When I first started reading, 'Homesick' by Roshi Fernando, it came to be like any other book of displaced families and forgotten voices. Of the second generation and third generations, wanting to search themselves and what they stand for. However, though the book did run on these lines, it had a different voice to it.
'Homesick' is a book of many layers and each layer has a unique and original voice. When I say layers, I but obviously mean the inter-connected stories and at the same time, there is something that tugs at the heartstrings that gives the book the enrichment and understanding it deserves.
'Homesick' is a collection of seventeen stories " telling the tales of Sri Lankan immigrants carving out new lives in sometimes warm and a sometimes hostile Britain. The narrative is cohesive and sticks to the larger framework of the book " of alienation and getting to know the new ways of living. At the same time it is contemporary (the issue will always be at hand, no matter what nationality) and complex, being careful about the emotions and voices of characters. There is a silent boy who experiences life through Charlie Chaplin, a man stuck in the aftermath of a war, to a familys life destroyed by a childs murder, each story comes together and linked by the theme of cultural displacement and its trauma, so to say.
Roshi Fernandos writing is crisp and razor-sharp. She does not sugar-coat emotions, though
08:16 PM, Feb 16, 2012
