This assumption sets up the expectation that solutions will come in the same form, in sentences composed in the same formal but conventional language. A lot of academic philosophers, I’ve found, eventually cease to be moved by the questions they first asked.Ī Anuk Arudpragasam - Most philosophers who come out of the analytic tradition see philosophy as consisting of various sets of problems, problems that they believe can be stated in a formal but relatively conventional language. These feelings of presence and wonder are forgotten when people pursue philosophy professionally, when they begin reducing these experiences into philosophical problems that they are then supposed to solve using logical ingenuity. These are often moments of attentiveness, of presence, but they’re also filled with a kind of wonder or mystery, part of which has to do with our inability to put these experiences into words, to articulate the ways in which they arrest us. This is very different from how we ask philosophical questions when we’re young, when something about a situation we inhabit moves us to seek out its boundaries, its invisible walls, with a kind of urgency or immediacy. It helped me understand that what I wanted could be done better in the novel, or at least in a certain kind of novel, than in conventional philosophy.Ī Anuk Arudpragasam - I trained in what is called the analytic tradition, which tends to see philosophy as continuous with the sciences and to approach philosophical problems removed from the social, historical, psychological and bodily contexts in which they arise.
Tamil romantic novels 2016 full#
The novel is full of long, essayistic digressions on philosophical subjects, but because they’re located in a literary and narrative context, these reflections are emotionally charged in a way philosophy rarely is. There was one novel in particular that changed my trajectory, Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities (1930–43). It was only when I went to university that I began to appreciate that literature could also teach me something about life, and that’s when I began to read fiction in earnest.
I started reading philosophy around the age of 15, partly because it gave me some distance from the toxic environment of my school, partly because like a lot of young Tamils in Colombo during the war, I was seldom let out of the house alone for fear of being stopped or detained, which meant I spent a lot of time at home. My encounters with books during adolescence were mostly accidental, and it was philosophy, not fiction, that was my first real reading obsession. I didn’t grow up in a household of books or readers, and though my mother especially encouraged me to read as a child, I didn’t have a sense of literature as something around which you could develop tastes, much less a life. As Arudpragasam’s thoughts and ideas slowly unwind, his companions and readers join a new temporality and become more aware of the significance of the everyday.Ī Anuk Arudpragasam - I had a clear vision of wanting to write from the age of about 19 or 20, when I first began to see writing as something a person could do. On the page and in person he is a magnetic interlocutor, his presence marked by tenderness. The Story of a Brief Marriage was translated into seven languages, won the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature and was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. Absorbed in reflections on both his own life and the island’s recent history, Krishan meditates on absence and longing at a remove, wondering what emerges if we are ‘lifted up from the circular daydream of everyday life’.Ī Sri Lankan Tamil, Arudpragasam splits his time between India and Sri Lanka. The book’s protagonist, Krishan, travels north from Colombo to attend the funeral of his grandmother’s caregiver, Rani. While in his first novel Arudpragasam’s investigations into time occur against the awareness of its brevity, his new novel A Passage North (2021) confronts time through duration and distance. I was struck by the ordinariness of human intimacy in The Story of a Brief Marriage – people touch, wash, sleep, eat and speak, while all around them, a war marks these everyday moments as fragile and precious. The novel is possessed by the notion that some of the most fleeting moments in our lives occupy a space that doesn’t match their original duration. In the book, time appears liquid and slippery. Loss, habit and desire run through what he reads and writes.Īrudpragasam’s debut novel The Story of a Brief Marriage (2016) is set over the course of a single day and night during the Sri Lankan Civil War. In conversation, Arudpragasam opened up a new horizon on the philosophical. We spoke about modernist novels, the Tamil imaginary and solitude. The apartment was heavy with music, but our exchange had its own infectious pulse. I first met Anuk Arudpragasam at a party in New York.
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