![]() Ganeshananthan explains, Because of the school's proximity to the war, Sashi’s experience as a medical student is really different including practicing medicine in ways that she didn. And when she wants to, Ganeshananthan can loosen her restraint to pull off gorgeous sentences. Brotherless Night tells the story of Sashi, a Tamil woman recalling how her education, including her time in medical school, was disrupted by the conflict. The narrator’s deliberative mode of describing her life feels, by the end of the novel, like the only way this story could have been told. And yet, in tone and emotional register, Sashi’s storytelling is a perfect fit for the delicate balance she is forced to walk by virtue of living in a society where running afoul of the dominant forces, saying the wrong thing, leveling too impassioned a rebuke, can prove a capital offense. ![]() Occasionally a precious exclamation mark finds its way into an especially cataclysmic scene, or the narrator might feel the air rushing out of her lungs or her hand involuntarily covering her mouth at the news of a loved one’s death but otherwise the prose is almost unsatisfyingly steady. ![]() Ganeshananthan is a writer of remarkable restraint. Perhaps Ganeshananthan’s finest achievement in Brotherless Night is showing, with meticulous accuracy, what it feels like to inhabit a day-to-day life onto which someone else, from the privilege of great distance, can throw a word like 'terrorism,' and be done. ![]()
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