Critical comment on four stories by Romesh Guneseke­ra

Critical comment on four stories by Romesh Gunesekera

“A house in the country”, “Carpace” and “Captives” are part of “Monkfish Moon”, a collection of nine stories by Romesh Gunesekera published in 1992, that deals with the political and social instability that followed Sri Lanka’s independence in 1947. These four stories depict  the multiple tensions that arouse on one hand, from the coexistence of two Sri Lankas, one traditional and the other modernized, and on the other, those tensions that were a direct consequence of the political, economical, and social transformation, instability and violence.

But far from dealing with the clandestine mass graves of civilians, the stories follow the daily lives of ordinary people, taking us from the beauty of their surroundings and inner wishes to their individual feelings of alienation and  their truncated need of expression.

They are alien because they are unable to communicate with themselves and with other people, whether they be their friends (“A house in the country”), family (“Carpace”), foreign guests (“Captives”) or an ever mutable economical, social and political tide  embodied in the figure of a powerful magnate (“Monkfish Moon”).

A  trait particular  to the  stories is that important events take place either at sunset or at night. In “Carpace” the progatonist meets her boyfriend (whom she loves but cannot marry) in a nocturnal disco, and will meet her husband to be, a man of wealth and a complete stranger, during an arranged meeting in her own home, under the supervision of her family, at night. “Captives” starts off at sunset, a shadowy scenery for a shadowy interaction between a Sri lankan owner of a maligawa, and his guests.

The whole narrative of “Monkfish Moon” takes place at night. “A house in the country” opens with a night scenery abundant in noises distinctive to human settlements amidst nature: “frogs, drums, bottles, dogs barking at the moon”. (11) These, we are told, are sounds that have always been there.

But the smooth surface of daily routine is cracked by silence. Night and silence are abnormal, since we are diurnal and social creatures, and, within these stories, may be associated with two handicaps, blindness and muteness. We find characters who vehemently dream or reflect in a future or present  that somehow slips trough their fingers.    These settings may stand for the the alienation between desire and possibility, thought and action,  between the oppression of politics, economics, social aspects,  and the individual freedom, between a cherished identity linked to the stability of the far past (what remains of its glory, like the ruins  in “Captives”) and th.....[read full text]

And the same goes for the manager of the hotel in “Captives”, a man who prides in the warm water of he installations (30), and his “bistake” (34), commodities that do not impress his guests that much.

He has an ability for noticing details, whether in the service, the foreign woman, or Sigiriya’s frescoes. His obssesive fixation in detail resembles to that of the artist. The characters that give life to these stories have all in common a desire for creation, for transcendence: Ray (“A house in the country) dreams of building a house,the nameless girl in “Carpace” accepts a promising though loveless marriage.

In Monkfish Moon, the narrative “I” (nameless as well)  seems to consider he has an special place beside Peter, the powerful magnate whose every action  engages the whole narration, and whose careless treatment of him is oddly similar either to that given to a close friend, or to a servant.  

But let us go back to the hotel manager’s considering the maligawa  (and his two guests) as a piece of art. In fact, for a beautiful moment he dares to dream that as did the painter of the frescoes at Sigiriya he can change his story, make of the ruins (the glorious past) his paradise, unleash his abrupt passion for his guest,  the  foreign woman. (45)

“I wanted to ask her [ .] Did she have to go back? Everything inside me was racing. On that plateau alone with her I felt, for a moment, anything was possible.

Kassyapa made this place his heaven. Surely that counts for something. [ .] I wanted her to understand I was not a base or vulgar man. In my original plans for the  maligawa I had included a large rectangular bathing pool made of stone, grey stone, with moss and lichen on its sides.

The water would be like ink, dark with algae. I wanted big lily pads to hold the surface still, and pink lutoses sipping on the top. I would have liked to have taken her there, to drink and feel the cool water, but we never built it. I w.....

There is no blood, nor screams, not one of the characters weeps or laments, and yet they are incomplete, crumbly, like musical boxes in a deserted nursery, lulling their country to sleep as they grow mute. Romesh Gunesekera writes the very beauty of despair without ever naming it.

The stories are the picture of a fragmented and  wounded country, filled with the anxiety of .....