It was one of my New Year reading resolutions to find more new voices.  Stories grown in different cultures and fresh perspectives, young writers, experimental sounds. The Story of a Brief Marriage is the debut novel of a young writer from Sri Lanka, Anuk Arudpragasam, and is set during the civil war that ravaged that country for more than 20 years and claimed tens of thousands of lives.

The story centers on a temporary camp for those displaced by the civil war.  It’s a place that offers neither refuge, security, nor peace, in fact nothing more than flimsy shelter from the near-constant bombardment.  Here lives Dinesh, completely alone until a fellow refugee proposes that he marry his daughter, Ganga.  It’s the ultimate marriage of convenience, completed in the shadow of imminent death and in the hope that the bride will be spared if the occupying forces take control of the camp.  The setting is the kind of living hell that war creates every day for millions of people around the world.

The writing here is tightly packed, slow-paced, occasionally poetic.  There are many flashes of beauty.  It’s unmistakably the work of a young novelist, with flourishes and indulgences that a writer more mature or with a better editor would have expunged.  These are minor and certainly did nothing to diminish the impact of a very moving story, one that stayed with me long after I finished it.  It’s a novel that seems to offer a vision that’s both bleak and uplifting at the same time.  A novel that speaks to us of the impossibility of understanding another person’s deepest feelings (in this case grief and loneliness), but asserts the essential importance of art that tries to do so.