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3.84 AVERAGE
3.84 AVERAGE
It is sometimes very hard to review a book that is the true story of someone's tragedy but I found this compelling all the way through. Ms. Deraniyagala was nakedly honest in her portrayal of her grief. It is impossible to imagine--even after reading her account--what is to walk in her shoes.
I rarely cry. Ever. But this book made me cry like a child. How gripped I was from the narrative - it's intense. However it's one of the most beautifully devastating works I've ever picked up.
At once devastating and hopeful, this book is a wonderful autobiographical account of the worst moment of the author's life, and how she is able to move away from that devastation in the aftermath. One thing I loved about this book - as compared to other autobiographies - is that Sonali doesn't have the same Main Character moral high ground approach, where all the bad stuff is carefully snipped away to portray a martyr. Nor does she have the Main Character 'even if I did wrong, it's completely justified' approach. She is just a deeply human person experiencing something truly awful, and coping with it all in the best way she can. It is a wonderful book, of an absolutely soul-crushing event. I would highly recommend it to anyone who is feeling disconnected from the world around them, and would like to reconnect with the fundamental humanity in all of us.
emotional
reflective
sad
slow-paced
I read this book in one sitting, on a late December afternoon. Despite my reading fervour, I'll carry her beautiful, sad story with me for a long time. This book is a fitting tribute to Sonali's lost family and for her inspiring resolve.
Sonali was in Sri Lanka on Boxing Day in 2004 when there was an earthquake in the ocean that caused a huge tsunami to rip across the water, coming on to shore in many countries in the region, killing more than 200,000 people. The book starts in her hotel room that morning with her husband, two boys, and family friends. Her family friend notices the tide start to look different, then the water start to come in. She urges them to leave and the family runs. Sonali doesn't even have time to notify her parents next door.
This book has one of the most chilling starts I've ever read. It's a first person account of Sonali leaving her hotel room, running for safety, and the wave overtaking them. She loses contact with her family and struggles to stay alive. Books don't usually impact my dreams, but I actually had nightmares the night after I read the start of this book. It was riveting.
Sonali finds out that none of her family survives. Right after the wave, she winds up at the hospital, hoping that one of her family members will show up and completely in shock. Sonali has absolutely no filter on her thoughts during this time and honestly I feel less of her because of this. She thinks some pretty horrible things of a child that survives.
The rest of the book focuses solely on Sonali's grief. She is, understandably, destroyed by losing her whole family: husband, two children, mother and father. She shuts herself away in a room of a family member in Sri Lanka, not returning to her home in London for years. She tries alcohol to sooth her grief. Eventually it gets to the point where remembering doesn't hurt her, but helps her. However, this part of the book reads like it should be her journal rather than a book for public consumption.
If you're looking for a book on the tsunami, this is not the book for you. This book is completely about grief and what happens to a woman who loses her entire family.
This book has one of the most chilling starts I've ever read. It's a first person account of Sonali leaving her hotel room, running for safety, and the wave overtaking them. She loses contact with her family and struggles to stay alive. Books don't usually impact my dreams, but I actually had nightmares the night after I read the start of this book. It was riveting.
Sonali finds out that none of her family survives. Right after the wave, she winds up at the hospital, hoping that one of her family members will show up and completely in shock. Sonali has absolutely no filter on her thoughts during this time and honestly I feel less of her because of this. She thinks some pretty horrible things of a child that survives.
The rest of the book focuses solely on Sonali's grief. She is, understandably, destroyed by losing her whole family: husband, two children, mother and father. She shuts herself away in a room of a family member in Sri Lanka, not returning to her home in London for years. She tries alcohol to sooth her grief. Eventually it gets to the point where remembering doesn't hurt her, but helps her. However, this part of the book reads like it should be her journal rather than a book for public consumption.
If you're looking for a book on the tsunami, this is not the book for you. This book is completely about grief and what happens to a woman who loses her entire family.
If grief could be considered uncensored, I think WAVE by Sonali Deraniyagala would fit the description. After losing her husband, two young boys and her parents to the 2004 tsunami in Sri Lanka, Sonali has survivor's guilt and an immense grief that will, undoubtedly, last her entire life but this memoir allows her to come to terms with the tragedy and find hope amidst the unbearable loss. I can only imagine how hard it was to preserve these memories of the people she loved the most on these pages but her unsentimental and raw prose helps the reader find a way into understanding her pain and her unending love for Steve, Vik and Malli.
Simply put: devastating. It's also a powerfully moving memoir about how someone recovers and survives a deeply traumatic loss. A loving memory of her self and the family she lost during the tsunami in Sri Lanka over a decade ago.
I'm currently reading [b:In the Wake: On Blackness and Being|28956825|In the Wake On Blackness and Being|Christina Sharpe|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1470694666l/28956825._SX50_.jpg|49182493][b:In the Wake: On Blackness and Being|28956825|In the Wake On Blackness and Being|Christina Sharpe|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1470694666l/28956825._SX50_.jpg|49182493], and this book both literally and figuratively captures many of the ideas and meaning in Christina Sharpe's book. Sonali Deraniyagala's book describes and emotes to her audience what it means to live in the literal and figurative wake of a tsunami. Her life, in many ways becomes a perpetual wake for her lost family, after and within grief. Memories can and do bubble up and wash over Deraniyagala during everyday life, with every sight, sound, and smell a possible trigger for a riptide that could pull her under. Deraniyagala experiences memories, which are the afterimages of an irretrievable past, as well as mirages of futures that can never be, while attempting to survive and thrive a wave that didn't end the day after she was "rescued."
This book is also, though it is not the focus, and mostly comes through our (readers') reactions to the text, shows us the way in which society expects people to just move on, and do so in a way that fits some sort of transcendent, empowering narrative.
There are several negative reviews of this book that explicitly or implicitly express that the reason for low ratings is one of the following: Sonali is not likeable/not sympathetic/too privileged; this book is just taking advantage of the drama of a tsumani. I would like to ask these reviewers, and we readers in general, why they/we may have/have had these knee-jerk reactions. To the first criticism, about Sonali not being "likeable," I would say that the author is being honest about the thoughts that she had/has had. No one can know how they would react in a crisis, and your thoughts are not who you are. I think plenty of mean and resentful things about people, and I don't think that I'm unusual in this, and I don't think that makes me a bad person. People also need to unpack the fact that subconsciously, they likely expect Sonali as a BIPOC woman to be more palatable/people-pleasing and "grateful" for everything that she has (and probably poor based on the books about South Asians that are popular). Because this is a book about the aftermath of a natural disaster in Sri Lanka, people also need to confront the fact that they are used to seeing/publishers most often market BIPOC trauma porn stories that are then spun as transcending circumstances (often with the help of white people and/or learning to game the existing (colonialist, capitalist, racist) system), and that a possible reason for a negative reaction is that that is not what they found here. There is no happy ending. This is uncomfortable and troubling. Years later, Sonali is still struggling and the best that she can do is attempt every day, every moment, to let the waves of grief and memory lap against her without washing her out to sea.
To the second criticism about "this book is just taking advantage of drama" and the cachet of a tsunami, I would say, this story is worth being told, and it is told in an emotionally-challenging way. Everyone's story is worth being told, and if you don't think that, then that is a you problem, not a this book problem. While being about a tsunami may be the reason publishers thought that it could sell, and what makes it unique, I would also point out that Sonali's grief is, unfortunately, something that is universal to some extent to anyone who has ever lost someone they have loved deeply and had to figure out how to keep moving through the world after and within the wake.
This book is also, though it is not the focus, and mostly comes through our (readers') reactions to the text, shows us the way in which society expects people to just move on, and do so in a way that fits some sort of transcendent, empowering narrative.
There are several negative reviews of this book that explicitly or implicitly express that the reason for low ratings is one of the following: Sonali is not likeable/not sympathetic/too privileged; this book is just taking advantage of the drama of a tsumani. I would like to ask these reviewers, and we readers in general, why they/we may have/have had these knee-jerk reactions. To the first criticism, about Sonali not being "likeable," I would say that the author is being honest about the thoughts that she had/has had. No one can know how they would react in a crisis, and your thoughts are not who you are. I think plenty of mean and resentful things about people, and I don't think that I'm unusual in this, and I don't think that makes me a bad person. People also need to unpack the fact that subconsciously, they likely expect Sonali as a BIPOC woman to be more palatable/people-pleasing and "grateful" for everything that she has (and probably poor based on the books about South Asians that are popular). Because this is a book about the aftermath of a natural disaster in Sri Lanka, people also need to confront the fact that they are used to seeing/publishers most often market BIPOC trauma porn stories that are then spun as transcending circumstances (often with the help of white people and/or learning to game the existing (colonialist, capitalist, racist) system), and that a possible reason for a negative reaction is that that is not what they found here. There is no happy ending. This is uncomfortable and troubling. Years later, Sonali is still struggling and the best that she can do is attempt every day, every moment, to let the waves of grief and memory lap against her without washing her out to sea.
To the second criticism about "this book is just taking advantage of drama" and the cachet of a tsunami, I would say, this story is worth being told, and it is told in an emotionally-challenging way. Everyone's story is worth being told, and if you don't think that, then that is a you problem, not a this book problem. While being about a tsunami may be the reason publishers thought that it could sell, and what makes it unique, I would also point out that Sonali's grief is, unfortunately, something that is universal to some extent to anyone who has ever lost someone they have loved deeply and had to figure out how to keep moving through the world after and within the wake.