Brotherless Night

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AM: Sashi has four brothers: steady, kind Niranjan, who has almost completed his doctor’s training; quiet Dayalan, who works at the public library and wants to become an engineer; hot-headed, popular Seelan, also at school; and the precocious youngest brother, Aran. The very early part of the book evokes their day-to-day family life on the cusp of the outbreak of the civil war, and then in the rest of the story, we see, through Sashi’s eyes, how the war affects each of her brothers as well as herself. The book thus shows the distinct ways in which the members of a well-to-do family, who happen to belong to an ethnic minority, are caught up in the conflict. In part, it seems to meditate on how individual agency is constrained by war and how the choices people face become limited and difficult. Is that a fair assessment? SM: And this is your first book, and obviously it’s a deeply personal book because the path that your own family took is apparent in it. Novelists voyeur into invented worlds so it should not be read as biography or memoir– AM: The book is a significant departure from your first novel, Love Marriage (2008), in both style and content. Can you say something about how the act of writing this novel compared with that of your first one? I drew on so many different books. Another way to talk about it would be to talk about nonfiction. There’s a book by a guy named Gordon Weiss called The Cage, which has a really good amount of history in it and is written for lay readers. And then my friend Rohini Mohan wrote an astonishing nonfiction book called The Seasons of Trouble that is totally brilliant. There’s now so many excellent books that it’s impossible to have an exhaustive list. But it feels wrong to reduce Brotherless Night to its aesthetic achievements when it feels so crucial, so important, so much more than its sentences or characters, its symbols or arcs. This is a book that feels like a whole world, filled with vital questions and the kind of wrenching heartbreak that stays with you long after the book has closed. I feel certain that if I met Sashi on the street, I would recognize her. This is a novel that works the particular alchemy of the best fiction: it feels like life, but more so.

A beautiful, brilliant book—it gives an accounting of the unimaginable losses suffered by a family and by a country, but it is as tender and fierce as it is mournful. It is unafraid to look directly at the worst of the violence and erasure we have perpetrated or allowed to happen, but is insistent that we can still choose to be better.” —Danielle Evans, author of The Office of Historical Corrections VVG: It seems to me that in war, women are vulnerable from so many angles, over such a long period, and particularly in relation to militarization and sexual violence, and that this does not get enough attention. And women’s resistance to this, which by necessity is often subversive, receives little attention, too. I had heard so many stories of what happened to women during the war, and those were the stories that stayed with me. So those were the stories that had to be in here. In this, again, I looked to The Broken Palmyra: Rajani Thiranagama, one of its authors, wrote in that book about what women endured. It was an example of compassion and solidarity that set the standard for what I wanted to do in Brotherless Night.Here & Now's Deepa Fernandes speaks with V.V. Ganeshananthan about her novel " Brotherless Night," which centers around a Tamil family caught up in Sri Lanka's civil war. V.V. Ganeshananthan is the author of "Brotherless Night." (Sophia Mayrhofer) Book excerpt: 'Brotherless Night'

The best historical fiction novels don’t just tell a great story—they reveal a side of history that their readers may not be familiar with. V. V. Ganeshananthan’s Brotherless Night does just that. . . .[It] is a powerful work of fiction; one that reminds the reader what it means to live through war, and stand as a witness to history.” —Town & Country At its best and simplest, Ganeshananthan can be profoundly moving. She captures the pain of exile poignantly.”— The San Francisco Chronicle VG: My parents are Ceylon Tamils, which means that my mother’s uørand my father’s uørare both in Jaffna. My parents came to the United States in the 1970s, and there was quite a wave of immigration then. That’s very anecdotal, but my father, and my father’s classmates from medical school, many of them emigrated around that time. V. V. "Sugi" Ganeshananthan (born 1980) [1] is an American fiction writer, essayist, and journalist of Ilankai Tamil descent. Her work has appeared in many leading newspapers and journals, including Granta, The Atlantic Monthly, and The Washington Post.VG: Yeah, I guess I’m imagining on the other end, hopefully, people who are Sri Lankan diaspora. I hope that this has special resonance for them. I hope that they’re not the only readers, but I think that many of them will find levels of meaning in it that other folks won’t. One of the things people always talk about with regard to Sri Lanka is which people were there first. And I think that’s a little bit besides the point, because both sets of people, the Tamils and the Sinhalese (who are not even the only two peoples involved in the conflict) really have been there for thousands of years. And then you have other populations: the Indian Tamils or the tea estate Tamils, and then also the Muslim population, which is Tamil-speaking, and you have Burghers, with their mixed European ancestry–so you really have a whole bunch of different populations. And I think if you’re going to talk about who was there longest and that being the reason that you have a claim, then all over the world you’ve got big problems with the feasibility of restoring everyone to where they were first. It’s not really a way to lay claim to land, necessarily.