The Stranger Analysis- The Victory of Man When Faced With the Absurd

The Victory of Man When Faced With the Absurd

“Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don’t know.”  This famous first line of The Stranger introduces the curious character Meursault.  He appears to have no reaction, negative or positive, to his mother dying beyond wondering what day she died on.  This strange detachment from any emotion continues throughout the novel, presenting the reader with a curious insight into the workings of Meursault’s mind.  The worldview presented from Meursault’s point of view is pure nihilism, taken from its infancy of thought in the beginning of the book to its inevitable conclusion at the end of the book.  To him, nothing really mattered because everyone dies in the end no matter what they do.  To this attitude, society has no way to react because society is full of meaning and purpose, while Meursault sees everything as meaningless and purposeless, himself included.  This kind of existence is remarkably similar to Sisyphus described in Camus’ “The Myth of Sisyphus”, in which Sisyphus is condemned to roll a large stone up a hill only to have it roll back down for all of eternity.        

Both The Stranger and “The Myth of Sisyphus” deal directly with a nihilistic situation, a situation in which the entire existence of people and effort is meaningless.  In the beginning of The Stranger, Meursault is oblivious to the deeper meaning of his worldview and drifts along with a detached ease.  Only later in the novel, when he has had time to think and analyze his situation, does he come to the full realization that existence and life is absurd.  It is at this point that Meursault’s life begins to resemble Sisyphus in “The Myth of Sisyphus” in a few different respects.

Both Meursault’s and Sisyphus’s existence are meaningless.  Sisyphus’s meaningless existence is found in the same task that he is set to do over and over again with no result.  Meursault realizes the purposeless of life when Raymond gives him the gun.  As he holds the gun, he realizes that “you could either shoot or not shoot.”(Stranger, 56), making no distinction between the option of living or dying.  To him either option could happen with equal chance; no preference is given to one or the other.  A little while later, while in prison, Meursault realizes that the same sentiment could be applied to him as well, that “life isn’t worth living”(Stranger, 114), that it doesn’t matter whether he dies now at thirty or if he were to die at seventy.  It is in this realization that Meursault brings the worldview of nihilism to its ultimate conclusion – a seeming depressing and despair-stricken existence.

This type of existence, Camus writes in “The Myth of Sisyphus”, is only tragic because of the complete self-knowledge the character possesses of his completely useless existence.  This absurd existence is only absurd to those who know of its absurdity.  In the beginning of The Stranger Meursault led a relatively blissful life of ignorance.  He wasn’t happy, precisely – such emotion seemed beyond him at that point –, but he was content with his life.  He was so content with his life, thinking that “one life [is] as good as another”(Stranger, 41), that his boss complained that his lack of ambition “was disastrous in business”(Stranger, 41).  It isn’t until Meursault comes to realize this tragedy of self-knowledge when he concludes, “Nothing, nothing matters.”(Stranger, 121).  Not his life, not his friends’ lives, not any life at all.  Nothing matters.

 From this ultimate conclusion there are only two possibilities – to sink into utter despair or to rise above that and to claim victory in the knowledge of the uselessness of life.  When the nihilistic man contemplates his own absurd condition, a condition that is pure torment to any man, Camus writes in “They Myth of Sisyphus”, he “silences all idols”, with the “universe suddenly restored to its silence”.  In this silencing of outwardly desires the man comes to find a peace within himself and the universe.  Meursault chooses the latter of the two afore-mentioned possibilities, and contemplates his existence, opening himself up to “the gentle indifference of the world.”(Stranger, 122).  He realizes that his life is meaningless, but that living life in itself is enough for satisfaction, even though it is not purposeful.  With his execution on the way, all that is left for him to feel satisfaction for is for a “large crowd of spectators”(Stranger, 123) to “greet [him] with cries of hate.”(Stranger, 123).  He finds satisfaction in the end of his life, Camus writes, the same way the “struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill [Sisyphus’] heart.”  For the first time in a long time, Meursault “was happy again”(Stranger, 123).

Meursault came to realize, over the course of his life, the meaningless of life, and eventually found his fulfillment in the simple fact that it was his life he was living, and he was living it his way.  He finds a final joy at the end of his life in the fact that he is living his own life, just as Camus remarks that Sisyphus must feel happy because he also is living his own life, living his own fate.  This, Camus writes, is the ultimate realization of nihilism, a realization that is consummated at the end of Meursault’s life, a realization that is all of Sisyphus’s existence.  It is ultimately a realization of peace.



[Published by ToughBasics, September 12, 2009]

The Heart's Eternal Vow - A Review of Gabriel García Márquez's Love in the Time of Cholera

 

The Heart's Eternal Vow

[The New York Times, 10 April 1988]

Love, as Mickey and Sylvia, in their 1956 hit single, remind us, love is strange. As we grow older it gets stranger, until at some point mortality has come well within the frame of our attention, and there we are, suddenly caught between terminal dates while still talking a game of eternity. It's about then that we may begin to regard love songs, romance novels, soap operas and any live teen-age pronouncements at all on the subject of love with an increasingly impatient, not to mention intolerant, ear.

At the same time, where would any of us be without all that romantic infrastructure, without, in fact, just that degree of adolescent, premortal hope? Pretty far out on life's limb, at least. Suppose, then, it were possible, not only to swear love "forever," but actually to follow through on it -- to live a long, full and authentic life based on such a vow, to put one's alloted stake of precious time where one's heart is? This is the extraordinary premise of Gabriel García Márquez's new novel Love in the Time of Cholera, one on which he delivers, and triumphantly.

In the postromantic ebb of the 70's and 80's, with everybody now so wised up and even growing paranoid about love, once the magical buzzword of a generation, it is a daring step for any writer to decide to work in love's vernacular, to take it, with all its folly, imprecision and lapses in taste, at all seriously -- that is, as well worth those higher forms of play that we value in fiction. For García Márquez the step may also be revolutionary. "I think that a novel about love is as valid as any other," he once remarked in a conversation with his friend, the journalist Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza (published as "El Olor de la Guayaba," 1982). "In reality the duty of a writer -- the revolutionary duty, if you like -- is that of writing well."

And -- oh boy -- does he write well. He writes with impassioned control, out of a maniacal serenity: the Garcímárquesian voice we have come to recognize from the other fiction has matured, found and developed new resources, been brought to a level where it can at once be classical and familiar, opalescent and pure, able to praise and curse, laugh and cry, fabulate and sing and when called upon, take off and soar, as in this description of a turn-of-the-century balloon trip:
"From the sky they could see, just as God saw them, the ruins of the very old and heroic city of Cartagena de Indias, the most beautiful in the world, abandoned by its inhabitants because of the sieges of the English and the atrocities of the buccaneers. They saw the walls, still intact, the brambles in the streets, the fortifications devoured by heartsease, the marble palaces and the golden altars and the viceroys rotting with plague inside their armor.

"They flew over the lake dwellings of the Trojas in Cataca, painted in lunatic colors, with pens holding iguanas raised for food and balsam apples and crepe myrtle hanging in the lacustrian gardens. Excited by everyone's shouting, hundreds of naked children plunged into the water, jumping out of windows, jumping from the roofs of the houses and from the canoes that they handled with astonishing skill, and diving like shad to recover the bundles of clothing, the bottles of cough syrup, the beneficent food that the beautiful lady with the feathered hat threw to them from the basket of the balloon."
 

 This novel is also revolutionary in daring to suggest that vows of love made under a presumption of immortality -- youthful idiocy, to some -- may yet be honored, much later in life when we ought to know better, in the face of the undeniable. This is, effectively, to assert the resurrection of the body, today as throughout history an unavoidably revolutionary idea. Through the ever-subversive medium of fiction, García Márquez shows us how it could all plausibly come about, even -- wild hope -- for somebody out here, outside a book, even as inevitably beaten at, bought and resold as we all must have become if only through years of simple residence in the injuring and corruptive world.

Here's what happens. The story takes place between about 1880 and 1930, in a Caribbean seaport city, unnamed but said to be a composite of Cartagena and Barranquilla -- as well, perhaps, as cities of the spirit less officially mapped. Three major characters form a triangle whose hypotenuse is Florentino Ariza, a poet dedicated to love both carnal and transcendent, though his secular fate is with the River Company of the Caribbean and its small fleet of paddle-wheel steamboats. As a young apprentice telegrapher he meets and falls forever in love with Fermina Daza, a "beautiful adolescent with . . . almondsshaped eyes," who walks with a "natural haughtiness . . . her doe's gait making her seem immune to gravity." Though they exchange hardly a hundred words face to face, they carry on a passionate and secret affair entirely by way of letters and telegrams, even after the girl's father has sound out and taken her away on an extended "journey of forgetting." But when she returns, Fermina rejects the lovesick young man after all, and eventually meets and marries instead Dr. Juvenal Urbino who, like the hero of a I9th-century novel, is well born, a sharp dresser, somewhat stuck on himself but a terrific catch nonetheless.

For Florentino, love's creature, this is an agonizing setback, though nothing fatal. Having sworn to love Fermina Daza forever, he settles in to wait for as long as he has to until she's free again. This turns out to be 51 years, 9 months and 4 days later, when suddenly, absurdly, on a Pentecost Sunday around 1930, Dr. Juvenal Urbino dies, chasing a parrot upon mango tree. After the funeral, when everyone else has left, Florentino steps forward with his hat over his heart "Fermina," he declares, "I have waited for this opportunity for more than half a century, to repeat to you once again my vow of eternal fidelity and everlasting love." Shocked and furious, Fermina orders him out of the house. "And don't show your face again for the years of life that are left to you . . . I hope there are very few of them."

The heart's eternal vow has run up against the world's finite terms. The confrontation occurs near the end of the first chapter, which recounts Dr. Urbino's last day on earth and Fermina's first night as a widow. We then flash back 50 years, into the time of cholera. The middle chapters follow the lives of the three characters through the years of the Urbinos' marriage and Florentino Ariza's rise at the River Company, as one century ticks over into the next. The last chapter takes up again where the first left off, with Florentine now, in the face of what many men would consider major rejection, resolutely setting about courting Fermina Daza all over again, doing what he must to win her love.

 In their city, throughout a turbulent half-century, death has proliferated everywhere, both as el cólera, the fatal disease that sweeps through in terrible intermittent epidemics, and as la cólera, defined as choler or anger, which taken to its extreme becomes warfare. Victims of one, in this book, are more than once mistaken for victims of the other. War, "always the same war," is presented here not as the continuation by other means of any politics that can possibly matter, but as a negative force, a plague, whose only meaning is death on a massive scale. Against this dark ground, lives, so precarious, are often more and less conscious projects of resistance, even of sworn opposition, to death. Dr. Urbino, like his father before him, becomes a leader in the battle against the cholera, promoting public health measures obsessively, heroically. Fermina, more conventionally but with as much courage, soldiers on in her chosen role of wife, mother and household manager, maintaining a safe perimeter for her family. Florentino embraces Eros, death's well-known long-time enemy, setting off on a career of seductions that eventually add up to 622 "long term liaisons, apart from . . . countless fleeting adventures," while maintaining, impervious to time, his deeper fidelity, his unquenchable hope for a life with Fermina. At the end he can tell her truthfully -- though she doesn't believe it for a minute -- that he has remained a virgin for her.

So far as this is Florentino's story, in a way his Bildungsroman, we find ourselves, as he earns the suspension of our disbelief, cheering him on, wishing for the success of this stubborn warrior against age and death, and in the name of love. But like the best fictional characters, he insists on his autonomy, refusing to be anything less ambiguous than human. We must take him as he is, pursuing his tomcat destiny out among the streets and lovers' refuges of this city with which he lives on terms of such easy intimacy, carrying with him a potential for disasters from which he remains safe, immunized by a comical but dangerous indifference to consequences that often borders on criminal neglect. The widow Nazaret, one of many widows he is fated to make happy, seduces him during a nightlong bombardment from the cannons of an attacking army outside the city. Ausencia Santander's exquisitely furnished home is burgled of every movable item while she and Florentino are frolicking in bed. A girl he picks up at Carnival time turns out to be a homicidal machete-wielding escapee from the local asylum. Olimpia Zuleta's husband murders her when he sees a vulgar endearment Florentino has been thoughtless enough to write on her body in red paint. His lover's amorality causes not only individual misfortune but ecological destruction as well: as he learns by the end of the book, his River Company's insatiable appetite for firewood to fuel its steamers has wiped out the great forests that once bordered the Magdalena river system, leaving a wasteland where nothing can live. "With his mind clouded by his passion for Fermina Daza he never took the trouble to think about it, and by the time he realized the truth, there was nothing anyone could do except bring in a new river."

In fact, dumb luck has as much to do with getting Florentino through as the intensity or purity of his dream. The author's great affection for this character does not entirely overcome a sly concurrent subversion of the ethic of machismo, of which García Márquez is not especially fond, having described it elsewhere simply as usurpation of the rights of others. Indeed, as we've come to expect from his fiction, it's the women in this story who are stronger, more attuned to reality. When Florentino goes crazy with live, developing symptoms like those of cholera, it is his mother Transito Ariza, who pulls him out of it. His innumerable lecheries are rewarded not so much for any traditional masculine selling points as for his obvious and aching need to be loved. Women go for it. "He is ugly and sad," Fermina Daza's cousin Hildebranda tells her, "but he is all love."

And García Márquez, straight-faced teller of tall tales, is his biographer. At the age of 19, as he has reported, the young writer underwent a literary epiphany on reading the famous opening lines of Kafka's Metamorphosis, in which a man wakes to find himself transformed into a giant insect. "Gosh," exclaimed García Márquez, using in Spanish a word in English we may not, "that's just the way my grandmother used to talk!" And that, he adds is when novels began to interest him. Much of what come [sic] in his work to be called "magical realism" was, as he tells it, simply the presence of that grandmotherly voice.

 

Nevertheless, in this novel we have come a meaningful distance from Macondo, the magical village in One Hundred Years of Solitude where folks routinely sail through the air and the dead remain in everyday conversation with the living: we have descended, perhaps in some way down the same river, all the way downstream, into war and pestilence and urban confusions to the edge of a Caribbean haunted less by individual dead than by a history which has brought so appallingly many down, without ever having sopoken, or having spoken gone unheard, or having been heard, left unrecorded. As revolutionary as writing well is the duty to redeem these silences, a duty García Márquez has here fulfilled with honor and compassion. It would be presumptuous to speak of moving "beyond" One Hundred Years of Solitude but clearly García Márquez has moved somewhere else, not least into deeper awareness of the ways in which, as Florentino comes to learn, "nobody teaches life anything." There are still delightful and stunning moments contrary to fact, still told with the same unblinking humor -- presences at the foot of the bed, an anonymously delivered doll with a curse on it, the sinister parrot, almost a minor character, whose pursuit ends with the death of Dr. Juvenal Urbino. But the predominant claim on the author's attention and energies comes from what is not so contrary to fact, a human consensus about "reality" in which love and the possibility of love's extinction are the indispensable driving forces, and varieties of magic have become, if not quite peripheral, then at least more thoughtfully deployed in the service of an expanded vision, matured, darker than before but no less clement.

It could be argued that this is the only honest way to write about love, that without the darkness and the finitude there might be romance, erotica, social comedy, soap opera -- all genres, by the way, that are well represented in this novel -- but not the Big L. What that seems to require, along with a certain vantage point, a certain level of understanding, is an author's ability to control his own love for his characters, to withhold from the reader the full extent of his caring, in other words not to lapse into drivel.

In translating Love in the Time of Cholera, Edith Grossman has been attentive to this element of discipline, among many nuances of the author's voice to which she is sensitively, imaginatively attuned. My Spanish isn't perfect, but I can tell that she catches admirably and without apparent labor the swing and translucency of his writing, its slang and its classicism, the lyrical stretches and those end-of-sentence zingers he likes to hit us with. It is a faithful and beautiful piece of work.

 There comes a moment, early in his career at the River Company of the Caribbean when Florentino Ariza, unable to write even a simple commercial letter without some kind of romantic poetry creeping in, is discussing the problem with his uncle Leo XII, who owns the company. It's no use, the young man protests -- "Love is the only thing that interests me."

"The trouble," his uncle replies," is that without river navigation, there is no love." For Florentino, this happens to be literally true: the shape of his life is defined by two momentous river voyages, half a century apart. On the first he made his decision to return and live forever in the city of Fermina Daza, to persevere in his love for as long as it might take. On the second, through a desolate landscape, he journeys into love and against time, with Fermina, at last by his side. There is nothing I have read quite like this astonishing final chapter, symphonic, sure in its dynamics and tempo, moving like a riverboat too, its author and pilot, with a lifetime's experience steering us unerringly among hazards of skepticism and mercy, on this river we all know, without whose navigation there is no love and against whose flow the effort to return is never worth a less honorable name than remembrance -- at the very best it results in works that can even return our worn souls to us, among which most certainly belongs Love in the Time of Cholera, this shining and heartbreaking novel.
 

By Thomas Pynchon*

* Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Jr. (born May 8, 1937) is an American novelist based in New York City and noted for his dense and complex works of fiction. After publishing several short stories in the late 1950s and early 1960s, he began composing the novels for which he is best known: V. (1963), The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Gravity's Rainbow (1973), and Mason & Dixon (1997).

Viragaya the Inimitable Psychological Novel

Viragaya the Inimitable Psychological Novel

-Dr Ruwan M Jayatunge MD

Viragaya novel is a turning point in Sinhala literature. Literary genius Martin Wicramasinghe vibrantly portrays Aravinda s character in Viragaya digging in to the inner psyche. Therefore Viragaya can be considered as one of the first and best psychological novels in Sinhala literature. Aravinda was a virtuous character trapped in biological instincts and cultural pressure. The complexity of Aravinda s character reveals the inner world of a man who was brought up according to the Buddhist village traditions and how he struggles to fulfill his hidden desires leading to a dramatic transformation.

According to the mundane eye Aravinda was a failure. His ambition to become a doctor and apparent haematophobia and aversion to dissect dead bodies prevented him from pursuing his goal. The untimely death of his father and subsequent financial problems forced him to engage in a petty job and to lead an insignificant life. When his girlfriend Sara offered her love and gave her consent to live with him Aravinda faces a moral dilemma. His Indecisiveness jeopardized the relationship and he becomes lonely for the rest of his life.

Aravinda s loneliness makes him to get close to Bathie. His unusual love for the adopted girl Bathie makes him a jealous man. It was a fatherly love which gradually transformed in to a hidden desire without any physical intimacy. He becomes furious when Bathie finds a young lover. The sociobiological perspective agrees that men tend to react more strongly to sexual indiscretion while women tend to find emotional infidelity more distressing. Hence Aravinda s reaction concurs with this idea.

Aravinda was an outlandish character who repressed his sensual desires due to ethics and moral pressure from the society. Psychoanalytic notion of ethics serves philosophical, religious, and moral causes. In Moses and Monotheism Freud showed that ethics originates in "a sense of guilt felt on account of a suppressed hostility to God”. He further states thus.

Analyse any human emotion, no matter how far it may be removed from the sphere of sex, and you are sure to discover somewhere the primal impulse, to which life owes its perpetuation. ... The primitive stages can always be re-established; the primitive mind is, in the fullest meaning of the word, imperishable. ... Mans most disagreeable habits and idiosyncrasies, his deceit, his cowardice, his lack of reverence, are engendered by his incomplete adjustment to a complicated civilisation. It is the result of the conflict between our instincts and our culture.

Freud argued that people have always known that at one time they had a primitive father and that they put him to death. The resulting "nostalgia for the father" reflected an insatiable need to appease a sense of guilt by changing the father's prohibitions into ethical obligations. This idea was represented in Aravinda s character.

Aravinda struggles between morality and biological instincts which leads to a generalized melancholic condition in him. This could be a universal feeling. In the Republic; Plato undertakes the most famous integration of morality and mental health. Mike W Martin Professor of Philosophy at Chapman University argues that moral values are inevitably embedded in human conceptions of mental health. In the end, he shows how both morality and mental health are inextricably intertwined in pursuit of a meaningful life. Nevertheless Aravinda fails to fulfill his heart desire. No one can claim that he was a loser. Hence Aravinda had a meaningful life in the existential point of view.

He was alienated from the society and critical about the social traditions. He was personally free and able to criticize the social values of the world around him. This is more similar to Jean-Paul Sartre s Philosophy which offers an account of existence in general, including both the being-in-itself of objects that simply are and the being-for-itself by which humans engage in independent action. Throughout his life Aravinda wants to find self and the meaning of life through free will.

Atawaka Puththu - Taking the Road less travelled by - [Dileepa Karunarathna]

Atawaka puththu by Liyanage Amarakeerthi is a unique book which discusses a wide span of contemporary topics. Reading this few days ago imbued me with a strange feeling which is a blend of nostalgia, wisdom, compassion and equanimity together with an irresistible desire to write down something about what I just read. Among many topics discussed in the book, taking the road less travelled by becomes a concealed theme which can be related to the whole book as well as life in general. The Robert Frost’s monumental poem “the road not taken” which is about making choices is used in the book to discuss some profound problems, dilemmas and choices people come across in their lives. The poem ideally suits for this since it doesn’t moralize the choices, but emphasizes the uncertainty about the appropriateness of the choice. Damayantha has to face this kind of situations in many occasions throughout novel like handing over the letter to anoma, decision to sabotage the examination using violence and joining the DJV, handling the delicate situation when Dilki falls in love with Ravi. Nanda’s decision to choose either academia or Prof. Ekanayake’s path etc…

Liyanage Amarakeerthi

The first 50 or 60 pages of the book is little different from the rest of the book in the sense it is written in different style. Especially the beginning of the book sounds agitated and the concept of twin is presented in the same style which makes the reader bewildered at first. But again one would say that there is no other way to present it and can also argue that it’s the hectic disoriented nature of the society or of that particular generation which has been symbolized in that temperament. But the writer soon gains a rhythm which is there constantly throughout the rest of the book. And we can also see that the writer is satirical about the folk culture and doesn’t treat it as a sacred thing. This equanimity is quite rare among writers since most of the writers talk about the generations, social evolution and folk culture as a nostalgic reminiscence rather than being equanimious about changes. This uniqueness of style can be seen when the land dispute is presented using Damayantha’s perspective. The eternal conflict between love, and social norms and personal dignity is depicted in love of nanda and anoma. What she asks from Nanda is to do exam again and get a so called ‘good’ job. But the stubborn nature of young Nanda doesn’t change and he get involved in things like bicycle races until Anoma commits suicide. According to Damayantha, getting through examinations, permanent jobs are words dismayed by nanda in those days. Though these social constrains are not the only reason for this tragedy, It can be considered as the prime reason.

The next part of the book starts with a description of Ravi who becomes a main character of the book in consequent pages. Ravi and Damayantha together forms a kind of binary opposition which depicts the ideological differences between rural and urban youth. These differences slightly resemble the description of petite bourgeois and urban proletarian, in Marxism. But we see that the reality of social relationships is more complicated which cannot be reduced to a particular analysis according to a particular philosophy. At the same time (in the conference hall scene in which damayantha and ravi meets for the first time) this also shows the extent to which our so called artists and related subculture is rotten and how they go after ministers and other authorities just for the sake of privileges and favors. After two friends get arrested, the writer takes Nanda back to the play with the issue of finding a person to bail out Damayantha. The story then revolves around Nanda’s life and the writer ridicules the whole university subculture and lecturers who does tuition. The names of these tuition institutes themselves carry subtle irony. Names like oxford, Cambridge and Harvard becomes satirical in this context. The writer also mention about great expectations Nanda had and role models he had like Dr Adikaram, Prof. Sarachchandra and how sloth can destroy those dreams and cause him to end up as a mundane person. This quite resembles ‘walmath wee hasarak nodutim’, a novel by Sarachchandra.

The writer sees both pros and cons of both DJV and government in objective manner. How Nanda’s image and personality dominate Damayantha and affect Damayantha’s attitudes and the ideological hegemony Nanda has towards Damayantha resembles Amarasekara’s short story “piya sulupiya saha putha”. Nanda’s dream about pala putha’s train is a symbolic representation of the plight of Srilanka as well as individuals like Nanda and at the end he sees Anoma which make the dream more natural and personal. How old ideals have been lost in this struggle to survive in Colombo in this capitalistic society which produces goods as well as demand for goods, the change of values, value conflict and the ultimate result of it is nicely depicted in the nostalgic retrospect of the student life of Nanda. Hypocrisy he had as a result of the society in which he was brought up and other aspects of his character and personality is nicely shown here in this part of the story. The Aquinas and Cambridge dilemma Nanda face as an assistant lecturer symbolizes this conflict of values.

The next part discusses the class distinction based on language using Dilki, Damayantha and Ravi. The writer also brings Samudra who is a girl from village, to the story at this time who can be compared and contrasted with Dilki. In subsequent pages, Ravi reveals his plans about Anisha, to Damayantha. Police SI and his sexual jealousy and its complicated nature which make him torture Ravi, is quite new to Damayantha. Later Ravi seriously falls in love with Anisha which cause her to face a dilemma. This again shows us the complicated nature of relationships in present social context. In those days in so called unspoiled villages, naive simple love existed and so were the relationships. But contrary to that, the nature of relationships has changed dramatically as society evolved. We can compare Anoma & Nanda VS Ravi & Anisha to make this point more clear. Ravi’s mere intention was to revenge from the SI until he falls in love with Anisha and Anisha herself is in dilemma because of fear towards SI and love about Ravi. This whole thing is very sophisticated compared to the simple love of Anoma and Nanda.

Samudra’s incident shows how sudden impulse can change people and how Damayantha’s sudden outburst with violence later cause him to get stuck in it. It all happens so quickly and he ends up as DJV activist in couple of days. Maybe this process can be generalized to understand how most of the youth joined that organization in those days. It does not happen after rigorous philosophical in-depth thinking about what’s right or wrong. But it was not a mere impulse which causes Damayantha to take this decision. Samudra’s plight motivated him to make the decision, change his ideology and undergo a transformation process. So it’s an impulse together with an experience associated with social injustice which caused people to take that step. The place where Damayantha talks with Rajiv and Nanditha shows his inner conflict and hidden guilt associated with Anoma’s letter. He recalls all things about that incident and unconsciously believes that things might have been completely different if he gave the letter to Nanda, which might be true. Whenever Rajiv reveals his stance and nanditha shows her disgust towards Nanda, Damayantha recalls phrases and sentences from old conversations associated with Anoma and Nanda. (pg278-280) This part of the book is very cleverly written and reveals Damayantha’s character. The dogmatic nature of most of the rural youth who joined DJV movement, how their naïve political ideology is constrained by slogans and limited exposure to various aspects of the society is also shown in this conversation.

But again the affectionate friendship of Ravi, Dilki and Anisha who visits Damayantha questions the raw simple class concept of DJV. Rajiv’s makes a sarcastic statement about being with Ravi and friends and skipping DJV meeting which reveals Rajiv’s hostility towards Ravi and friends. According to this classification, Engels also might have been branded as bourgeois and being ostracized if he lived there in srilanka in those days. We know how other leftist leaders were assassinated in those days in cold blood. As Amarasekara also has pointed out in his earlier work, inferiority complex is a main reason which motivates petite bourgeois youth to be militant. Damayantha also says to Ravi, “palayan ban yanna, eyala kawda api kawda? ” when Ravi mentions about Dilki (page289) Damayantha’s struggle with his Victorian ideals about sex which make sex mysterious thing, and natural desire to go to Dilki and his inner psyche is nicely shown in that night they spend in the village. Rajiv’s hostility towards Ravi and Dilki, and later surrendering to Army, Damayantha’s attitude about pol sunil and doubts about potential of pol sunil to be a good activist, all together reveals interesting aspects of the common mindset of people in that kind of village subculture. Because of being socially conditioned by the folk society and the above mentioned mindset, Damayantha believes that pol sunil cannot be good political activist. But at the same times empirical observations make him reconsider his opinion. This inner conflict is nicely presented when Damayantha goes to a meeting with pol sunil after Rajiv surrender to army.

Damayantha forgets the name ‘Gotabaya’ when he just escaped from the police jeep with the help of sunil. He calls him sunil aiya instead of gotabaya. This shows how emotions and feelings predominate over names imposed on them by the organization. We can see that DJV ideology has not integrated with the deepest roots of souls of rural youth and its artificial nature which has neglected the material reality of grassroots level. This dogmatic nature of the organization becomes apparent to the reader when they try to assassin the village midwife who is a radical individual, because of voting. Damayantha leaves back to Colombo and gets to know that his studentship has been cancelled because of getting involved the riot and sabotaging the examination. Nanda’s pragmatic attitude about this and how he tries to gain advantage of this in a selfish way is very interesting. Cambridge owner offers Damayantha to teach A/L which is very symbolic in the sense it symbolizes what can happen to an individual like damayantha in such scenario. Cambridge owner becomes a friend of Damayantha because Damayantha attacked a professor with whom he had disputes. Damayantha realizes that something is wrong in his politics when he sees that this kind of people also indirectly gains the advantage of things DJV does. Throughout the story, Prof. Ekanayake’s plays quite significant role which quite resembles characters we have met in books like “Mage naduwa iwarai” and “Aththa bindei paya burulen” and we can see what happens to him in last few pages of the book which again reminds us the impermanence and make us sympathize about his plight.

The last part of the book turnout to be very different and interesting story. Sometimes we feel that this is a product of a collective effort of Gunadasa amarasekara, John Grisham, Boris Pasternak, and G.B.Senanayake because of the style and the content of the book. It discusses the mentality of rural youth and its limitations, becomes an intriguing detective story (when Damayantha has been abducted) , Shows the inner conflict of characters and psychological aspects of characters, and also discusses the hardships individuals undergo when this kind of militant struggle is carried out.

The story of Dilki’s family which is presented next bears a resemblance to Indira’s ostalgic memories about her mom and childhood in “Premaye sathya kathawa” (by Amarasekara). As individual characters also, Indira and Dilki have many similarities. The story smoothly flows since then until Damayantha becomes Suneth and goes to Sarartha and talks to a girl called Randima confidently after going through a sophistication process using library and other resources there and then, the story is propelled towards a dramatic ending. This final part of the book shows how life experiences can groom a person to be a matured, worldly and complete person. Suneth is almost free from naïve immature reactionary Damayantha because of experiences he had and the productive time he spent in Sarartha. Nanda’s mental disorder also gets healed by being in his native village up to which roots of his illness, guilt and controversies extend. Dr Zoysa and Pradeep from Jaffna visits Nanda and they have very interesting discussion about the country as well as university education. Nanda with his wife and daughter finds the life and missing parts of it while being in the village once again. Retired from pursuit of false values which were presented to them by the capitalistic society, they start a new life. Nanda is going to resume his intellectual life which was paused when he started tuition and Nayani who was a conservative wife becomes a social activist who eventually becomes the leader of a movement which challenges the existing government. She is particularly motivated by the guilt of not answering to Damayantha’s call which again shows us how a particular incident or experience can affect one’s life and can result in a dramatic change.

The remaining part of the book sums up to a very good conclusion. The writer artistically points out the impermanence as a fundamental reality by showing the new era after the armed uprising of DJV and the oppression carried out by government in response. Ravi is emerged in his own work and Dilki too is busy and new Suneth realizes impermanence, emptiness and loneliness while being at Sarartha. Ravi is not single anymore, but a family and Suneth is experiencing a profound loneliness as if he lost his twin again. In these days, Suneth finds a book from Sarartha library which discuses this concept of twin or soul mate in a profound philosophical problem. But Anisha’s gets assassinated in cold blood by her ex boyfriend who was the police SI which again makes the whole outset topsy-turvy. This part of the book is simply awesome. Dilki falls in love with Ravi while they try to empathize with Ravi who is miserable after Anisha’s departure. In fact we can see that Dilki had vestiges of her feelings she had on the first day she met Ravi in conference hall (the day on which Ravi and Damayantha was arrested) and at the same time we cannot see any lapse of her love or whatever feelings she had towards Damayantha. The whole story therefore points out the intricate, profound, subtle, complicated nature of the phenomena called love. Love is indefinable for sure and is hard to distinguish with certainty by comparing the consistence with a certain predefined criteria. And the way it operates cannot be quantified and measured, cannot be theorized and is always mind boggling like quantum physics. Meanwhile the pursuits of charactors for better society also continue. Ravi reveals the astute plans minister had regarding the teledrama he acts which again reminds us that most of the things in this society which looks nice and awesome overtly, is not really independent from capital and horrendous plans and agendas of some invisible personals which make us recall the metaphor, Kafka’s world which is extensively used in this book. Meanwhile Nanda and Nayani together with Vajira reveal the rotten character of Prof. Ekanayake while taking part in many other social activities in a positive way.

As a whole the book is a very unique piece of work which cleverly discusses a variety of themes simultaneously and consistently which is quite similar to life itself. It make anybody who has a personal history, to go back to his nostalgic memories and recall about friends, soul mates, congenial companions, teachers and other people who are there in his/her life, and at its culmination, it makes the reader to perceive what life is, as a whole at once. This novel (especially the end) contains life, its profound philosophical depth as well as beauty and delight, which poets like Frost and Sekara saw.

Dileepa Karunarathna
karu_dr@ieee.org
30 August 2009

Note:
I almost could not observe weaknesses of the book which might be either because I was too much attached to the book and story which can affect the ability to think objectively and because I write this just couple of days after finished reading, or because the book is simply perfect.