![]() ![]() ![]() In Reef Gunesekera seduces you with a charming depiction of a lost era, but underlying it all is the knowledge of the killing that came later. ![]() Like many others, I was struck by the incongruity of such horror in a country so deceptively gentle, one that looked so much like the Garden of Eden. This, by Sri Lankan standards, was nothing. I lived in Colombo from 1992 to 1994, teaching English, and my first home was on Havelock Road where, only the year before, a bomb had exploded, throwing severed heads and body parts into the air. Another is the play of light and shadow in Romesh Gunesekera’s prose. I think the way that The Tempest flits in and out of the novel is one of the things that keeps me rereading it. A play of light and shadow something flitting in and out of a story I knew by heart.Įach time I read Reef – the story of a boy, Triton, growing up as a servant and cook in Sri Lanka in the late 1960s – I find something new. And even after I had read all of them, each time I looked I would find something new. There must have been a thousand books in the sitting-room by the end, each a doorway leading somewhere I had never been before. ![]()
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