Brotherless Night

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You wait here for me,” Niranjan said, his face a stone. “There isn’t time to argue. Just listen for once, will you?” Then he turned to Dayalan and my father. There is a civil war going on in Sri Lanka in 1981- and sixteen-year-old Sashi reveals what it means to be swept up in the violence and confusion. The good guys are ruthless, people she loves take incredibly cruel actions, and Sashi finds that even following her conscience has regrettable consequences. Author V. V. Ganeshananthan cast us as witnesses alongside Sashi to the scorched earth unfolding in the wake of the fight. Your question very generously asks me about my choice and again, here, there was a lot of subconscious work going on. I don’t know how much I consciously chose her, and how much she sort of showed up and started bossing things around. Which, again, was very fortunate for me. I knew I was interested in medicine and that’s always been the case. There’s medicine in my first novel as well. And so that gave me a hook to hang my hat on and something that she wanted which had an arc, an educational arc. That was the thing I knew was going to go awry. In Sashi, we see someone who gathers strength, specifically from her friendships with other women, and also from her own mother, from her grandmother. And a lot of the kind of quiet acts of care that make the society able to continue — in some form — during this intense period of conflict come from civilians, come from women, come from civil institutions, like universities, like hospitals, right, like libraries.” Reading and writing In the middle of all this, as Sashi is studying to become a doctor, there’s Seelan’s friend K, with whom Sashi’s relationship is neither romantic nor wholly platonic. K is the novel’s agent of chaos. He is the harbinger of transformation (even his first encounter with Sashi, thrillingly recounted in the first chapter, changes how she looks at herself) and that necessarily includes destruction.

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… Ganeshananthan graduated from Harvard College in 2002, where she served as managing editor of The Harvard Crimson, and later earned her M.F.A. at the University of Iowa in 2005. In 2007, she earned another master's degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, where she was a Bollinger Fellow specializing in arts and culture journalism. There’s a very Anne Of The Islandfeel to some of Sashi’s initial musings about her future, her education and even her romantic thoughts about K (indeed, it comes as no surprise that as a younger reader, Ganeshananthan enjoyed L.M. Montgomery’s works). Ganeshananthan will launch the book with a conversation with Curtis Sittenfeld at the Magers & Quinn bookstore in Minneapolis on Thursday, Jan. 26.SP: One of the most important characters is based on a real person, Rajani Thiranagama . How did her narrative become such an important part of this book? I will be pressing Brotherless Night into everyone's hands, because you need to read this book immediately. 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.”—Nathan Heller, The New Yorker Sashi's storytelling is a perfect fit for the delicate balance she is forced to walk by virtue of living in a society where running afoul of the dominant forces, saying the wrong thing, leveling too impassioned a rebuke, can prove a capital offense Omar El Akkad, New York Times Book Review

Brotherless Night is an absolute must-read and a story that I will not be forgetting any time soon. V.V. Ganeshananthan did a masterful job not only crafting this story and setting but also with her characterization. I highly recommend Brotherless Night to all! And I think I often have said to my students ‘read your work aloud to yourself,’ but, like any teacher, I am sometimes a hypocrite. And so, in this instance, I had the great benefit of: No, I was forced to do that. And I think that that also just kind of turned the screws on the prose.” You must understand: There is no single day on which a war begins. The conflict will collect around you gradually, the way carrion birds assemble around the vulnerable, until there are so many predators that the object of their hunger is not even visible. You will not even be able to see yourself in the gathering crowd of those who would kill you.” Also Read: Growth of children’s literature is critical for a nation: Kavita Gupta Sabharwal 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]

Author Q&A

We were not safe, Appa meant; he could not protect us. But I did not need him to tell me. I had known from the moment Dayalan returned to our house without his bicycle.

Perhaps Ganeshananthan’s finest achievement in Brotherless Night is showing, with meticulous accuracy, what it feels like to inhabit a day-to-day life onto which someone else, from the privilege of great distance, can throw a word like 'terrorism,' and be done." — New York Times VG: Well, I think that because she was the only woman among the four [authors of The Broken Palmyra], naturally I look to her as an example of someone who was intensely principled and also clearly a really powerful storyteller. My own father is a physician, and I also know a lot of Sri Lankan doctors, probably most of whom are Tamil. I spent some time reading about those experiences. Things like the hospital massacre did occur, for example, but there were lots of precarious situations of people treating other people. And she in particular, because she was the professor of anatomy, had this outsized influence on the students. When I think about the ways that doctors communicate care, I think there’s a lot in common with the things that I care about and want to pay attention to. And the doctors that I respect the most are looking at people holistically, which also seemed like something that that she was doing, and specifically caring for women, specifically noting the experiences of women in her community related to sexual violence. 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. 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 EverywhereWith 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 The problem I have with the five star scale on Goodreads--or at least the way I rate books on it--is there is no way to distinguish "excellent" from "everyone must drop everything and read this book now." The five stars for Brotherless Night is more along the lines of the later. It is a devastatingly powerful, moving and complex portrayal AM: Sashi has four brothers: steady, kind Niranjan, who has almost completed his doctor’s training; quiet Dayalan, who works at the public library and wants to become an engineer; hot-headed, popular Seelan, also at school; and the precocious youngest brother, Aran. The very early part of the book evokes their day-to-day family life on the cusp of the outbreak of the civil war, and then in the rest of the story, we see, through Sashi’s eyes, how the war affects each of her brothers as well as herself. The book thus shows the distinct ways in which the members of a well-to-do family, who happen to belong to an ethnic minority, are caught up in the conflict. In part, it seems to meditate on how individual agency is constrained by war and how the choices people face become limited and difficult. Is that a fair assessment? SP: I loved it, and I did think it was interesting that it could serve both functions, depending on who’s reading it.