At the Water's Edge

Reviews

 “A deft handling of Sri Lanka... light and unlaboured but deeply engrossing...”---Ceylon Daily News.

"In Pradeep Jeganathan's At the Water's Edge, you get to feel Sri Lanka's raw edge...it says much in a few words."---The Lonely Planet Guide (Sri Lanka).

"In this finely sculpted collection of interwoven stories, he draws out the complexity of Sri Lankan lives in personal tales of disempowerment, disconnectedness, poverty, violence and civil war that has scarred this nation so deeply...Most importantly, these are stories that resist simple answers, and fast, cheap conclusions. The tight, sinewy prose rejects sentimentalism and any play towards melodrama. The stories are startling, precisely because they can so easily slip under the radar, and reveal their true arsenal only on later reflection. This is an assured and intelligent collection, and an important examination of contemporary issues and lives in this country."----The Nation on Sunday.

This collection of loosely interlinked short stories delicately and movingly explores large themes (violence, gender, class, nationalism, transnationalism, politics, ethnicity) in contemporary Sri Lanka through the microscopic lens of the ordinary and the everyday. The landscape of these stories is fraught with subtle and not-so-subtle tension, foreboding, sadness, loss, anger, violence and fatigue. Each story delicately winds itself around an event or events in everyday life - a fight in a classroom among boys, the desire of a servant girl for trousers, the struggle of a poor working class woman to care for her young daughters, the estrangements of going to college in the US, a train ride, the slippery slope of conversation between friends --- each shot through with the fissures of gender, class, nation, transnation, and ethnicity that underscores the social and political terrain of contemporary Sri Lanka. The language is beautiful, spare, and simple. The deceptive simplicity of these stories and the connections and disconnections between them creates a multifaceted, complex, and deeply felt exploration of the situatedness of our everyday lives along the faultlines that mark the contemporary world. This is an impressive debut collection." -- Prof. Ritty Lukose

"I ended up swallowing At the Water's Edge in one entranced gulp. It's about Sri Lanka, and it's about being an alienated intellectual under conditions of late capitalism, and it's about the human predicament. Jeganathan has a deceptively unaffected style, the pitch is fine-tuned, and the story I liked best, The Train From Batticoloa, manages to convey utter menace and despair without anything "really" happening - I could hardly bear to read on. This is a book with an inner novel struggling to break free..." -- Prof. Nivedita Menon

"...Anybody can have ideas--the difficulty is to express them [in] one glittering paragraph." -- Desijournal.com, June 11, 2004


"...an incredibly elegant, seamless piece of writing, the kind that is rare..." -- chowkpickbook 1st May 2004


"Pradeep Jeganathan has certainly mastered the art of the short story." -- Sangam.org, May 14, 2004