Brotherless Night

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Here there is no righteous way to fight a pure fight for justice. Sashi loses her brothers and friends to the Tamil Tigers, the revolutionary group rising up in response to the oppression forced upon them by the Sinhalese majority. As a medical student she is recruited to help but discovers the leaders stooping to tactics no better than the enemies they are fighting. And she believes very strongly that people, regardless of their political beliefs, deserve to have health care,” said Ganeshananthan. “But she also finds herself in situations that politically and morally she can't abide.” Hundreds of thousands of civilians were caught between the armies while the United Nations and the world watched without sending aid. Ganeshananthan’s first novel, Love Marriage (2008), was longlisted for the Orange Prize. Smart money says that before this year’s awards season is over, Brotherless Nightwill receive more than a few nominations as well. SM: How does the diaspora of the Sri Lankan Tamil community worldwide–there are a lot of them all over Europe and America–how do they carry on the memory of what has been lost? How do they deal with this not being able to return? My accountant is a Jaffna Tamil and he keeps describing a lost Eden…

I find this is a difficult book to summarize and even more difficult to rate. I will also mention that I was listening to this book first while traveling through Laos, a country obliterated in a war they were not even party to, and where people are still regularly maimed and killed by unexploded clusterbombs 50 years after the end of the secret war and later in Vietnam, and I imagine that the setting impacted my read. I was fortunate that there are a lot of books about this time period, many of which are specifically in university libraries. And I’ve taught in universities off and on. I’ve taught college and university since basically the fall of 2008. I’ve had access to a lot of different libraries in different places, so I made use of that. Even before that, as a graduate student, I remember discovering the University of Iowa had an enormous number of books about Sri Lankan history, which was, for some reason, a surprise to me. And that was the moment I began to understand the capacity of university libraries, which I’m so grateful for. In this novel, I was transported deep into the experiences of civilians who are inspired to action, either to defend their people or to serve all people. They witness first hand terrorism and suffering, all the horror of war. Friends turn on friends, student against teacher, siblings are divided, families displaced. Brotherless Night succeeds in telling all its stories—the historical and the personal, the factual and the ethical—as one, and that narrative has echoes. . . . This book, a careful, vivid exploration of what’s lost within a community when life and thought collapse toward binary conflict, rang softly for me as a novel for our own country in this odd time.” —The New Yorker She is a past vice president of the South Asian Journalists Association and now serves on the board of the Asian American Writers' Workshop, as well as on the graduate board of The Harvard Crimson.The outsider-geeks of the Dean campaign join forces with Al Gore, the most mainstream geek in American politics." The American Prospect. December 11, 2003. VG: My parents are Ceylon Tamils, which means that my mother’s uørand my father’s uørare both in Jaffna. My parents came to the United States in the 1970s, and there was quite a wave of immigration then. That’s very anecdotal, but my father, and my father’s classmates from medical school, many of them emigrated around that time. VG: Yes. Often I don’t hear from them. I remember I mailed a letter to a cousin whose birthday it was one month, and she got the letter five months later after her birthday. And that’s a pretty mild example of what I mean. Ganeshananthan is a superb writer...I wept at many points in this novel and I also wept when it was over Sunday Times She found a solution in the English department at the University of Minnesota, where she teaches. She engaged the help of two students as scribes. She says basically she read the entire book aloud to them, and they took down her revisions.

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 toward the second. [p. 3] Sixteen-year-old Sashi wants to become a doctor. But over the next decade, as a vicious civil war tears through her hometown of Jaffna, her dream takes her on a different path as she sees those around her, including her four beloved brothers and their friend, get swept up in violent political ideologies and their consequences. Desperate to act, she must ask herself: is it possible for anyone to move through life without doing harm? New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice • A courageous young Sri Lankan woman tries to protect her dream of becoming a doctor in this “heartbreaking exploration of a family fractured by civil war” (Brit Bennett, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Vanishing Half). In “Brotherless Night,” Sashi, the medicine-obsessed high schooler, becomes Sashi, the medical student. But her commitment to the ancient ideal of “first do no harm” is soon sorely tested. A young man for whom she has unrequited feelings asks her to help in a field hospital set up by the Tamil Tiger rebel group. She has misgivings about the Tigers, but says yes. SP: You mentioned that you want to reach Tamil readers specifically, and I would love to hear more about that. What do you hope that they will take away from this?One of the novel’s big themes is the idea of multiple allegiances. Two of Sashi’s brothers end up joining the Tamil Tigers. As a medical student, she herself agrees to work at a field hospital to treat Tiger cadres. But she does not agree with their authoritarianism, nor their blatant targeting of other rebel groups as well as civilians they consider “traitors” (and as the novel shows us, this happens with increasingly smaller excuses/justifications provided).

SM: And this is your first book, and obviously it’s a deeply personal book because the path that your own family took is apparent in it. Novelists voyeur into invented worlds so it should not be read as biography or memoir– One of the things people always talk about with regard to Sri Lanka is which people were there first. And I think that’s a little bit besides the point, because both sets of people, the Tamils and the Sinhalese (who are not even the only two peoples involved in the conflict) really have been there for thousands of years. And then you have other populations: the Indian Tamils or the tea estate Tamils, and then also the Muslim population, which is Tamil-speaking, and you have Burghers, with their mixed European ancestry–so you really have a whole bunch of different populations. And I think if you’re going to talk about who was there longest and that being the reason that you have a claim, then all over the world you’ve got big problems with the feasibility of restoring everyone to where they were first. It’s not really a way to lay claim to land, necessarily. From the author of Love Marriage, the deeply researched novel Brotherless Night took nearly two decades to complete as V.V. Ganeshananthan meticulously crafted characters and events after real activists who left records of the lives normal people lived amidst Sri Lanka’s civil war. Both sides commit atrocities, and Sashi is enraged by her older brothers’ defense of brutality as necessary for their cause. “Brotherless Night” shows a family tested by political beliefs and the realities of war. It's a book about love in all its facets. It's about family, education and medicine and about the power of writing. But most of all, Ganeshananthan says, it's about the vital roles women quietly play in society. Riveting, heartbreaking and extraordinary . . . Brotherless Night is a masterpiece.” — Minneapolis Star Tribune

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At its best and simplest, Ganeshananthan can be profoundly moving. She captures the pain of exile poignantly.”— The San Francisco Chronicle I rate this historical fiction book a solid 4 stars. It is set during the Sri Lankan civil war, between the Sinhalese majority and the Tamil minority. The war lasts more than 25 years. The book centers on one Tamil family and how the vicious war affects them. Both sides kill and torture civilians. The narrator is 16 year old Sashi in 1981. She wants to be a doctor, a very difficult goal in a male dominated society. She could talk about one other reason which may have slowed the novel, but also may have added to its power.

A beautiful, brilliant book - it gives an accounting of the unimaginable losses suffered by a family and by a country, but it is as tender and fierce as it is mournful. It is unafraid to look directly at the worst of the violence and erasure we have perpetrated or allowed to happen, but is insistent that we can still choose to be better Danielle Evans, author of The Office of Historical Corrections So it’s been going on for about twenty-five years by most people’s count. But it’s important to realize that like any war, it’s the result of things that happened for decades before. The Sri Lankan government started discriminating against Tamils very shortly after the country gained independence from the British in the late 1940s. This has been well documented. The riots of 1958, for example. The war is really a culmination of previous events. It doesn’t justify the Tigers’ violence, but it does provide appropriate context. In 1981 Jaffna, sixteen-year-old Sashikala “Sashi” Kulenthiren dreams of becoming a doctor just like her eldest brother Niranjan and her late grandfather who was a renowned physician in Colombo. But as the civil war in Sri Lanka intensifies and violence ensues between the warring factions- the Sinhalese government and the Tamil militants who are fighting for an independent state free of persecution of the Tamils, life as she has known it shall be changed forever. When one of her brothers loses his life in an act of anti-Tamil violence and two of her brothers and a family friend join the “movement” Sashi finds herself making choices and being drawn into a life she had never imagined for herself- a medical student also working as a medic for those serving in the movement. As she bears witness to the politics, the violence, and the activism of the 1980s she eventually embarks on exposing the true plight of civilians caught in the crossfire between the warring factions of the Sinhalese government, Tamil militants and the Indian peacekeeping forces through the written word with the help of one of her professors taking risks that could endanger her life and those of her associates. A blazingly brilliant novel... With immense compassion and deep moral complexity, V. V. Ganeshananthan brings us an achingly moving portrait of a world full of turmoil, but one in which human connections and shared stories can teach us how—and as importantly, why—to survive.” —Celeste Ng, New York Times bestselling author of Little Fires Everywhere With immense compassion and deep moral complexity, V. V. Ganeshananthan brings us an achingly moving portrait of individual and societal grief. " I want you to understand," the narrator of BROTHERLESS NIGHT insists, and by the end of this blazingly brilliant novel, we do: that in a world full of turmoil, human connections and shared stories can teach us how - and as importantly, why - to survive" CELESTE NG, bestselling author of LITTLE FIRES EVERYWHERE

Riveting, heartbreaking and extraordinary for both its empathetic gaze and its clear-eyed depiction of the brutality of war, Brotherless Night is a masterpiece Star Tribune With immense compassion and deep moral complexity, V. V. Ganeshananthan brings us an achingly moving portrait of individual and societal grief CELESTE NG, bestselling author of LITTLE FIRES EVERYWHERE