A Review of Akil Kumarasamy’s “Half Gods”
A Book Without Context
The last time I heard anything about Sri Lanka, the tiny teardrop-shaped country south of India, was in 2009. I was living in Toronto at the time, and was in a bar. It was a few days after Mother’s Day of that year, and on that Mother’s Day members of the Sri Lankan community in the city had blocked off the Gardiner Expressway in protest over something I simply cannot recall, but it was as serious as civil war. A few guys in the bar were talking about the protest, and not kindly. “They closed the road on Mother’s Day, stranding motorists with their aging loved ones for hours,” said one guy. “Whatever they’re protesting about, they’ve completely lost my sympathies.” On one hand, it was easy to agree with the guy — yes, the protest and road blockade caused problems on a busy travel day of the year, and the age of the guys in the bar suggested they had elderly mothers, so time spent in a car stuck going nowhere might have been particularly uncomfortable to them. Maybe picking another day to protest would have been a smart idea. But, then, I checked my privilege as a white guy, and realized that that thought was a bit racist. I knew that the protest had something to do with a massacre of some sort, so what is the inconvenience of blocking traffic when people are dying in a faraway land?
However, I haven’t thought about that area of the world since then, until now. The reason is Akil Kumarasamy’s debut collection of interlocked short stories, Half Gods, arrived on my doorstep unannounced from the publisher, and I decided to give it a shot. The book is essentially about the fallout of the Sri Lankan civil war, written by an American writer, and how a community escaped persecution to arrive in the States. I’m going to start with the good stuff first. The book is lyrical. You’ll get lost in the sentences. This is probably the closest anyone has ever gotten to making poetry prose, and the collection practically sings. Kumarasamy is a gifted stylist, and you’ll find yourself looping around the labyrinth of words. Honestly, I could have read this book all day for weeks and just have simply enjoyed the language of it. I don’t know anything about the author’s circumstance, and whether or not English is a first language, but, if not, then Kumarasamy shares something with Joseph Conrad: those not original native to the English language can find ways to make it shine in unexpected ways.
Still, that doesn’t mean the collection is not without problems. This is a book without context, meaning that, to fully understand it, you’ll need to know something about the history of Sri Lanka and its bloody wars because there isn’t anything akin to a road map in this book. My favourite story in the collection, “The Office of Missing Persons,” is good simply because it doesn’t need any context: it’s a story of losing a loved one to a needless war that discriminates against those of a certain ethnicity in fascist-like ways. Anyone can understand the concept. Otherwise, most of these stories require the reader to know something of the culture and history of the country to understand what motivates the characters. If you’re not Sri Lankan and don’t know much about that corner of the world, you might want to do a bit of background reading before cracking open this book.
The other problem is that the publisher bills this as a retelling of “the fractured origins and destinies of two brothers named after demigods from the ancient epic the Mahabharata.” I wouldn’t have known that just from reading the book cold. This is a family saga, but because Kumarasamy usually tells her stories from the first person singular, the main character is usually not named. That creates a confusing web as you jump from story to story looking for anything that would link the material together. You have to remember a minor character from an earlier story who is mentioned in a paragraph or two, who suddenly shows up as a main character in another story told in a different time frame. Yes, Half Gods is not told chronologically, so you really have to be paying attention as you read it. Essentially, this might be a book that you’ll have to read twice to fully grasp. Not that that’s a huge problem, because it is a concise 205 pages and it is written so beautifully. Still, expect to put some work and effort into reading these tales.
I have to say, though, that I’m very impressed with Half Gods, even if it is above my pay grade. Kumarasamy was born in 1988, which means she turns 30 this year. That’s a baby in the publishing world’s eyes. For someone so young to have written something so challenging and provocative is a marvel to behold. Colour me impressed. I’m sure we’ll be hearing more about the author in future years — I wonder what her debut novel will be like, assuming you don’t consider Half Gods to be a novel — and this book marks the arrival of a formidable talent. Perhaps if she could weave a few more signposts into her stories, without losing the essence of the tale, that might be helpful to expand her reach into an audience that deserves to hear her report on the Sri Lankan diaspora. Sri Lanka is a place that we Westerners don’t tend to hear much about, unless there’s a particularly brutal carnage that merits some air time on the news, only to be forgotten about until the next crisis comes along, so it’s great to hear from a voice that can so deftly chart the bonds of family even as their homeland is breaking apart. Half Gods is a great book in the making. You just might have to take a few university classes to unpack it is all.
Akil Kumarasamy’s Half Gods was published by Farrar, Straus and Groux on June 5, 2018.
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