Many Roads Through Paradise: An Anthology Of Sri Lankan Literature

by Shyam Selvadurai

Shyam Selvadurai pieces together the best of Sri Lankan poetry and fiction in this anthology. From the Sinhala and Tamil writers of the 1950s to diasporic writers of today, from stories of love and longing to those of brutality and death, this masterfully constructed anthology will give you a rich sense Sri Lanka’s history, its people and the stories they have to tell.

536 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2014

About the author

Shyam Selvadurai is a Sri Lankan-Canadian novelist who wrote Funny Boy (1994), which won the Books in Canada First Novel Award, and Cinnamon Gardens (1998). He currently lives in Toronto with his partner Andrew Champion.

Selvadurai was born in Colombo, Sri Lanka to a Sinhalese mother and a Tamil father--members of conflicting ethnic groups whose troubles form a major theme in his work. Ethnic riots in 1983 drove the family to emigrate to Canada when Selvadurai was nineteen. He studied creative and professional writing as part of a Bachelor of Fine Arts program at York University.

Selvadurai recounted an account of the discomfort he and his partner experienced during a period spent in Sri Lanka in 1997 in his essay "Coming Out" in Time Asia's special issue on the Asian diaspora in 2003.

In 2004, Selvadurai edited a collection of short stories: Story-Wallah: Short Fiction from South Asian Writers, which includes works by Salman Rushdie, Monica Ali, and Hanif Kureishi, among others. He published a young adult novel, Swimming in the Monsoon Sea, in 2005. Swimming won the Lambda Literary Award in the Children's and Youth Literature category in 2006. He was a contributor to TOK: Writing the New Toronto, Book 1.

Reviews

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

this book is like your favorite english professor, your best friend, your most missed lover,
this book was very hard for me to find in sri lanka but was the first thing I bought and has become like my Rough Guides to Sri Lanka, dog eared just a bit, pages folded, written on, ect.
This book is six degree of separation because every thing I read takes me to another book, another author, down another path, through another gate, to another destination. And the books poems ect featured in here are not easy to find. i wish I read this book before I went so I would know which books to buy (but in truth, the three coffee table books I bought (Glorious Jaffna, Sri Lankan heritages and the Cultural Triangle of Sri Lanka) were so heavy and big that it would have been almost impossible to bring home more books.
this book has Shyam's personal story about growing up which alone is worth the price of the book. He analyzes the situation in Sri Lanka and to be honest in sri lanka english is not held in favour anymore. Lots and lots of books in Sinhala. Its just such a brilliant book with such carefully chosen pieces. the list of contributors is very interesting, but the copyright acknowledgements is the most interesting because not all of the works came from books, some came from anthologies and some from journals (theres the six degrees again). Everytime i pick up the book, I open up my laptop and say, where is this book going to take me today.

[Lauren · Rating 5 out of 5]

All short story collections with multiple authors are restricted by the fact that the general reader will not vibe with every single author featured, and this book isn't particularly an exception.
However, the curation of this collection is exceptional, and the reading experience is unparalleled. A poignant journey.

[Soo Meng · Rating 5 out of 5]

The stories in this collection together make a vivid picture of Sri Lanka from multiple perspectives and in different time periods. The civil conflict and its origins is there as an undercurrent and sometimes in the foreground, but the stories in the book make it clear that the identity of the country is made up of more than the war.

I struggled to get through some of the stories in the earlier parts of the book, which were older (and therefore written in an older narrative style) but the rest of the collection was amazing. Favourites were A House Divided, The Cat's Table, Hole-in-the-Heart, The American Girl, Pradeep Mathew and Love in the Tsunami (there are a few stories that are edited extracts from larger books).

[JANANI · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well worth a read. The Perfection of Giving, A House Divided, The Rag, Hole In The Heart, The Stealing of a Jeweled Lamp, and A Poet's Fearless Deaths are my favourites.

[Gita Madhu · Rating 3 out of 5]

I picked it up with high hopes but couldn't find the time to do it justice. It's a blend of prose and poetry and a bit bulky to boot. A must have for anyone who wants to somehow glimpse writings from all over the world.

As a tourist destination, Sri Lanka attracts many and this would be wonderful for anyone who is planning a visit.

I've evolved a way to keep track of what I'm reading and that's to take pictures of significant pages or passages. I can see how valuable a Kindle would be to a person like me! Yes, I'd love to have one on my Birthday!

To return to the anthology, the first two stories are actually excerpts from longer works and don't really breathe well on their own. There was a naughty one somewhere in the middle that was slightly entertaining. Towards the end, some stories deal with the civil war but failed to grip. As I said above, I have failed to do this book justice and would hope to sit with it at leisure.

There's a nice section about the authors which makes it a valuable resource.

I repeat: this book would have been so much more enchanting if read on a Kindle as the physical book is unwieldy in size and, to an extent, in content.

There's a whole lot of authors! So, all in all, it's an ambitious work and, just perhaps, it hasn't quite come together for me.

I still think I'd love to come across this book in an airport library (do they have those?) or in a hotel - hotels simply must have a bookshelf at least if not a library. Westin, Bali, had one.

Sri Lanka is a country whose stories would be most valuable when narrated by native voices, turbulent, sensuous, austere, verdant, violent, island voices, a Buddhist country, war, strife, love, tea, tsunami, hills, rivers, fragrances, aromas, families, lives, loves... I've sold myself on this book and may even re-review it here

[Shaha Hashim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved everything about this book- the introduction, Singhalese and Tamil voices, historical content, people and feelings, the collection and order of all the pieces. This has become my favourite book on Srilanka, treasured and to read from time to time.