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A review by amelia555
Brotherless Night by V.V. Ganeshananthan
3.5
I recently heard someone talking about how we should distinguish between books that are important and books that are well-written – because quite often, these two things are not the same. I feel like this is the case here. This book is important because it tells a story about an absolutely devastating historical event. I didn’t know much about the civil war in Sri Lanka, so this read was eye-opening, and I learned a lot. My only previous encounter with this topic was Maali Almeida, but I feel like that book wasn’t very interested in details. It was an “everyone is suffering, all sides are equally bad, and the protagonist is mainly interested in himself” kind of a book – which is why I didn’t care for it very much. This book also shows duplicity of all sides of the conflict, but it focuses on the Tamil side, and the struggles and heartbreaks of Tamil people. It was much easier to feel for this story, and to understand the characters.
However, Brotherless Night felt to me like a Wikipedia page disguised as a work of fiction. It’s more interested in telling the real history as accurately as possible than in building characters. Honestly, fair enough, the story needs to be told. But it does take away from this book if we look at it as a work of fiction. Our protagonist, Sashi, is a very good, very hard-working and selfless girl – and she stays like that throughout the entire book. We need her to get access to certain people (2 of the characters she’d friends with are real-life people (with different names) important to the history of this war), we need her to be there during significant events so we could be a part of it, too. But all of this we can also read in a non-fiction book on the subject, written in a very similar tone. We don’t see Sashi being doubtful, selfish, scared, in love. She might mention something and we might guess something, but we don’t feel it. She or any other characters are not the point, and must move away for us to see this piece of history.
This is a hard book to read, it’s like an open wound. Terrible events of that merciless war happen in every chapter. I’m glad I read it, but I’d like it more as a non-fiction book, honestly.
However, Brotherless Night felt to me like a Wikipedia page disguised as a work of fiction. It’s more interested in telling the real history as accurately as possible than in building characters. Honestly, fair enough, the story needs to be told. But it does take away from this book if we look at it as a work of fiction. Our protagonist, Sashi, is a very good, very hard-working and selfless girl – and she stays like that throughout the entire book. We need her to get access to certain people (2 of the characters she’d friends with are real-life people (with different names) important to the history of this war), we need her to be there during significant events so we could be a part of it, too. But all of this we can also read in a non-fiction book on the subject, written in a very similar tone. We don’t see Sashi being doubtful, selfish, scared, in love. She might mention something and we might guess something, but we don’t feel it. She or any other characters are not the point, and must move away for us to see this piece of history.
This is a hard book to read, it’s like an open wound. Terrible events of that merciless war happen in every chapter. I’m glad I read it, but I’d like it more as a non-fiction book, honestly.