Mind Picker: A Passage North

He couldn’t help thinking, as the train hurtled closer toward his destination, that he’d traversed not any physical distance that day but rather some vast psychic distance inside him, that he’d been advancing not from the island’s south to its north but from the south of his mind to its own distant northern reaches.

Author Anuk Arudpragasam has a PhD in Philosophy from Columbia University, and in a very pointed way, his novel A Passage North feels more like a framework for Arudpragasam to display his philosophies than a standard work of fiction — and that was okay with me. There’s not much plot here — a young Tamil man, physically and emotionally disconnected from the Sri Lankan civil war by his bourgeois upbringing, receives word that his grandmother’s caregiver has passed away and decides to travel to the heart of the recently ended conflict in order to attend her funeral — but with a narrative that is centered entirely in this Krishan’s mind as he learns the news and makes his journey, in a meandering style that has no dialogue and features paragraphs that last for pages, this is a dense and serious book of ideas with little entertainment value (and again, that was okay with me). Arudpragasam has Krishan muse on big ideas (trauma, history, memory) but also the mundane (the roots of addiction, the violence inherent in the male gaze), and throughout it all, Arudpragasam prods the reader into witnessing the effects of Sri Lanka’s recent history as Krishan is forced to do the same. Not every reader will have the patience or interest for this one, but as the most weighty novel on the 2021 Man Booker shortlist, I wouldn’t be upset if it won.

On the same day that Krishan learns about Rani’s death, he also receives a surprise email from his former lover, Anjum; a beautiful and serious activist whom he met while studying in Delhi. These two separate events send Krishan’s ruminations into different directions; and while I wouldn’t say that his memories of this love affair add much emotion to the story, I do want to note that Arudpragasam is one of those rare authors who writes sex scenes meaningfully (probably because he focusses on the mental progression instead of the mechanics). As for the philosophising, the following might have been a nice sound bite if I chopped it after “unveiled”, but I want to give a sense of how densely Arudpragasam writes (and should also note that this paragraph started a page earlier but I couldn’t put it all in):

Falling in love, or what deserved to be called falling in love, he had realized that night, was not so much an emotional or psychological condition as an epistemological condition, a condition in which two people held hands and watched in silent amazement as the world around them was slowly unveiled, as the falsities of ordinary life began to thin and dissolve before their eyes, the furrowed eyebrows and clenched jaws, the bright colors and loud noises, the surface excitements and disturbances all dropping away so that what remained — time stripped bare -— was the only way the world could truly be apprehended, so that even if this condition did not last, even if it was lost, as eventually it is always lost, to habit or circumstance or simply the slow, sad passage of the years, the knowledge that it has imparted remains, the knowledge that the world we ordinarily partake in is somehow not quite real, that time does not need to pass the way we usually experience it passing, that somehow it is possible to live and breathe and move in a single moment, that a single moment could be not a bead on an abacus of finite length but an ocean that can be entered into, whose distant shores can never be reached.

In addition to Krishan’s thoughts and personal memories, Arudpragasam also includes him recalling, in detail, the plots of several books, films, and traditional poems. I might have found this to be annoying or strange if this were a standard novel, but as an act of witnessing, I found it appropriate to understand the specifics of what influences the author, through Krishan, was using to evaluate his reality. There was much on eyes and vision and witnessing (including some disturbing historical details and interesting funeral practise) and the following contrasts Krishan’s thoughts about Anjum’s beauty and the horrors that Rani experienced during the war:

Maybe it was for this reason, it had occurred to him at that moment, that eyesight weakened with the passing of the years, not because of old age or disease, not because of the deterioration of the cornea or the lenses or the finely tuned muscles that controlled them but because, rather, of the accumulation of a few such images over the course of one’s brief sojourn on earth, images of great beauty that pierced the eyes and superimposed themselves over everything one saw afterward, making it harder over time to see and pay attention to the outside world, though perhaps, it occurred to him now, four years later in the country of his birth, walking at the back of the procession bearing Rani’s body for cremation, Rani who’d seen so much that she had never been able to forget, perhaps he’d been naive back then, perhaps it was not just images of beauty that clouded one’s vision over time but images of violence too, those moments of violence that for some people were just as much a part of life as the moments of beauty, both kinds of image appearing when we least expected it and both continuing to haunt us thereafter, both of which marked and branded us, limiting how far we were subsequently able to see.

Again, so much philosophising felt like Arudpragasam was speaking directly to me instead of filtering his ideas through the experiences of an invented character, and I was okay with that; I found it all interesting and maybe this is the most authentic way to write about atrocity. Further reading that I found interesting: an admiring interview with the author in The Paris Review and a more critical review in The Guardian. Definitely not for everyone but it feels like A Passage North will remain relevant into the future; and that's no small thing.