silence in her stories are stunning.Few of the reviewers have questioned the love in the marriages portrayed in the book ....it exists in the quiet silence. Tamizh culture is hard to fathom ... communication thrives in the silent part. Fortitude is a virtue in that terrain and Vasugi does a great job. Again, i beseech Ms. Ganesanathan to write and write more and now maybe the ugly aspects of the bleak and violent world have ceased to exist amongst those that lived or were connected by blood to their kin in Ariyalur, Valvetithurai, Jaffna, Nandikadal and the other towns with lush a backdrop.







Vasugi's narrative style is almost like living in areas riddled with insurgency. Most often you are existing contended lulled by the absolute silence, some times you hear the occasional sounds of a battle somewhere but not too concerned and then there are those occasional blinding flashes and the skull piercing sounds that rattle every fiber of your being. A beautiful book that takes you through the multi generational stories of lives lived. Love Marriage is a book that deals very little with love marriage but on the under current of love trickling through any relationship. The author uses tamil words judiciously and translates almost immediately. A beautiful book to read and maybe even own.

In "Love Marriage" V.V. Ganeshananthan has given us a very painterly portrait of a Sri Lankan Tamil family's weave of relationship, and experiences that transform both family and individuals. Its insights are particularly relevant to broader American society: the immigrant's generational shedding of "home" culture through the process of adapting to a new world; the reaching back toward that "home" culture in an effort to understand and define oneself; the gap between those who have experienced war first hand and those who have not.

The story is seen through the eyes of Yalini, daughter of an immigrant couple. She is born on the 1983 day when anti-Tamil violence in Sri Lanka pushed that country into a civil war that ended only in the past few days (May 2009). Yalini describes generations of defining events in a manner that is both gentle, and as steadily persistent as the ocean's waves. Her story is captivating in the beauty of its details, and in the frank humanness of its relating of days of joy, days of tragedy.

Yalini speaks of the different types of marriage within Sri Lankan society; Love Marriage, Arranged Marriage, Marriage Under Pressure, Marriage Abroad............... Within each of these are the tradeoffs that we all make in our lives; the balancing of the forces of selfishness and selflessness, expression of individuality and conformity, acceptance and pro-activeness. Perhaps what Yalini's story conveys best is the sense of the deep tissue change that results from her engagement with the faces of her own fears, anger, insecurity and doubts, and the place that culture plays in supporting and healing her.

I hope that we see much more from this writer.

Having lived almost two decades in the Jaffna Peninsula of Sri Lanka, I wa very pleased to find the novel a very accurate statement of the background of the current conflict between the LTTE(Tigers) and the government. It was probably a wise decision to make the narrator, Yalini--whose name refers to the Yal, the harp symbol of Jaffna--not the center
of attention. Her parents, who met and married in the USA, are the
characters who have experienced the brunt of the Tamil problem in Sri Lanka. She introduces the problem of support for or reaction against
the LTTE with a brother of her mother, who from Jaffna threatened
Yalini's father, a doctor, who dared to become engaged to her mother,
without the benefit of the traditional go-betweens. This situation is
relieved when the brother, well-placed in the LTTE and who is dying of cancer, is released from the organization to go to Canada for medical help from his once maligned
brother-in-law. He also brings with him his own daughter, a convinced Tiger, to give in marriage to a man who has been organizing support for the LTTE in Canada. Without making her book an apology for either the pro or the con case, the author presents the problem as it affects her characters' lives.
It is a well-written novel and an amazing achievment in evenhandedness.
Dr. Bob

This is a really wonderful account of a family separated by oceans and war. The writing is first-rate and the voice is wise and compassionate. I would highly recommend this book for anyone who wants to know more about the human aspects of foreign conflict, as well as just a splendid lesson on how to write a novel. V.V. Ganeshananthan is one to watch and I can't wait for her next.