Love Marriage

Love Marriage by V.V. Ganeshananthan (fiction, LibraryThing Early Reviewers, 302 pages)

“In this globe-scattered Sri Lankan family, we speak of only two kinds of marriage. The first is the Arranged Marriage. The second is the Love Marriage. In reality, there is a whole spectrum in between, but most of us spend years running away from the first and toward the second.

Among the categories that bleed outside these two carefully delineated boundaries: the Self-Arranged Marriage, the Outside Marriage, the Cousin Marriage, the Village Marriage, the Marriage Abroad. There is the Marriage Without Consent. There is the Marriage Under Pressure. There is even Marrying the Enemy, who, it turns out, is not an Enemy at all.

You cannot go unfettered into a family’s history if you are one of them. The nature of certain unions will be hidden from you, rephrased to you, the subject dropped, the music changed. There is Proper Marriage; there is Improper Marriage. This Tamil family speaks of the latter in whispers.” (Love Marriage, page 3)

V.V. Ganeshananthan’s first novel, Love Marriage, paints an elliptical portrait of a Sri Lankan family through their marriages and family history. Yalini, the American-born daughter of Sri Lankan immigrants, is gathering the oral history of her family as she nurses her dying uncle Kumaran. Kumaran, a Tamil Tiger who married and fathered a child while part of the militant group, has fought his whole life for the identity of his people, an identity that Yalini only understands at a hazy remove.

Unfortunately, that hazy remove is passed along to the reader. In this first-person narrative, it always feels like the real story is tantalizingly out of reach. Yalini sketches her story through a series of little vignettes, introducing us to characters and then abandoning them, and rarely getting to the heart of any one story.

Yalini’s voice, while naive at first, grows in strength as the novel progresses. And yet, she remains the observer. The marriage structure, as outlined above in the quote, really restricted the narrative–the reader gets so much less of Sri Lanka and the current conflict, because it is all seen through the filter of the marriages. And, unfortunately, Kumaran’s marriage, which I was most interested in learning about, is never discussed. The reader learns nothing about his wife or their life together.

Is Ganeshananthan a writer worth watching? Absolutely. But this work is immature, and I think her next book will be so much better. I hope that she embraces her subject matter and her story, and learns to impart it with more immediacy, because I can see her talent yearning to break through.