Love Marriage

Author: V. V. Ganeshananthan
Genre: Memoir
Publisher: Random House, 2008
Pages: 302
Rating: Recommend


Synopsis: In this globe-scattered Sri Lankan family, we speak of only two kinds of marriage. The first is the Arranged Marriage. The second is the Love Marriage. In reality, there is a whole spectrum in between, but most of us spend years running away from the first toward the second. [p. 3]

The daughter of Sri Lankan immigrants who left their collapsing country and married in America, Yalini finds herself caught between the traditions of her ancestors and the lure of her own modern world. But when she is summoned to Toronto to help care for her dying uncle, Kumaran, a former member of the militant Tamil Tigers, Yalini is forced to see that violence is not a relic of the Sri Lankan past, but very much a part of her Western present.

While Kumaran’s loved ones gather around him to say goodbye, Yalini traces her family’s roots–and the conflicts facing them as ethnic Tamils–through a series of marriages. Now, as Kumaran’s death and his daughter’s politically motivated nuptials edge closer, Yalini must decide where she stands.

Lyrical and innovative, V. V. Ganeshananthan’s novel brilliantly unfolds how generations of struggle both form and fractures families.


Review: This was a random find as I was browsing the shelves at my local library last week. The title and cover caught my attention.


The author certainly has a unique style and it took me a few pages to get into the rhythm and flow of the story. Only a few chapters in, I started wondering about the author so I flipped to the back cover. As it turns out this memoir began as her senior thesis when she was a student at Harvard.


This is a culture I cannot imagine, and I always enjoy reading about it.