Dinesh lives in a displaced people camp on the coast of the ocean during the Sri Lankan civil war along with other refugees. These people dun have anywhere to go anymore when the Tamils are pushed out of the villages by the govt. forces fighting the Tamil Tigers. Dinesh is completely alone with no family remaining. He would have to face the violence and destruction the war brings upon the citizen of the country. Dinesh later is bestowed a girl by this girl's father to be his wife. The father does it in order to protect his daughter as he no longer can protect her himself. Initially Dinesh is so unsure to get married but he finally jumps in. Yet can a ring go without the suffering? What I love about Arudpragasam's The Story of a Brief Marriage is his ability to present the scenes and to drag the readers to the sequences of the story like they're experiencing them themselves. When the marriage triggers Dinesh's emotion to the extents of the existence of which he has totally forgotten; Arudpragasam to me also shows what is inside the boy's traumatised mind. There's no such sentimentality but Arudpragasam has never failed with the readers' physiological insights. The text flows leading the readers along with Dinesh. Yes! The book is indeed so condensed and the timeframe in which the story takes time is so short but Arudpragasam manages to pack so much in each sentence. At times, it just feels that Arudpragasam tends to give too much time to things so they will go along with the meaning instead of allowing them to hold their own meaning by existing. What came before and what is to come seems to matter much less than what is happening right now and it's Arudpragasam who successfully brings that essence in this book. Des ✨ #bookishindonesia #bookaholic #bookstagram #bookstagramindonesia #bibliophile #bookreview #bookreviewer #booknerd #bookaddict #bookblogger #bookaesthetic #bookenthusiast #booksbooksbooks #descalibrary #descaslibrary #descareading2022 #fictionbook #literaturejunkie #nonfiction #igreads #igbook #instaread #instabooks #ReadTheWorld22 #riotgrams #BookstagramReels #AnukArudpragasam #TheStoryofaBriefMarriage #SrilankanWriter #SrilankanLiterature (at Bangkok, Thailand) https://www.instagram.com/p/Cmsmd_yrmA-/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

“The Story of  Brief Marriage:” An Even Briefer Essay

Anuk Arudpragasam’s The Story of a Brief Marriage is a snapshot of humanity and youth existing within Sri Lanka’s decades-long civil war. The novel’s protagonist, Dinesh, is an evacuee who has witnessed death nearly every day, including that of his mother.

Assisting the wounded in the camp’s makeshift clinic, Dinesh meets Mr. Somasundaram, an old man who has lost all his family except for his daughter, Ganga. Somasundaram asks if Dinesh would consider marrying Ganga before his impending death. Dinesh agrees and the two are married immediately without fanfare. Dinesh takes Ganga to his makeshift home in the jungle’s clearing. Ganga is closed off, grieving the loss of her father’s care and suspicious of Dinesh’s ability to take his place.

They struggle to find common ground and some sort of intimacy. Dinesh fanaticizes about a world in which they can make a life together, allowing himself some slight hope that they will make it out of this alive. Ganga, too, begins to soften.

After just one night together, a brutal round of shelling breaks out in the camp. Dinesh wakes and realizes Ganga is no longer next to him and races back to camp through the death and destruction only to find his new bride dead on the dirt floor of the tent, her stomach ripped open by a piece of shrapnel. There isn’t anything left for Dinesh to do but rock back and forth, his marriage already over.

The novel is heartbreaking but beautiful portrayal of the life that can exist even in the direst of circumstances. Arudpragasam seems to raise the question: Is it foolish to cling to that hope, or does it provide a reprieve in a definitively hopeless situation?

A survivor of the civil war himself, Arudpragasam lives deeply within the mind of Dinesh through a close third-person point of view, finding a balance of and practicality. On page 147, the couple tentatively clings to each other: “Lifting his head up slightly from her neck Dinesh placed his temple alongside Ganga’s and tried to listen, as if by juxtaposing their individual pulses and measuring the differences in rhythm he could find out whether he thoughts were the same as his, whether or not she too believed he was capable of taking care of her and whether she even wanted that …” Here, the author combines the physical – their individual heartbeats – with the imagined – whether those heartbeats could tell him Ganga’s thoughts.

Interestingly, this very physical act is repeated when Dinesh discovers Ganga’s body as he places his head in a similar location to hear a heartbeat that isn’t there.

It’s easy to get bogged down in the sometimes pages-long paragraphs of Dinesh’s wandering thoughts, often confusingly jumping from the present to the past. However, it also seems authentic. When one has spent as much time alone with his thoughts as Dinesh, rabbit holes and directionless meanderings would be commonplace. There are some real gems imbedded within these blocks of texts, though. One of my favorite examples is on page 151 as Dinesh ponders why it felt so good to cry after years of holding back: “Perhaps it had to do with the fact that in crying for yourself you were acknowledging your vulnerability, acknowledging that despite your various efforts and postures you can be and have been hurt by the world.”

The Story of a Brief Marriage

is straightforward, a novel woven throughout with impactful moments of imagery and vulnerability. In his first novel, Arudpragasam opens the door to the hard life of an evacuee, and his willingness to tackle these moments is an inspiration

Book 124 of 2018. #TheStoryofaBriefMarriage is a visceral, bleak and grim novel set during the bloody Sri Lankan Civil War. A story of a quickly arranged marriage and the devastating consequences of war. It was well-written and frighteningly real. Bleak and sad and heartbreaking. A good book by all means just way too depressing. Go ahead with caution if you want to pick it up. It will leave you feeling numb. 3/5 purely for the blue funk it left me in. This is the 6th or 7th Sri Lankan book I've read and pretty much all of these were centred around the Civil War. They were all great just about the same thing. I really need to find a book that is from Sri Lanka but not about the war. . . . #bookreview #bookrecommendation #indianbooksinaugust #literaryfiction #literature #bibliophile #warstories #booknerdigans #booksbooksbooks #unitedbookstagram #culturetripbooks #igreads #bookishfeatures #bookishgirl #bookblog #bookblogger #bookgasm #bookstagram #bookstagramindia #acolorstory https://www.instagram.com/p/BnDZGoLFQw3/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=zh6r8ft703w9

October's book club pick is Anuk Arudpragasam's THE STORY OF A BRIEF MARRIAGE. Ed calls this astonishing debut novel "an unflinching, visceral meditation on the stark cruelty of war, told in prose as devastating as it is beautiful. Our discussion will take place on Tuesday, November 7th at 6:30PM. We've got copies of the paperback on our shelves now. #litsyndicate #anukarudpragasam #thestoryofabriefmarriage (at Unabridged Bookstore)

☆☆ #lazysunday = #cupcake #coffee #chocolate #goodbook ☆☆ #thestoryofabriefmarriage #anukarudpragasam #mesjokke #holycacao ☆☆

These beauties finally arrived today! 🌸🌸🌸