The Story of a Brief Marriage by Anuk Arudpragasam is a moving and intimate portrait of a man caught up in Sri Lanka’s civil war. Set in and around a refugee camp, this debut novel offers a peek into just a few short days of Dinesh’s life. Arudpragasm delves deep into this one man’s thought process, drawing it out in eloquent and elegant prose. Moments that take but a few seconds traverse multiple pages, yet the book does not feel like it drags on.
The prose captures the disrupted mindsets of one whose life has been completely overturned by war–one of moving from camp to camp and avoiding being drafting. And then the confusions and small joys and larger anxieties of entering into marriage with a stranger. As Dinesh and Ganga’s relationship slowly, sometimes excruciatingly unfolds, the search for human connection is deftly explored and exposed. Continue reading
Lit review.
A family history.
What I love most about this week’s stories is that there’s every reason to believe these kids have been reared by these parents. If nothing else, Ken and Allison have raised their kids to use their heads and to be resilient. I’m not dumb enough to expect real-world parents to take lessons from television characters, but it can’t hurt that Allison and Ken model a kind of parenting that encourages their children to take chances, to pursue interests, to be comfortable with themselves, and to be prepared for failure while not fleeing from it.
Indications.
Topical medication.
At the very end of the negotiation scene, which is kind of a clown show, Pat steers the moment to its closure with his usual weirdness, but on his way out the door, he turns, looks Clark closely in the eye, and says in a friendly, comparitively downtempo, I-got-the-better-of-you way, “Hey, this was fun,” adding a gentle shoulder-slap. It’s the best acting in the episode, the rare moment where Dave Foley quarterbacks a whole scene with Tom-Brady-like dexterity. Props to Jonathan Slavin for the assist. Slavin can fill a room, but here he plays smaller while his character tries to play bigger, allowing Foley to work toward that great payoff line. Super impressive.
Microsynopsis: Cattleman’s Ranch is serving as a polling place for the 1996 general election. Jessica and Louis take opposing sides on a proposition to build a wall keeping illegal immigrants out of Florida, while Emery and Evan support opposing candidates in the Clinton-Dole presidential election. In a move to get wall protestors removed from the premises, Jessica discovers that she is herself an illegal immigrant. Eddie can’t be bothered with trivialities like presidential elections: he is too consumed with the recent murder of Tupac Shakur, while tensions with his friends over who killed him threaten their relationships.
Bad: It’s really difficult to be genuinely funny when you spend so much time preaching, and this is a very preachy episode. Louis preaches to Jessica about the importance of voting, and later he preaches to her about Hector’s difficult situation. Grandma preaches to Eddie about keeping his friendships intact. Evan preaches to Louis about the electoral college. Emery even kind of preaches to a customer about the futility of voting for a third-party candidate. And I get that Jessica is super competitive, but calling the INS on Louis’s cook is way over the line, even for her. Ugh.
