In my post last year about reading diversely, I forgot to mention another side effect of more diverse reading: gaining new areas of interest. Sri Lanka came onto my radar when I read the beautiful-covered On Sal Mal Lane last year, but it also left me uncertain about the particulars of the country’s civil wars. The difficulty is that when there are no hooks in your brain for new information to grab onto, you’re less willing to take in that information in the first place; and once you have taken it in, you’re less likely to retain it.
(This is Science.)
After On Sal Mal Lane, I had some vagueish, unanswered questions about the Sri Lankan civil war, which made me more inclined to pick up another book dealing with the same topics (such as Island of a Thousand Mirrors), which in its turn clarified some of my questions (Buddhist, Hindu, and Christian; yes, but Dutch more than Portuguese; you really can’t; an independent state encompassing various coastal provinces; that they would ally with Tamils from India and take over all the Sinhalese stuff), which in turn has made me interested in reading further books set in Sri Lanka in the future. The more you do know about a topic (unless it sucks, like economics), the more you want to know. And that is a good thing about reading diversely.
Island of a Thousand Mirrors tells the stories of two Sri Lankan girls growing up as the war between Sinhalese and Tamil reaches its crisis point. Yasodhara falls a little in love with her Tamil upstairs neighbor, though such a relationship could never really be; and Saraswathi watches her brothers, one after the other, be taken off to train as Tamil Tigers.
More broadly, the arc of the story was predictable. Yasodhara lives a safer life, because she is Sinhala, and because her family can afford to leave for America. Saraswathi has no means of escaping her life of danger and death, and she becomes (in a not-particularly-inventive narrative transformation) the sort of soldier her family has learned to fear. You can probably make a fair guess at what happens from there.
But even with that drawback, Island of a Thousand Mirrors was a very good read in many ways. Munaweera’s writing is lovely, and she has a knack — which feels not quite yet fully developed and promises gains in her future career — for the striking juxtaposition.
They set fires on front lawns, threw in furniture and children over the wailing of mothers. They committed the usual atrocities in the usual ways, but here was something unexpected and incongruous. In their earth-encrusted, callous fingers, they clutched clean white papers, neatly corner-stapled. Census accounts, voting registrations, pages detailing who lived where and most important, who was Tamil, Burgher, Muslim, or Sinhala. And in these lists was revealed precision and orchestration in the midst of smoky, charred-flesh-smelling chaos.
I have had enough now for a while of painful fiction about civil wars. (My tolerance is low.) If anyone can recommend a good history of Sri Lanka, whether of the civil wars in the late twentieth century or a broader, all-encompassing history that gets to the colonialism stuff a bit more, please recommend in the comments. I want a proper history, though, not something along the narrative nonfiction lines. I want some intense endnoting or I cannot be satisfied.