Minoli Salgado

I have no idea why it's called what it is, and, just to get this out of the way too, it has one other irritating detail which is that Savi, the central character, refers to "Brighthelm" all the time. If she's meant to be pretentious, then why? Apart from that, it's excellent, brave and beautiful. And when you've finished it, you want to nip back to the beginning and re-read the italicised opening.
I'd found it quite annoying to begin with, Savi particularly, but it suddenly improved when her English husband puts her right about what she's seeing in Sri Lanka - more sinister, if she'd only look. From about halfway through - a chapter called "The Leper King", it takes flight. Savi's cousin Renu, seeking truth, explores the issue of story-telling, Savi's father explains Antigone with terrific succinctness from a lawyer's, and loving father's, perspective and we get a bird's eye view of Bradley's extraordinary heartbreaking story wrapped up in the background of the disappearances during the brutal civil war.
The cocky and the innocent are swept away together in that leveller that was the tsunami, and Bradley's story is finished seven years later. Story-telling is silenced though, and so for me it was deeply resonant of 1983 when right from the start of the war, we couldn't find out what was happening until we got back to England. The rehab centre, where work is stymied too because of what can and can't be said, resonates bitterly, with the awful euphemisms and, powerfully, the morphing of language of innocence into meanings of violence, torture and abduction.
Jus edit the "Brighthelm" nonsense - so simply done - and I'd be able to recommend it to people wholeheartedly.… (más)