Noontide Toll
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- $22.99
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- $22.99
Publisher Description
Vasantha is a van driver for hire, ferrying aid workers, returning exiles, and tentative entrepreneurs across the battle-scarred landscapes of Sri Lanka. The civil war is finally over, but the traumas of the past are still haunting. Behind the facade of peace we are made to remember the war: mysterious hoteliers conceal scars under their collars; genial old soldiers are secretly identified as perpetrators of brutal crimes; young Sinhalese men pine after Tamil girls whose brothers died by their hands. Vasantha keeps his own counsel, lingering on the periphery of his passengers' stories, but as time goes on he reveals a little of his own story too.
Perceptive, sombre and finely-tuned, Noontide Toll paints an extraordinary portrait of a post-war Sri Lanka grappling with the ghosts of its troubled past.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Guneskera's (Monkfish Moon) newest work is a cross between a collection of stories and a novel. The chapters are both self-contained stories and a larger arc of reflections and revelations related to the protagonist, Vasantha. Set in 2009, two years after the Sri Lankan Civil War, Vasantha buys a van with his retirement money and becomes a driver. He drives an array of individuals from Jaffna's army camps to Galle. Through his encounters with them, traversing through a country trying to recover, he learns about their experiences. Episodic rather than plot-driven, the writing is smooth, spare, with exquisite detail. Vasantha meets everyone from a solider afraid to tell the girl he loves that he killed her brother in war to a honeymooning couple horrified that the place in which Leonard Woolf wrote about will be renovated to be a modern resort, even after surviving the tsunami. Guneskera's powerful prose keeps the reader turning the page, with images and emotions resonating long after the story ends.
