‘Love Marriage’ is a read best savored slowly

By Barbara Rich Daily Progress correspondent
Published: September 28, 2008

“Love Marriage” — the debut novel of V.V. Ganeshananthan — was published in April, and the young Sri Lankan-American author came to Charlottesville for a reading and book signing. I have not reviewed it sooner because, initially, I found myself at a loss as to its category.

A novel? When each page reads like a poetic biography of an extended, fragmented family dealing not only with the subject of traditional marriage vs. modernity, but the violence going on in its ancestral home? And music, too, inserted itself. I know this sounds “precious,” but Ganeshananthan’s prose sings on the page.

Sri Lanka, formerly known as Ceylon, has been described as a “tear-shaped island.” Sadly, it achieves noteworthiness when hit by nature’s violence or because of its long-term conflicts among the country’s Tamils, Tigers and Sinhalese. All this underlies the book’s central theme, which is disclosed in the title.

There are love marriages in Sri Lanka and arranged marriages. These differences exist within a country where tradition is not only present and revered, but is carried over to the United States, where the narrator’s parents met as emigres.

Yalini, the narrator of “Love Marriage,” was born in America in 1983, while in Sri Lanka, the Black July riots raged, fueled by governmental repression. She is a bright, almost compulsively observant child and young woman — her father a doctor, dedicated to healing and helping; her mother wise and loving. The two have a secret which the author shares with us: Theirs was the first true love marriage. Although they pretend it was a “proper” marriage — an arranged marriage — the truth is that they were in love.

“… Twenty-five years after their wedding, my parents like to give the impression that their marriage was arranged, because they were both very proper.”

Throughout this slim paperback, graced with a brilliant red and gold cover, one thing is as clear as Ganeshananthan’s liquid prose. “Love Marriage” is a melodious blend of love and war, with numerous glimpses into how people not only act and react, but how they feel. Deep down, where it is not always visible to the casual eye.

All this is done in a non-linear way, and in the form of brief vignettes devoted to individual events and characters. In spite of its novel designation, it would be a form of near-denial not to suspect that the author’s people were kin — or kin to women and men known to her. Family and friends she had had contact with.

Because Yalini’s father is a doctor, death is both a family friend and an enemy. If there is one flaw — one downside — to this book, it lies in the way too many of the stories end in sadness and death. There is Uma, the narrator’s aunt, who dies both mad and unmarried; and Kumaran, her uncle, a former warrior of a militant group who is dying. Yalini travels to Canada to be with him.

In one particularly illuminating vignette, we are present when Yalini’s parents meet, and we also learn the genesis of Kumaran’s excesses. I found myself wondering, as I read story after story, if it might have been more accurate, but less eye-catching, to have titled the book “Love, Marriage and War,” because the three are interwoven.

Nevertheless, Ganeshananthan has given us a sharp insight into unforgettable women and men who may not always escape lives of quiet desperation, but who — in the main — live fully examined ones.

Something to celebrate, too: How the author — and I hope she will forgive me for thinking of her as the narrator — both shows and tells her readers what they, her characters, are absorbing. This is a true literary gift.

I marked several passages due to the lyrical quality of the writing. “Voyage inside a family and there will always be something unknown, a masked love or hatred, an unexplained death, the exact fragrance of the temple’s air at the last wedding. That unknown could have been one person’s beginning, or another person’s end.”

Musing about the telling of her stories, Yalini writes: “Reverse a family tree, and branches of blood are whittled down to one person. I am composed of all the women and men who came before me. I am the result of many marriages.”

These are just samples of Ganeshananthan’s ways of weaving words together into a rich tapestry.

“Love Marriage” started out as the author’s senior thesis at Harvard, under the guidance of writer Jamaica Kincaid. She then went on to the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, from which she graduated in 2005, and last year, received her master’s at Columbia University. That she will go on to write other books is not in doubt; that they will be replete with life’s pleasures and pain is anticipated.

I would recommend reading “Love Marriage” slowly, the better to extract the variety of poetic, musical and literary juices from a writer who put me in mind of a thirsty, retentive sponge.