{"id":21282,"date":"2013-05-14T00:39:04","date_gmt":"2013-05-14T04:39:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/?p=21282"},"modified":"2013-05-14T06:14:53","modified_gmt":"2013-05-14T10:14:53","slug":"sri-lanka-born-canadian-author-shyam-selvadurai-returns-to-literary-scene-with-epic-novelthe-hungry-ghosts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/?p=21282","title":{"rendered":"Sri Lanka Born Canadian Author Shyam Selvadurai Returns to Literary Scene with Epic Novel “The Hungry Ghosts”"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Shyam<\/a>

Shyam Selvadurai<\/p><\/div>\n

By Ian McGillis<\/strong><\/p>\n

It hasn\u2019t been a century since Shyam Selvadurai was a star presence on the Canadian literary stage, but it was in a previous century that most of us last saw him \u2014 in 1998, to be precise, when his second novel Cinnamon Gardens solidified the profile established by his 1994 debut Funny Boy, a book that won what is now called the Amazon.ca First Novel Award and quickly became a foundation text both as gay literature and South Asian Canadian fiction.<\/p>\n

\"GH051413\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Now he returns with The Hungry Ghosts (Doubleday Canada, 371 pages, $29.95), an epic novel that incorporates elements of the earlier two in its story of the half-Tamil, half-Sinhalese Shivan Rassiah, a young gay man torn between the difficult adjustment to Canadian life and the unresolved dramas he and his family left behind when they fled the civil war in Sri Lanka. It also adds a new maturity of tone, scope, language and character.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The question can\u2019t be avoided, so it may as well be put in blunt terms: what took Selvadurai so long?<\/p>\n

\u201cOn some level, you don\u2019t really know,\u201d the still-youthful 47-year-old says, having clearly thought about it a fair deal. \u201cIn every artist\u2019s life there are these periods of what you can call dry spells, but often when you look at others\u2019 careers you see that those dry spells were actually a period of gestation. That\u2019s what I\u2019m hoping this will turn out to be. We\u2019ll have to wait and see.\u201d<\/p>\n

Selvadurai returns to a very different landscape than the one he left. Veteran writers he cites as kindred spirits \u2014 Jhumpa Lahiri, Zadie Smith \u2014 had yet to debut when Cinnamon Gardens came out; there was no such thing as Facebook or Twitter. \u201cEverything moves much faster now,\u201d the writer observes. But there\u2019s an upside, too. <\/p>\n

In contrast to the \u201990s, when his company as a South Asian Canadian fiction writer consisted of Rohinton Mistry and precious few others, Selvadurai finds less need to explain basic questions of identity and motivation now.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople now are much more sophisticated in a way,\u201d he says. \u201cAnother thing is that it\u2019s our generation (he nods to his slightly older interviewer) who are doing the interviewing now. So there\u2019s a shared language, in a sense. We understand on a basic level \u2014 we accept and we acknowledge \u2014 that we don\u2019t understand everything. Do you know what I mean? The multiplicity of realities is something that we accept. We don\u2019t try to squeeze everything into a universal norm.\u201d<\/p>\n

Another element in The Hungry Ghosts\u2019 difficult birth, says its author, was the need to find a way, and a language, to utilize a lot of the reading he\u2019d been doing. \u201cI was fascinated by the way the early Buddhist writers found a way to incorporate philosophy into narrative,\u201d he says, \u201cand I wanted to be able to do that in a modern context.\u201d<\/p>\n

Central to that philosophy is the idea of karma. The novel\u2019s very title refers to the spirits of people who desired too much during their previous lives and must rely on living relatives to free them.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe word karma is interpreted in different ways by different people,\u201d says Selvadurai. \u201cShivan\u2019s grandmother\u2019s interpretation is a very punitive one: if you are suffering right now, you deserve it because it\u2019s due to something bad you did in your previous life. That\u2019s almost a non-Buddhist take, because it\u2019s not about compassion. But there\u2019s a version that is comforting, which says that if you\u2019re going through a bad experience right now and you don\u2019t know what you\u2019ve done to deserve it, the good thing is that it\u2019s like a debt. Once you\u2019ve paid that debt of karma, it falls off you and you\u2019re free of it. And within that is the idea of free will. You can perform actions to create a better karma for your next life.\u201d<\/p>\n

While not prepared to call himself a Buddhist \u2014 \u201cBuddhism is a religion, and especially in a Sri Lankan context it carries all the problems that religion has for me\u201d \u2014 Selvadurai does find elements of the faith useful. \u201cI do believe that everything you say and do and think and feel produces a result, and that you are then stuck with that result and have to deal with it. There\u2019s no easy escape. I find that, for me, is a very sensible way to think about how I live my life.\u201d<\/p>\n

Plenty will be tempted to read Shivan as a fictionalized version of his creator, an eventuality Selvadurai understands. \u201cLike Shivan, I did come to that particular Toronto suburb and felt it in the same way, the alienation of it. And like him, I did come out in the early \u201980s as a non-white in a white gay community. But I would say that on the whole it\u2019s autobiography of time and place and feeling, rather than of character and plot.\u201d<\/p>\n

Speaking of place, The Hungry Ghosts is unsparing of Toronto and the alienation its atomizing urban sprawl can have on new arrivals. If the Queen City doesn\u2019t do very well in the novel, says Selvadurai, \u201cthat\u2019s because, for Shivan and his family, it can\u2019t do well. On a simple level, migration is traumatic, and even more so when you add things like isolation, lack of access to employment. I didn\u2019t want the book to in any way avoid that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Some immigrants cope by refusing to look back; Shivan, for his part, is the opposite.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf the place you are coming from is traumatic, you are less able to give it up,\u201d Selvadurai says. \u201cYour relationship is fraught; you\u2019re less able to put it aside than if your journey has been something like from France to Quebec. In a case like that, return is easy and possible, and by return I don\u2019t just mean getting on a plane. I mean safety, comfort, basic stuff. People like Shivan are no longer safe at home.\u201d<\/p>\n

Shivan is not the most conventionally likable of narrators; one reviewer has described him as \u201cirritating,\u201d and while that\u2019s unfairly dismissive, there\u2019s no denying that he is a prickly figure, prone to petulant outbursts and emotionally manipulative behaviour. If not all readers find him easily sympathetic company over 370 pages, that\u2019s a chance Selvadurai was more than willing to take.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t want to know about goody-goody characters with fake-naive voices,\u201d he says. \u201cThat feels very catering. In a lot of contemporary fiction I find a kind of cuteness to the narrators and main characters that sets my teeth on edge. I like to read about very complex and dark people, because there\u2019s something cathartic in the true Greek sense of it, of working through the darkness and into light. The epiphany at the end, if there is one, has to be deeply earned.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the gap between novels (there was a children\u2019s book, Swimming in the Monsoon Sea, published in 2006), Selvadurai found himself spending more and more time in the country of his birth, working as the curator of a literary festival, finding himself rooted in everyday Sri Lankan life \u201cin a different way than when you\u2019re just coming in as the \u00e9migr\u00e9 writer sniffing around for a story.\u201d What he has seen there does not fill him with optimism.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s no rule of law in Sri Lanka anymore,\u201d he laments. \u201cIn a way, I feel I saw this coming. I knew that we couldn\u2019t have been through 25 years of civil war and lost so many people and done so many terrible things and then think that when the war was over we would enter into some bright period. All that negativity and evil and suffering that people have gone through has to go somewhere. It doesn\u2019t just stop because a false date is put on the end of it. I hope for something better, but …,\u201d and his voice trails off in a way that makes you feel this karmic cycle has a long way to run.<\/p>\n

Courtesy:MontrealGazette<\/em><\/p>\n

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By Ian McGillis It hasn\u2019t been a century since Shyam Selvadurai was a star presence on the Canadian literary stage, but it was in a previous century that most of us last saw him \u2014 in 1998, to be precise, when his second novel Cinnamon Gardens solidified the profile established by his 1994 debut Funny …<\/p>\n

Continue reading ‘Sri Lanka Born Canadian Author Shyam Selvadurai Returns to Literary Scene with Epic Novel “The Hungry Ghosts”’ »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[12],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21282"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21282"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21282\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21294,"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21282\/revisions\/21294"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21282"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21282"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21282"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}