A review by dinojah
A Passage North by Anuk Arudpragasam

emotional reflective medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.75

Perhaps he was wrong to think of lamentation in terms of sincerity or insincerity, that perhaps the crying and wailing and sobbing all around him was intended not as an expression of emotion but as a kind of service offered to the bereaves, a performance in some sense but a performance that, together with the drums and the rituals, was meant only to help the bereaves with their own lamentation, to ease out, like the calm rhythmic words and from kneading hands of a midwife during a difficult birth, the tears that the bereaves so often found impossible to bring out by themselves.

Even now he felt ashamed thinking about his initial reluctance to acknowledge the magnitude of what had happened at the end of the war, as though he's been hesitant to believe the evidence on his computer screen because his own poor, violated, stateless people were the ones alleging it, as though he's been unable to take the suffering of his own people seriously till it was validated by the authority of foreign experts, legitimized by a documentary narrated by a clean-shaven white man standing in front of a camera in a suit and tie.
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