When Memory Dies

By Ambalavaner Sivanandan

Book Overview

"Haunting, with an immense tenderness . . . Unforgettable" JOHN BERGER

"I'm recommending When Memory Dies to everyone" ARTHUR C. CLARKE

"Profoundly moving" Evening Standard

"A brilliant and moving first novel" Times Literary Supplement

A powerful three-generational saga of a Sri Lankan family's search for coherence and continuity in a country broken by colonial occupation and riven by ethnic wars.

Through the viewpoints of three generations of a Sri Lankan family (taking the reader from 1920 through the 1980s), Sivanandan explores a culture destroyed first by colonization, then through the ethnic divisions that are released when the country achieves independence.

The family, which lives at a level of poverty that makes survival a constant struggle, must also balance love for one another with a deep love of their homeland. Without bending to romanticism or proselytization, the author evokes a compelling and very human story of a lost country. It is a vision as beautifully told as it is unrelenting in its devotion to truth. In the process, the work also supplies a rich historic background to the often underreported news accounts of the massacres and upheavals in Sri Lanka.

**Winner of the Sagittarius Prize **Shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize**

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1905147597
• ISBN13: 9781905147595
• Release Date: August 2007
• Publisher: Arcadia Books
• Length: 416 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.4" x 5.6" x 7.7"

Customer Reviews

When Memory Dies

Sivanandan's book is a vivid telling of three generations of a Sri Lankan Tamil family and of the disintegration of ethnic harmony on the island. Having fled Sri Lanka after the 1956 riots Sivanandan's novel is remarkably even-handed and captures the humanity on both sides. Sri Lanka's post-colonial history is one of failed expectations and avoidable disasters. Sivanandan thoughtfully sketches the path to Sri Lanka's civil war and the painful breakdown in relations between the Sinhalese and the Tamils. The tragedy of the estrangement between some of the key Sinhalese and Tamil characters in the novel is all the more poignant considering that Sinhalese nationalism and Tamil Eelam nationalism are painfully intertwined. I wonder if the title "When Memory Dies" is an allusion to the fact that Sinhala-Tamil enmity in Sri Lanka is less than a hundred years old and was preceded by about 2500 years when ethnicity did not matter?

Historical fiction at a high level of sophistication.

I have used this book as an introduction to the contemporary political and cultural history of Sri Lanka for college students who will be studying on the island for the academic year. In some ways, it is a somewhat cynical rendering of the evolution of the ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka. That is, it is difficult to come away from reading it with much of a sense of hope for the current political situation. But it is precisely the evocation of hopelessness that makes Sivanandan's compelling novel realistic, as unfortunate as that sounds. Idealism, indeed, seems to have little space in Sri Lanka these days. There is much in this novel that educates its readers to the nature of ethnic conflict, class consciousness, caste, family, religion and political identity. I found it a tour de force, a remarkable novel.