Voyaging beyond a Sri Lankan marriage

V V Ganeshananthan.
Photograph: Preston Merchant

FICTION: V V GANESHANANTHAN'S first novel, Love Marriage, travels between continents, as Yalini, the central protagonist, comes to grips with her parents' Sri Lankan past and her own American present.

Such a theme of a disconnected diaspora may be the tried and tested blueprint for recent Asian novels written in English, but Ganeshananthan manages to rescue the genre with her sparse and pointed language. Yalini recognises the cultural divide that her parents had to cross when they migrated to the US, but in them she finds traces of Sri Lankan heritage very much alive.

She is a collector of lives and events that populate her wider family: "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."

Beyond this, the obligatory intermeshing of family and national history in so-called new literatures in English, is a trope that reappears in Love Marriage. 1983 is a dark year in Sri Lankan history; it saw the slaying of thousands of Tamils by the local Sinhalese, which finally resulted in the growth of the militant Tamil Tigers. This is the historical screen on which Yalini charts her own being; in many ways her presence in the world is the outcome of events that preceded her birth.

Such a sense of time-lag is a dominating motif, and thus her father Murali is described as "Murali not yet my father" for much of the novel. To what extent these are innovative gestures is questionable. Ever since Salman Rushdie, the magic realism associated with quirky temporal destabilisation seems less magical and more like a required phenomenon.

Readers of Vikram Seth will also recognise the essential genealogical chart at the start of the book. These observations aside, the book is at times witty and always beautifully written: "My mother is someone who could see a fire in front of her and say it was not there. My mother is someone who, by the force of her will, could put a fire out."

Sri Lankan writing in English has not gained the level of popularity in the West that other new literatures in English have. There is no reason why this should be so. (The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje is an exception). Romesh Gunesekera's Monkfish Moon, short stories by Solomon Dias Bandaranaike, and countless other works by Sri Lankan writers, offer important and interesting narratives about this small country situated off the southern tip of India.

Ganeshananthan's novel will provide insights into the lives of the oppressed Tamils in the country, as seen from the historical and geographical distance in which Yalini finds herself. Ganeshananthan is right to clarify her protagonist's position as an outsider, looking in, as it were, into the cultural and political milieu of Sri Lanka.

The common charge made by the reading public in Asian countries against their migrant authors is that their novels speak to an audience that is always outside the home country. Love Marriage, to a certain degree, challenges such stereotyping of home culture by the diasporic author. Tea, for example, does not signal an obsessed fascination with Sri Lankan beverage preferences but rather deftly enters the narrative as: "In any country, in any time, tea brings order and calm to a place of chaos." The heady smell of mangoes and pickles, and other gastronomic testimonials that litter many pages of new Indian literature, is in such a sentence quickly put to the test.

But what would a book written with the Indian sub-continent in mind mean if it did not figure marriage? Love Marriage may well express the politics of a matrimonial alliance, but not without its share of irony, evident from the start. It is a book that is competently written and well worth your time.

Malcolm Sen is a lecturer in the School of English, Drama and Film at University College Dublin

Love Marriage
By VV Ganeshananthan Weidenfeld
Nicolson, 302pp. £12.99

© 2008 The Irish Times

This article appears in the print edition of the Irish Times