Wave is unflinching as it charts the depths of grief, but it s also, miraculously, a beautifully detailed meditation on the essence of happiness. I came away from this stunning book with a new appreciation of life s daily gifts. I urge you to read Wave. You will not be the same person after you ve finished. Wave is a haunting chronicle of love and horrifying loss. The heartfelt writing manages to render the absence of the loved ones the void, and the pain of it in such a beautiful way that what was lost emerges as a new life form, one whose flesh and sinew are memory, sorrow, and undying love.
Sonali Deraniyagala was born and raised in Colombo, Sri Lanka. She has an undergraduate degree in Economics from Cambridge University and a doctorate in Economics from the University of Oxford. She lives in New York, and North London. Evelyn Waugh: A Life Revisited. Carl Rogers: A Critical Biography. The Hairy Dieters: Fast Food. My Life with Wagner. I mean one minute I was at home in north London, getting the boys ready for school, the next people were comparing my life to the Holocaust.
People would tell her there was a reason she survived, but she never bought that. Or they would say, Steve would want you to be happy, or the kids would want you to be happy. But actually, she says: "When I thought about it, and if I put him in my situation, I'd kick his head in if I thought he was happy without us!
Her therapist is a medical doctor, but has written on aspects of Buddhist psychology. Sonali is sceptical about a lot of it, but if any frame of reference helped at all, she says, it was just that sense of "finding a space to feel suffering as well as joy, and realising one was an aspect of the other. To open yourself to everything. The hardest thing was to reimmerse myself in that.
Just to think what it was like back in the kitchen, with Vikram and Malli messing around and Steve making an omelette or something. You have so many defences preventing you from imagining that. You think you will go mad with wanting it back. One of the things that comes home fully in reading the book is that all childhoods are about transience, every day, and all parenting is about mourning little bits of that passing. Reading it, I tell her, I was thinking, as I imagine many readers will think, could I do this?
Would I be able to bring to life these details of fleeting family life, little paradises lost? I mean, it's what you do all the time at the end of the day, talking about the kids with each other, guess what Vik did, you should have seen Malli do that… We are always storing those bits up, and they are what came back to me.
I don't have anything more profound to say than that. It's funny, I don't use the word love much in the book. But of course that is what it is about, their love for me and mine for them. We walk out into the late morning sun in search of somewhere to go for lunch. I'm struck again by the disjunction of her lives, the one she carries in her head, and the one that rushes insistently around her on these New York streets, and the way she has sought to reconcile them.
One of the stranger things that Sonali discovered about the wave came from a friend who happened to speak to the man who found her immediately after the water had begun to subside. When he got to her, Sonali was, the man recalled, covered in thick black mud, coughing blood, and spinning around and around on the spot like a child would to make herself dizzy. She has no recollection of that, but supposes it must be true, and when she talks about what came after, she often uses the phrase "spinning" to describe her world.
Could this really be my life? That spin that she first felt in the water was the most destructive of centrifugal forces; it separated her from every single thing she held dear. She has a forensic eye for words these days, and the one she most often uses to describe the horror of that day is "dispersal"; everything close to her suddenly became randomly scattered.
Like the green shirt of her son Vikram, the sleeve still rolled up as he liked it, which she found in one of her foraging missions to Yala many months after the water had gone, or the beloved cricket ball that the boys used to bowl to Steve, king of dads, which she braces herself to weigh in her hand back in the London house. People talked to Sonali a lot about memorials over the years: there is an annual lecture in Steve's name at the Policy Studies Institute, where he worked as a research fellow, but though she loves to attend, it has never seemed enough, too partial.
She wanted something weightier, with more substance, more alive. Her writing surprised her by offering her something of that possibility. It allowed her to collect up all the dispersed traces of her family, the innumerable scattered fragments that proved they had lived and loved, and hold them in one place again.
Her world as a result is steadier, has stopped spinning so wildly. She is not sure where the future will take her.
She spends more time now in the house in Friern Barnet, which is still exactly as it was. People come in and imagine they have just stepped out, which I love. There are a few telltale signs, of course: a Guardian from , from the weekend before we left. But it is still us…". She can't imagine living there full time but loves now to come and go. And of course she will carry on writing. When I came to New York I was on all kinds of medications. When I started writing I got rid of all of them. I just decided to try without them.
I wonder if she can begin to think at all of her life as not just befores and afters but as a single piece? She thinks about it. But I guess your disposition doesn't change. I remember being furious when one friend came to see me and reported back that I was still the same Sonali. I wrote a long email saying I wasn't, I never would be the same.
I'd lost too much of who I was. But she was right in a way. And I know now they will never stop being part of me as they always were. Tim Adams. Sonali Deraniyagala lost her husband, children and parents in the Indian Ocean tsunami, and was maddened with grief. Join Goodreads. Combine Editions. Sonali Deraniyagala Average rating: 3. Want to Read saving…. Want to Read Currently Reading Read. Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Quotes by Sonali Deraniyagala. But until then how do l tame my pain?
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