At the Water's Edge

Rating:
Summary: Amazing debut!
Review: I ended up swallowing At the Water's Edge in one entranced gulp. It's about Sri Lanka, and it's about being an alienated intellectual under conditions of late capitalism, and it's about the human predicament. Jeganathan has a deceptively unaffected style, the pitch is fine-tuned, and the story I liked best, The Train From Batticoloa, manages to convey utter menace and despair without anything "really" happening - I could hardly bear to read on. This is a book with an inner novel struggling to break free...

Rating:
Summary: Amazing debut!
Review: I ended up swallowing At the Water's Edge in one entranced gulp. It's about Sri Lanka, and it's about being an alienated intellectual under conditions of late capitalism, and it's about the human predicament. Jeganathan has a deceptively unaffected style, the pitch is fine-tuned, and the story I liked best, The Train From Batticoloa, manages to convey utter menace and despair without anything "really" happening - I could hardly bear to read on. This is a book with an inner novel struggling to break free...

Rating:
Summary: A beautiful beginning
Review: Pradeep Jeganthan writes with quiet brilliance. This collection draws readers close with its austere, delicate prose, and intimate dialogue. Yet each tightly focused story presents all-too-human interactions alongside observations about the deep despair and violence that emerges from social stratifications of the most jarring and unjust kind.

Rating:
Summary: A beautiful beginning
Review: Pradeep Jeganthan writes with quiet brilliance. This collection draws readers close with its austere, delicate prose, and intimate dialogue. Yet each tightly focused story presents all-too-human interactions alongside observations about the deep despair and violence that emerges from social stratifications of the most jarring and unjust kind.

Rating:
Summary: An Impressive Debut!
Review: This collection of loosely interlinked short stories delicately and movingly explores large themes (violence, gender, class, nationalism, transnationalism, politics, ethnicity) in contemporary Sri Lanka through the microscopic lens of the ordinary and the everyday. The landscape of these stories is fraught with subtle and not-so-subtle tension, foreboding, sadness, loss, anger, violence and fatigue. Each story delicately winds itself around an event or events in everyday life - a fight in a classroom among boys, the desire of a servant girl for trousers, the struggle of a poor working class woman to care for her young daughters, the estrangements of going to college in the US, a train ride, the slippery slope of conversation between friends --- each shot through with the fissures of gender, class, nation, transnation, and ethnicity that underscores the social and political terrain of contemporary Sri Lanka. The language is beautiful, spare, and simple. The deceptive simplicity of these stories and the connections and disconnections between them creates a multifaceted, complex, and deeply felt exploration of the situatedness of our everyday lives along the faultlines that mark the contemporary world. This is an impressive debut collection.

Rating:
Summary: moving and memorable!
Review: This is almost a poem, not a detail or word is wasted. A work that invokes a depth of feeling in me; the beauty of his language is juxtaposed to the grotesqueness of his world, making us appreciate the courage of an author who can show us with such exactness, what that world might be like.