A Calf in Milk and Milk Chocolate by Jagath Kumarasinghe

First let me wish all of you a Happy New Year. Let's hope that 2010 will hold a bright future not only for us but for the country as well.

Sometimes, I wish that I hadn't restricted this blog to only Sri Lankan books. For instance I read Michelle de Kretser's book The Lost Dog, towards the end of last year (she is coming to the Galle Literary Festival this year, I hear). I couldn't understand head or tail why reviewers thought it was such a great book. For me, it was boring, obscure and totally self-indulgent. But as she is not a Sri Lankan author, I can't review her book and must content myself with these few snide remarks!

So off I went to read a truly Sri Lankan author and happily my mother had bought Gratiaen winner Jagatha Kumarasinghe's latest book, A Calf in Milk and Milk Chocolate - isn't that a great title? Even if you never read the book, the title will make you lick your lips. So I took it off to my holiday destination to read in peace and tranquillity. What a mistake!

Jagath is a truly unintelligible writer, for me at least, and all things being relative, I could be very wrong. The stories claim to be advertisements in spiritual realism. Unfortunately, it sounds that if you want to be spiritual you have to be incomprehensible as well. The ten stories are liberally sprinkled with Bible quotes and sound as if they are going to be portentous. Instead they seem to ramble on and on using fairly bizarre language that makes the reader exhausted in a few minutes.

I generally hate reviews that copy chunks out of books, but just in case you haven't read the book this will give you an idea of what I am talking about. For instance, what do you make of the following passage -

"I myself am erected. Even men get themselves erected and that would lead them to beget and I myself am erected on this sprawling grounds, which is quite hilly. Yeah four things say not it is enough; The grave: and the barren womb; The earth that is not filed (sic) with water And the fire that saith Not, it is enough ...The sprawling grounds on which I am erected has many a grave, and on this ground I witness the nature of a barren womb and the nature of fire which is kindling within my belly that never satisfies. The Sinhalese use a nice word for hunger - Badagini - it denotes about the very nature in the belly when the fire within the belly gets roaring you need food to sacrifice for the fire. And I have a chimney which is running upwards and which adds zigzagging curly smoke to the sky where heaven is. ( The Barren Womb Grounds)"

Whoa! Now that is a mouthful. And a complex and confused mouthful to me. The whole book is peppered with such passages full of spelling mistakes and grammar mistakes disguised as philosophy. It is such a perplexing read that you are not sure if the writer intends the mistakes and perhaps they are not mistakes or are they real mistakes. Who knows?

Jagath's first book Kider Chetty Street which won the Gratiaen Prize some years ago was also full of this adhoc English but at least it was sweet. But I take this opportunity to question the judges for I believe they were single-handedly responsible for all sorts of drivel to be written up as Sri Lankan English. When in fact Sri Lankan English is merely English that is written reflecting the way it is spoken and written in Sri Lanka. Jagath is by no stretch of imagination our local James Joyce if that was the implication of the judges.

This latest book of his is neither sweet nor accessible nor does it make sense to me. But who knows perhaps it is a gem for other readers.

I am sorry, I hate giving bad reviews and wished I could give it a better review. But maybe it's just me. Perhaps others will love the book. Let me know.

Christine - A Memoir

I must confess my ignorance. When I first heard of Christine Spittel Wilson and her famous father Dr R.L.Spittel, I was unaware of the formers fame as a writer and the latter’s fame as an anthropologist surgeon. I imagine that it is a common plight among my fellow countrymen today. Many people would, when you ask them if they know about Dr Spittel, vaguely say ‘His name sounds familiar’ but most of them have not read his body of work on the indigenous people of the island of Sri Lanka – the Veddahs. For that matter most people may not have read Christine Spittel Wilson’s eleven other books that she had written previously. I know I had not. I believe for the most part, they are largely forgettable – mushy historical romance, except for Surgeon of the Wilderness, and Brave Island, which were about her father.
But if you read this Christine Spittel Wison’s book, simply titled, Christine – a memoir, it does more than talk to you about her life or her father or romance. It is also the journey of a country.
The book spans the life of a woman from childhood to old age. Christine is in fact still alive at the ripe old age of 95 years, living in the heart of Colombo, next to her childhood house that is the legendary Wycherly.
Apart from being a skillful writer, Christine unwittingly, I suspect, writes a commentary on the changes of Sri Lankan life. The Burgers, privileged during the time of the British, so privileged in fact, I don’t wonder that most of them thought they were in fact the heirs to the British and somewhat superior to the rest of their countrymen, lived for the most part a life of advantage. When reading the book you get a sense that despite Christine’s love and affiliation for the country, there is a sense that this affection only relates to the country and not the people in it.

During our twenty years away the island had changed. Spoken English was being swallowed by Sinhala. The charming small politeness had disappeared and a proud new people had emerged who learned English in their sixth form. (p252)

The book begins with the writer’s childhood where she would watch a bullock drawn water cart suppress the red dust of the road down Alexandra Place by spurting water on it. As a young child she was already aware of her father’s frequent disappearances into the jungle to study and befriend the Veddahs. Her younger sister’s death, when Christine was six, of a medical misadventure when her parents were abroad, left the family scarred and hurt. She attended Bishops College and one day when her father found her speaking to herself because she was lonely, he brought home a little Veddah child to be her companion. As I read that passage, I thought, that he had brought the child home like the way one brings a pet into the family. Therefore it is no surprise when the Veddah child turns bad, began to gamble and steal and eventually was sent to prison for theft. Christine Spittel Wilson writes of the incident without judgement or responsibility which is also perhaps a reflection of the attitude towards the indigenous people of the island, despite her fathers committed work with them.
One of the loveliest passages in the book is when she is taken by her parents as a child to sail from Kalpitiya to Wilpattu on a dhow. Camping on the beach, and eating fresh grilled fish they attended Christmas Eve mass at a tiny Catholic church in the middle of the jungle. Incredible!
Eventually sent to England for her education, Christine returns to the island to get married, live on a tea plantation where one had to ride horses to get about and then finally divorce her husband soon after her daughter is born. She then joins the war effort, becoming becoming a Class lll TWA at Army Command Headquarters. Her description of Colombo then, is ironically similar to what we have now.

Colombo had changed almost overnight. Loops of twisted barbed wire and men in kakhi blocked roads. The racecourse where we had watched somany races, was a heavily camouflaged aerodrome and Wycherly with a white cross painted on the red tiled roof of the nursing home, was now in a strict Security Zone…Troops everywhere. Army vehicles thundering along the towns treets; the Museum where I had done so much research, strange in its camouflage coat. The city filled with officers, troops and yet more arriving daily; people hurrying in their thousands to the hills in over-loaded cars, buses, coaches, bullock carts, bicycles, and on foot, out of Colombo. (p 108)
It was then that Christine meets the man she is to marry, Alistair Wilson – a Scots captain. After some years in Glasgow, they return to live in the island, visiting far flung places with Dr Spittel, and Christine beginning to write seriously. The rest of the book deals with her life after they return to Scotland, then the move to Africa and finally back home to Sri Lanka.
What the book did was to teach me that as always there are different perspectives to a situation and a history. Christine Spittel Wilson writes a beautiful though skewed memoir of her country, her various homes, and in the process gives us a interpretation on the world of that time and this.