A Visceral and Infinite Day in the Life
A review of The Story of a Brief Marriage, a novel by Anuk Arudpragasam.
I loved this book, end to end, and highly recommend it. As it was part of the course reading from author Garth Greenwell on mystical thinking and writing, I was not able to help myself from reading this book as a writer, as someone examining sentence and paragraph for style choice, for craft elements, for narrative structure. Again, I enjoyed it wholeheartedly as a beautiful piece of literature, but here I am focused on a few of my favorite such elements-as-lessons.
Foreshadowing Title
The title is terribly good foreshadowing, once the setting and driving question are made clear in the first chapter. Every time I pick up to read some more, or when I close it again for a break, that title reconfirms the tension between me and the narrator, the narrator and his surroundings, the surroundings and its foregones, the narrator and his relationships. The sky and the ground and the narrow thread of potential for continued life that hovers on tiptoe in between.
Thought versus Exposition
The meanderings of mind that are not navel-gazing exposition, it is hard to define and do well, I think, but sort of goes unnoticed by the compelling nature of the story. I know I have read and learned elsewhere that any so-called rule of writing can be acceptably broken when done well. When I get that feedback in workshop, I think it is important to realize that I can always address the issue in one of these two divergent ways, to either use more action and dialogue instead, or can work harder at following well a character’s train of thought. It is in this book that the latter path is done so well as to shine with Dinesh’s rich interiority where so much can’t be expressed externally.
Narrative Time and Flashbacks
There is power in a slim novel that travels through a short span of active narrative time, where the space of questions, the thoughts that lead into others, the meandering mind, they reach backwards in time, away from the moments currently happening, the mind’s permission received from the body that has little left to sustain it. If this is, in its way, life flashing before one’s eyes, it is
Unquoted Dialogue
Dialogue without quotes highlight both the rarity of the spoken word in this setting, and the nearness of internal thought and narrative distance from the protagonist, Dinesh. Speaking is a tool used sparingly and hesitantly in such an environment. The headspace of thought and survival is primary.
The Beingness of a Body
A final lesson, in a long series of insightful craft elements, on top already of being a beautifully written story, is in bodily sensation, the somatic elements, the visceral reality of physical form. When it comes to my own writing, I am very easily bent into the expository, into the tangential thought that begets the tangential thought, and still try to pass that off as a worthy piece of literature. I aspire. But, where I am wanting, in the verbal expression of the physical life, in a character’s relationship to and experience of their body, I have found here so much excellent work at giving the reader the fullness of that knowledge. To my writing, my mind, I would take the perspective that mental illnesses like depression make the physical/external world very small and distant. Something of this life-threatening and death-surrounded setting makes Dinesh as the narrator have very pointed expression of the sensations of his body. Eating and digesting, excreting, breathing, washing, hunger, crying, hair and skin, sweat and feces, smell and hearing, blood and wounding and dying. That close to the edge puts all sense of the body as tether to the world in high relief. The living meditation when standing next to death, given expression here, sublime.