Preeta Samarasan read from her debut novel Evening Is the Whole Day, and Sugi Ganeshananthan read from Love Marriage, at Harvard Book Store last night. A novel about a Tamil Malaysian family, Evening has a Juno-esque cover:

Set on the outskirts of Ipoh in Malaysia, Samarasan’s impressive debut chronicles another bad year in the Big House on Kingfisher Lane. With the death of Paati, the grandmother, and the disgraceful departure of Chellam, the family’s servant girl, the wealthy Rajasekharan family is in shambles… Father Raju’s dreams have been stifled by his unrealized political ambitions… Vasanthi, his wife, bristles at reminders of her lower-class roots… Uma all but disconnects herself from the family in anticipation of escaping to Columbia University, and her six-year-old sister, Aasha… must settle for interactions with a ghost only she can see. [Link]

In the Q&A, Samarasan discussed the political situation in Malaysia, where Tamils recently held mass protests, race is central, and the first thing callers ask is your race if they can’t tell from your voice. She said Tamils wept with happiness and pinched themselves at the results of the March 8th elections, limited though they were. Bostonist has more:

… the country’s racial relations have deteriorated visibly even since I was a child in the 1980s… the Internal Security Act and the Sedition Act… allow the government to detain people without trial for inciting racial unrest. Of course, the government itself decides what constitutes such incitement, so that peaceful protesters who try to address racial questions can be thrown into jail without trial, while government ministers can get away with hurling racial invective and threatening horrifying violence against minorities…

In the last general elections in March, the party that has ruled Malaysia since independence in 1957 lost its two-thirds majority for the first time… now young Malaysians are full of plans and hope for the country. I really do believe we can defeat the culture of fear that has defined Malaysian life since 1969… [Link]

Sugi said Love Marriage has no identifiable home country — the action takes place in Canada, England, the U.S., Sri Lanka. She’s doing a reading in Toronto shortly and said wryly she looks forward to an enthusiastic crowd. The questioner had asked whether Torontonians had an opinion about the novel’s authenticity.

International cover

Sugi also mentioned something interesting about novels in general — the epic poem is the primary Tamil form, not the novel, as in this classic which gave title to Vikram Chandra’s debut:

What could my mother be
to yours? What kin is my father
to yours anyway? And how
Did you and I meet ever?
But in love
our hearts have mingled
as red earth and pouring rain [Link]

By the end of the evening I still couldn’t discern why the bookstore brought in Sugi and Samarasan together, as the issues of Tamils in Toronto and in Malaysia are quite disparate. Perhaps it’s the Tamil connection, or that they’re first-time novelists, or an ethnic ghetto of the sort Hanif Kureishi complained about. In the middle of Sugi’s reading, a customer blundered through the reading searching for a tome in shelves accordioned for the reading; at the end, the inevitable Audience Uncle monologue.

Here’s a clip of Samarasan reading in clipped Anglicized syllables:

And Sugi reading from a passage about her protagonists’ parents falling in lowe:

Related posts: Mixed ‘Marriage’, No country for young men