Layered Text
A. Mangai
THE SWEET AND SIMPLE KIND by Yasmine Gooneratne Perera Hussein Publishing House, 2007, 645 pp., 1000
October 2007, volume 31, No 10

This voluminous novel brings together the literature student, teacher, critic and social thinker in Yasmine Gooneratne. Set very close to the experiences of her generation in the last years of colonialism and early dawn of the new nation called Sri Lanka, the novel unfolds the growing up of Latha from a young girl to that of a scholar with a doctoral degree from Cambridge. The growth of Latha is juxtaposed and contrasted with that of her cousin Tsunami. In fact most of the eventful happenings in the novel are to do with Tsunami—her affairs, family turmoils, psychological trauma of her mother’s decision to leave her husband, marriage with an Indian, accident at the young groom’s yard on the day of their wedding, her ambition to write her novel and her exotic settlement in a Greek island.

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