A combination of memoir and fiction
Bringing Tony Home
Author: Tissa Abeysekara
Scala House Press, USA
A friend of mine recommended this book because she knew of my
affinity for Proust. Tissa Abeysekara shares that poetic digression into
nostalgia, the lingering description of a taste or a sound, and the
endearing affection for mother.
The attention to sensation is similar, even though we follow
Abeysekara's narrator through late twentieth-century Sri Lanka, not
turn-of-the-country France, and the flavour that remains is not a
saturated madeleine but the metallic taste of water tinged with
sardines.
A combination of memoir and fiction, these four stories follow the
adolescence of both the man and his country. In the narrator's
mid-twentieth-century home of Ceylon, the stale breath of four decades
of colonial rule is still discernable.
Locating an individual identity in a land focused on discovering
itself is a daunting task. The narrator is a boy from a privileged
native family whose fortune failed after World War II. The family is
forced to leave behind the Big House and the red Jaguar and Tony, the
faithful family dog.
The boy's mother would have him learn to adapt, and his father would
have him hold onto a former world. These stories explain the
consequences of this division, evidenced in the narrator's internal and
social world. When revisiting the native home of his grandmother, he
encounters a monk on the mountain who asks, "From where are you?" This
question in my language implies much more than your place of residence.
It wants to know your origin."
This is the question the narrator pursues and the one that provokes
the deep introspection of these stories. It isn't only because
Abeysekara has worked as a filmmaker in his native Sri Lanka for over
three decades that this book feels cinematic.
The colours are rich, the light palpable and the combination of
action and dialogue is seamlessly manoeuvred.
By mixing screenwriter's direction into the prose and dialogue of his
first story, he creates an appropriate blend of proximity and distance,
a reflection of his own relationship to the nostalgia that motivates the
book.
Like many post-colonial authors, Abeysekara's metaphors carry
substantial weight. I found myself searching for the colonial face in
the deep descriptions of abandonment, power and the decay of bodies,
from mangy Tony, his weakening father and the rotting man on the rubber
plantation. But Abeysekara is a craftsman who allows subtext to remain
so, and we are able to focus on the intimacy of the narrator's own story
of aging and memory.
When the boy rescues his dog, marching him the distance between the
Big House in Depanama and the poor one in Egodawatta, or when he rejects
his father's gift, rediscovers his adolescent lover or travels to the
central hills where his grandmother was born, we understand that we are
being shown more than just these incidents. We are following the
narrator as he learns, finally, the meaning behind the episodes in his
life.
There is clarity in the distance he has gained and in remembering
things past, much like glimpsing the sea from the mountain top. As the
monk he encounters near his grandmother's home explains, after years of
looking it will happen suddenly: "through that little break in the long
line of hills, like through the eye of a needle, I saw the water, blue
and glistening like a crest gem. Ever since then I see it. I need
glasses to read, but I see far away things."
Abeysekara has paused in the middle of his life to reflect on a world
he no longer recognises, and which has ceased to recognise him, and to
glimpse the world he was unable to see before now.
- Kristianne Huntsberger
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