‘Longing is objectless desire’

His second novel, which is on the Booker longlist, is a meditation on time, intimacy, and the psychic repercussions of trauma

1The Tamil protagonist of your new novel Krishan tries to construct in words a kind of “private shrine” to the memory of the anonymous lives lost during the Sri Lankan civil war. Are you doing the same thing through the novel?

In a way, I think I am. My work is a kind of eulogy for the many thousands of Tamils who lost their lives during the last two years of the war in Sri Lanka. When there is a political prohibition on mourning, mourning must retreat into semipublic and private spaces, and for me literature is one of those spaces.

2

You begin with a meditation on the passage of time. Is the idea of time central to the novel?

Yes, I would say so. For me time is one of the great mysteries, the way a moment can expand so that it seems to last much longer, or the way months and even years can sometimes flicker by without our knowledge or consent. A lot of the way I organise and structure my writing comes from trying to capture the different ways in which time passes.

3

You tell the story through the protagonist’s memories and philosophical musings, in long, loopy sentences, with no dialogue, and with paragraphs sometimes running into two pages. What marked your narrative choice?

My writing is introspective and essayistic, and in that sense it is philosophical, but academic philosophy as it is practised in American and British universities is neither introspective nor essayistic. In a sense, it was my disappointment with the discipline of philosophy that pushed me toward fiction. I was looking for a way to dwell on life in a way that is philosophical but also intimately tied to the texture of the everyday, and I discovered that there was room to do this in the novel.

4

Is Krishan’s distance from the war, and his realisation that there can be no recovery and closure, close to your own experience?

Dinesh, the protagonist of my first novel (The Story of a Brief Marriage), was subject to all the violence that unfolded over the final months of the war, and, therefore, his experience is very far from my own experience as a Tamil who grew up in Colombo. Krishan, in this sense, is much more similar to me, both in terms of class status and experience, though, of course, he too is a fictional character.

5

How do you approach inner states and inner lives?

I depict interiority in many ways. I generally depict my characters when they are alone. I pay close attention to their bodies as a way of deciphering their moods.

And I also pay a lot of attention to the rhythm and syntax of my sentences, since it is in rhythm and syntax above all that emotional texture is communicated.