"The Hungry Ghosts" by Shyam Selvadurai is an exquisitely rich story about Shivan Rassiah, a young boy born from poverty and the weight of a burdened past that originally stems from an abrasive grandmother that poisons her lineage to create a wilful and eventually rebellious daughter—and the fate of her belief in her own terrible karma.

Amidst the turmoil of a divided Sri Lanka where the tensions between the Tamils and Sinhalese people are a vivid and violent backdrop to the tensions between Shivan’s estranged grandmother and mother and the sides he is forced to choose from in order for his family to survive—Shivan also grows, discovers, and explores his own sexuality as a gay man and battles against the intolerance of his homosexuality by his Sri Lankan culture and community.

Between his grandmother’s controlling dominance and astute ambition for power and money; his mother’s depression and devastation at the failure of a western country, Canada, whose expectations she held towards were far too high in estimation compared to her real immigrant experience; and his sister’s radical extremism in feminist theory and racial equality—Shivan is often a victim of emotional liminality and displacement, marginalized in his culture and experience not only by being both Tamil and Sinhalese, but more importantly a Sri Lankan-born boy who immigrates to Toronto, Canada as a refugee and eventually becomes a westernized Torontonian and later, a Vancouver resident, open and active in the LGBT community.

The richness in this novel is found in the author’s ability to write with an eloquence and ease that give his characters resounding depth, authenticity, and a vulnerability, which readers can eagerly connect to and appreciate.

And the emotional landscape of the novel’s characters are not static, nor linear, but like life, mimic the fluctuation of people who change their minds over time and over a number of experiences.

The cultural translations of Buddhists stories also enrich the novel in metaphor and Sri Lankan culture, as well as intensify the substance of the novel’s characters.

But, the novel is not just entirely character-driven. The plot, too, is rich as it is turbulent and engaging. The capacity in which characters can love is just as passionate as their ability to hate and condemn, which drive them to illogical and unthinkable acts of cruelty.

The plot, filled with the torment of conflict and anguish, create an emotionally charged and gripping tale that will move readers to empathy and reflection about the importance of resisting exclusivity, answering the issues of cultural displacement, and advocating racial and gender equality, while defining the ideas of love and home.

Overall, "The Hungry Ghosts" by Shyam Selvadurai is a beautifully written book, full of substance and dichotomy, tenderness and heartache, tension and cruelty—a book that is so gloriously good, I couldn’t put it down—and still mourn the loss I feel in turning its very last pages.

A book like this is one is one in which you befriend its fictional characters in your reading and then miss them severely, feeling a loss at having to accept that though the story does not end, the book itself, has to. The Hungry Ghosts by this gifted and mature writer will inevitably leave its readers hungering for more.

For more book reviews, you're more than welcome to visit my book blog: The Bibliotaphe Closet at http://zaraalexis.wordpress,com ( )

This is the long-awaited successor to the wonderful [Funny boy] (1993). Where Selvadurai's first novel was basically a coming-of-age story, this is a much more complex and mature treatment of the "gay love story against a background of communal violence" idea. He uses traditional Buddhist stories interpolated into the narrative to explore the way the ways that bad actions and the need to find forgiveness and redemption work out in the lives of his characters, particularly the gay narrator and his property-shark grandmother. There's a danger in this sort of thing that you end up in the profound shallows of Herman Hesse country, and Selvadurai steers dangerously close once or twice, but I think he manages to stay afloat. It's probably the lively realism of the main story that saves him, set partly in Canada and partly in the "Cinammon Gardens" middle-class neighbourhoods in Colombo. Although the riots and communal violence happen mostly offstage, we aren't allowed to forget that there are real atrocities going on and large numbers of people suffering. ( )

THERE MAY BE SPOILERS HERE.
As a metaphor for the decades of conflict in Sri Lanka, this story is tragic in many aspects, although ultimately resolved. As a reflection on the immigrant experience in Canada, or queer relationships in the 1980s, it is not uplifting. It all turns out painfully bad, in spite of the narrator Shivan’s somewhat passive attempts to make a life for himself. He is overwhelmed by the circumstances of his early life in Sri Lanka, having to choose between poverty for his family and affluence with a selfish, controlling grandmother. He escapes by immigrating to Canada, but finds that life as a gay student offers him only limited options, in part because of the damage he carries from his early life in Sri Lanka. He tries to make things better by returning to Sri Lanka to accommodate his past, but things get worse. Returning to Canada, he tries a new start which seems to succeed, but he finds his attempt to bury his past fails, and his only recourse is to give up what he has achieved and return to face his nemesis with unconditional compassion. The simplified message seems to be that for Sri Lanka to overcome its murderous civil war past, everyone has to be prepared to give up what they have won and face each other with forgiveness and compassion. Simplified though this is (and I don’t see much in the story that offers a more nuanced reading), it’s pretty inadequate as a political solution for Sri Lanka’s past.
What is really good about this book (and what I loved in his earlier books) is the beautiful writing, and Selvadurai’s ability to create a rich visual sense of the lush environment of Sri Lanka, and in this case its contrast with the dirty, grey, dusty, cold, barren Toronto suburbs (softened a bit by the scenes of UBC and the West End of Vancouver). And Selvadurai writes very effectively about their mental anguish. I can empathize with Shivan’s mother’s horror of life as an immigrant woman, and with Shivan’s wretchedness as a South Asian exotic object in the gay scene or his rage at his grandmother and everything she destroys for him. But this writing is undercut when Selvadurai repeatedly describes a character’s complicated reactions to words or events as if unable to make the characters understood without explanation. While it’s probably true that I would not get the complex interactions on a first reading, I found the repeated explanations intrusive.
More problematic is the unrealistic nature of many of the relationships – I often did not buy into the decisions that many of the characters made, Shivan in particular with his back and forth changes from hating his grandmother and Sri Lanka to adopting them, then hating them again and finally adopting them again. Yes, his character is drawn in many directions by powerful feelings of home, family, love, greed. But Shivan seems to barely think about his sudden changes of direction, he just feels he has to do it. Similarly, other characters, his family and his partners, jump to extremes of feeling without any intrinsic change. It seems that they are driven more by the needs of the plot and the need to fully illustrate the theme of compassion than by any internal sense. They act as if they are puppets more than people (and to an extent they are, driven by the forces in their lives).
So this raises a question of style and authorial intent. In places, I found the style clunky, awkward and repetitive, and I found myself wondering what happened to Selvadurai’s editor. But I know Selvadurai to be a careful and thoughtful stylist and I don’t remember these issues in his previous books. So are the intrusive explanations and repetitive style deliberate, an attempt to recreate in an English novel the ritualistic story telling of more traditional literatures? Selvadurai recounts a variety of Buddhist stories and aphorisms to illustrate the message of compassion. He shifts from Shivan’s present hostility to his emotive narration of the past and then his final resolution. And he frequently shows how books and stories are a key elements in Sivan’s youth and adult life. (Thank you buriedinprint for pointing that out.) I found the writing irritating in places, but if this is really supposed to work as a metaphor for something else, than perhaps it serves a purpose that the writing should call attention to itself, forcing the reader to step back and ask what’s going on here. I cannot say that it made me appreciate the story more, although perhaps it brought out its meaning. As someone else noted, readers care about the characters, not about a metaphor, so it’s the characters who have to work, not the metaphor. ( )

This is an excerpt from a longer consideration of the work which can be read on BuriedInPrint.

***

Shivan’s bookishness will immediately appeal to bookish readers. Books contain memories of the past and embody promise for the future.

When he returns to his childhood room as an adult, there are all his old favourites (the Famous Fives, the Secret Sevens, the Agatha Christies, War and Peace, Pride and Prejudice, and the Jeeves and Woosters).

“[I] sat on the edge of my bed and read the first page [of The Magic Faraway Tree], remembering what joy it was to lie in bed, the fan grating above me, lost in the world of these books.”

When he finds it difficult to fit into his new school, he finds refuge in a used bookstore on Queen West (and eventually finds a pamphlet there — “Are You Gay?” — which opens the door to better understanding his sexuality).

“The smell of old books in Canada was different from the raw-rice odour of books in Sri Lanka. Back in Scarborough on a Sunday evening, I would often pick up one of my purchases and sniff its greenish crushed leaf scent – a promise that my life would not be confined to this suburb, that pleasure awaited me the following weekend too.”

The bookstores and cafes in the Queen West neighbourhood are of vital importance to Shivan, whose world is both literally and figuratively widening with every weekend.

(Later, he recalls first meeting a lover, who was reading Clear Light of Day and who read Banana Yoshimoto’s Kitchen on the first morning they shared. These are not random selections; Desai’s novel considers the scars left by demanding familial relationships, and Yoshimoto’s is a ghost story too.)

Much of The Hungry Ghosts takes place in memory, in Sri Lanka, but the portions of the novel which unfold in Vancouver and Toronto are intricately detailed as well. Even readers who are unfamiliar with the Toronto neighbourhoods will readily distinguish between the varied landscapes therein. (Beyond Queen West and York U, Shivan also explores and/or inhabits Kensington Market, Pearson International Airport, Cabbagetown, and the Bridlewood Mall and environs in Scarborough.)

Still, Sri Lanka is at the heart of the novel.

***

This is an excerpt from a longer consideration of the work which can be read on BuriedInPrint.

The strength of this novel lies in the insightful depiction of setting—Sri Lanka in the 1980s and 1990s; the low-income options available to new immigrants to Canada; how the members of Shivan’s family adapt. The worlds Selvadurai describes are rich and textured. The depiction of the conflict in Sri Lanka between Tamil and Sinhalese factions belong to the unfolding of events in the novel and never comes across as pedantic. This is well-done.
Selvadurai includes Buddhist tales and aphorisms, which initially heighten the South Asian atmosphere, but I found they were repeated too often and too obviously. The story of the hungry ghost—at first interesting—becomes heavy-handed. Ditto the story of the hawk. And how clumsy to invoke the hawk yet again to explain Shivan’s final decision.
Ah yes… explaining. A character’s actions should not have to be explained. A character, if written plausibly—which I believe is Selvadurai’s aim—should seem to act naturally. Selvadurai frequently explains a character’s motivations in an analytical fashion that feels stilted and jars the narrative flow. For example, “He reacted stonily, but I told myself he needed to know, ignoring the undertone of aggression in my forcing him to listen to these preparations.” That Shivan is forcing Michael to listen to him is obvious from the circumstances. The reader does not need the pointer. Selvadurai goes further, explaining that this has an aggressive undertone.
There are many instances of unnecessary explaining in the novel—and I don’t even think they work. Explaining motives doesn’t compensate for writing implausible characters. Again and again, I was not convinced by the characters. They didn’t come across as real-seeming, believable people. The grandmother, who does not speak or acknowledge her daughter with anything but hostility for years, suddenly accepts her love in a single afternoon. The mother, who claims she would have aborted or strangled her son, had she known he would grow up gay, visits her son and his lover whom she accepts whole-heartedly and addresses as “son”. And although I believed in Shivan’s desperation when he felt he was losing Mili and Michael, I did not believe in their relationships.
As I read, I felt this was a plot-generated novel and that the characters were fashioned as tools toward that end. Consequently, the characters and their stories suffer—even if Selvadurai wrestles them toward a conclusion. I wished that Selvadurai had let his characters develop as people, even if that meant dropping the hungry ghost or the hawk metaphors. Readers aren’t touched by the plight of metaphors.
Given the excellent writing in this novel, I regretted that the characters didn’t convince me. ( )