Mirage - Softcover

Bandula Chandraratna

3.32 out of 5 stars

121 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0953240207 ISBN 13: 9780953240203

Publisher: Serendip Publishers, 1998

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There is a simplicity to Mirage, this story of impoverished lovers whose brief happiness is cut short in the harshest of ways, which belies the skill of the telling. Set in a closed desert kingdom in our own times, it tells how Sayeed, a good but unexceptional man, finds love with a woman who would have been beyond his reach had not poverty and widowhood brought her low. It is a classic tale, in the style of D.H. Lawrence and Thomas Hardy, and set to become a kind of modern classic. The scene is set with unpretending tenderness: the hospital where Sayeed works, the kindness of his friends, the struggle to make a decent home for his new wife Latifa and her child, the bustle of his brother's home, the simple wedding. Heat, dirt and squalor are the backdrop to the tragedy, Latifa, confused and far from home, the terrified victim. Petty jealousy, sexual desire and religious fervour combine to bring her down and to leave the reader stunned. As the book ends, there is a sense of an unfini shed story - what will become of Latifa's child? How will she survive in the oppressive world her mother has left her in? Mirage emerged from 1999's Booker judging as the unexpected favourite of the chairman, Gerald Kaufman, and other judges, just missing the final shortlist. It was later chosen by two of the judges, Boyd Tonkin and Shena Mackay as one of their books of that year. What made this championing of a first novel all the more surprising was the fact that it had been published by the author himself. Chandraratna plans to take up the story of Sayeed through the eyes of Latifa's little daughter Leila in the second volume of a proposed trilogy.

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About the Author

Bandula Chandraratna has worked in hospitals in Saudi Arabia and the UK and p

From Booklist

A purely told tale of humble lives, Chandraratna's first novel is as spellbinding as it is devastating. Orphaned as a boy, Sayeed has sacrificed his own happiness to care for his younger brother, leaving him and his growing family their parents' home and land in a verdant village in an unnamed Muslim country to move to the city, where he lives precariously in a dusty shantytown and works as a hospital porter. On a visit home, he surprises himself by agreeing to his brother's plan for him to marry a young widow, hoping fervently that she and her little daughter won't find city life too odious. Fablelike in its clarity and careful pacing, lushly beautiful and exquisitely touching in its lingering descriptions, Chandraratna's quietly powerful and tragic tale slowly and inexorably reveals the malevolence brewing beneath the surface of this spare but volatile world as traditional ways of life break down and jealousy, resentment, and vindictive religious extremism intensify. Self-published in England, Chandraratna's tale just missed being short-listed for the Booker Prize. Donna Seaman
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