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A Little Dust on the Eyes
A Little Dust on the Eyes
A Little Dust on the Eyes
Ebook287 pages4 hours

A Little Dust on the Eyes

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

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It is the late 1980s in southern Sri Lanka and Bradley Sirisena’s father is abducted and tortured during the violent struggle for power between the state and local insurgents. Savi, a Sri Lankan research student long settled in the UK, has lost her way in both her thesis and her life, when she receives a wedding invitation from the uncle she would rather ignore. Meanwhile in a coastal fort in Sri Lanka, her cousin Renu continues to try to uncover the secret of Bradley’s father’s disappearance as she works with the wives and widows of the disappeared. Reunited on Savi’s return to Sri Lanka, the cousins are compelled to confront truths that put them into direct conflict in their understanding of both the past and themselves. As the story draws to its inevitable end, a tsunami strikes and carries them all into a future that promises to be even more disturbing than the past. The novel is a haunting evocation of intersecting lives and parallel times that draws upon real historical events. Linking the personal with the political, it carries readers into the shifting landscape of memory where competing versions of the truth coexist. In this richly textured book, myth and magic merge, as the bustle of a seaside city in England gives way to the unreal calm of coastal communities in southern Sri Lanka where thousands disappeared without trace.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateNov 1, 2014
ISBN9781845233020
A Little Dust on the Eyes

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Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
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  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I have no idea why it's called what it is, and, just to get this out of the way too, it has one other irritating detail which is that Savi, the central character, refers to "Brighthelm" all the time. If she's meant to be pretentious, then why? Apart from that, it's excellent, brave and beautiful. And when you've finished it, you want to nip back to the beginning and re-read the italicised opening.I'd found it quite annoying to begin with, Savi particularly, but it suddenly improved when her English husband puts her right about what she's seeing in Sri Lanka - more sinister, if she'd only look. From about halfway through - a chapter called "The Leper King", it takes flight. Savi's cousin Renu, seeking truth, explores the issue of story-telling, Savi's father explains Antigone with terrific succinctness from a lawyer's, and loving father's, perspective and we get a bird's eye view of Bradley's extraordinary heartbreaking story wrapped up in the background of the disappearances during the brutal civil war.The cocky and the innocent are swept away together in that leveller that was the tsunami, and Bradley's story is finished seven years later. Story-telling is silenced though, and so for me it was deeply resonant of 1983 when right from the start of the war, we couldn't find out what was happening until we got back to England. The rehab centre, where work is stymied too because of what can and can't be said, resonates bitterly, with the awful euphemisms and, powerfully, the morphing of language of innocence into meanings of violence, torture and abduction.Jus edit the "Brighthelm" nonsense - so simply done - and I'd be able to recommend it to people wholeheartedly.

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A Little Dust on the Eyes - Minoli Salgado

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