Sandglass

Jacqueline Carey

Part of the singularity of The Sandglass is the way it expresses [a] splintering process through the virtually equal...attention given to the many secondary characters...[T]here is no doubt that this is an important novel....It pesters, it cross-pollinates, it lingers. —The New York Times Book Review

Pico Iyer

[An] examination of how independent Sri Lanka devolved into bloody ararchy and its people got scattered around the globe. Its protagonist. . .is twilight, and its brief sections. . .tell us, unequivocally, that time is running out.
— Time Magazine

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Mysterious disappearances--of individuals, families, nations and ways of life--haunt this poignant tale of two feuding Sri Lankan families and their intertwined destinies, at home and in England, since the 1950s. Piecing together diaries and anecdotes, narrator Chip, a Sri Lankan expatriate in London, ruminates on the sorrowful story of his friends Pearl and Jason Ducal and their adult son, Prins, whose lives have been marred at every turn by the malign influences of their Colombo neighbors, the Vatunases, a dynasty of corporate robber-barons. Jason's 1956 death in an ostensible freak accident facilitates a business coup that cements the Vatunases' ascendancy. Now family matriarch Pearl has died, an event that opens the novel in present-day London. Deeply affected by this new tragedy, Chip reflects sadly on mortality, identity, exile and the passage of time. Although Booker finalist Gunesekera's The Reef; Monkfish Moon prose becomes a bit turgid in some of this reflection, he thoroughly involves the reader in the Ducals' plight and skillfully evokes their disparate worlds.

Library Journal

Expatriate Sri Lankan matriarch Pearl Ducal dies in London just days before her first great-grandchild is born in the same hospital. Her wandering son and only surviving child, Prins, descends upon his old home in Sri Lanka, agitated by the mystery of his dissolving family. The result is a tale replete with silences, deaths, and the imposing presence of the entrepreneurial, predatory Vatunas clan, whose grand homestead nearly encircled the eccentric dream home of Prins's late father, Jason. Narrator Chip, Prins's contemporary and a longtime confidante of Pearl's, is swept into the Ducal enigmas by virtue of association. Weaving memories of conversations with Pearl through two days of talks with Prins, Chip emerges with the melancholy story of tragic Jason, long-suffering Pearl, and their unraveling family. A tender, accomplished novel by Booker Prize finalist Gunesekera (Reef, LJ 2/1/95); highly recommended.--Janet Ingraham Dwyer, Columbus, OH

Salon

Just a teardrop off the southernmost tip of India, the island nation of Sri Lanka has always existed in the shadow of its larger neighbor. So it's no surprise that Sri Lankan author Romesh Gunesekera has remained a somewhat peripheral figure as American readers discovered Indian fiction during the past year, a trend culminating in the runaway bestsellerdom of Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things. In Max Vadukul's group photo of contemporary Indian authors in a recent special issue of the New Yorker, Gunesekera stands somewhat uncomfortably on the edge.

Furthermore, Gunesekera's new novel, The Sandglass is a story that's as much about London where Gunesekera now lives as it is about Sri Lanka. The year is 1993, and Prins Ducal, a middle-aged Sri Lankan hotel entrepreneur, arrives for the funeral of his mother, Pearl, who left Sri Lanka nearly 40 years before, after the death of her husband, Jason. In London, Pearl was befriended by Chip, the book's self-effacing narrator, a rootless Sri Lankan. As they prepare for the funeral service, Prins and Chip try to make sense of the Ducals' knotty family history, exchanging stories that Prins only dimly recalls and that Chip has been fed over the years by Pearl as she sat in her small, yellowing flat, knitting and watching old movies on TV.

As the novel unfolds, we learn of the Ducals' long-standing rivalry with the Vatunas family, and of old Esra Vatunas' shady business dealings, designed to prevent Jason Ducal from acquiring a local distillery. At the center of this web of stories is Jason's suspicious death in 1956 -- officially an accident -- a mystery that Prins is determined to solve. Meanwhile, Prins and Chip trace the fates of the various Ducal and Vatunas offspring, as they have drifted through the ruins of a Sri Lanka devastated by relentless civil war.

The melancholy that merely colored Gunesekera's earlier work, the story collection Monkfish Moon and the novel Reef, threatens to overwhelm The Sandglass, so preoccupied are Prins and the narrator with making sense of ultimately unknowable mysteries. Why did Jason die? What do Pearl's life and death mean? Where is "home" for the men and women who hover between a Sri Lanka that no longer exists and an England far from the fictional universe of Pearl's beloved Father Brown mysteries? "You know, nothing really fits," exclaims Prins. "It all pretends to fit, like someone has constructed it all for us to see exactly how the thing works, but really it is done to hide everything. To lead us completely in the wrong direction." Gunesekera might have leavened these existential musings with a defter blend of comedy, as he did in the perfectly realized Reef -- his masterpiece to date. Still,The Sandglass remains a heartbreaking and exquisite novel, wise to both the tragedies and absurdities of the modern condition. -- Oct. 1, 1998

Island Magazine

Sri Lankan Romesh Gunesekera has a magical way with words, and though The Sandglass treads some of the ground covered in his debut novel, Reef, the writer spins his tale with such delicacy that it is wonderfully fresh. Gunesekera builds his story - about a coterie of Sri Lankan emigrants in London - around a single day: Like grain upon grain of sand in an hourglass, their revealed secrets, fears, and desires mount into a fragile heap of memory. And as the details accumulate, Gunesekera shapes a moving portrait of expatriate friends whose memories move back and forth between the trembling beauty of their beloved homeland and the bitter cold of their northern refuge.

Kirkus Reviews

A beautifully crafted second novel from Booker finalist and Sri Lankan-born Gunesekera (Reef) tells of two warring families in contemporary Sri Lanka. Like the reluctant confession of a wayward spouse, the truth of the tale here is learned incrementally, teased out by inference and gradual revelation. Nor are there any stunning denouements—only a pervasive sadness as two accomplished families, like Sri Lanka's two real-life warring factions, continue harming one another.

The story of the feuding Ducal and Vatunas families is narrated by Chip, himself a Sri Lankan who immigrated in 1975 to London (where he lived in Pearl Ducal's apartment). A year after Pearl's death, Chip, in Sri Lanka on business, is anxious to catch up with Pearl's son Prins, whom he suspects has gone into hiding for fear of his life. Cutting back first to the previous year, when Prins flew to London for his mother's funeral, Chip continues afterward moving back and forth through time and place as he tells what he learned or intuited of a story beginning back in the 1930s, when Pearl married Jason Ducal. Jason turned out to be an astute businessman, but when he bought his dream house—next to the Vatunas family's compound—the Ducal family's troubles began: Esra, the Vatunas patriarch, conspired to undercut a business venture of Jason's and was probably responsible for his murder in 1956; Esra's son Tivoli may have been Pearl's lover; and his grandson Dino seemed determined to block Prins' marriage to Lola Vatunas, Dino's daughter, and tried to deter Prins' efforts to discover who killed Jason.

As Pearl hints in deathbed reminiscences and in letters found afterward, living near the Vatunasfamily permanently blighted the Ducals' lives. Elegiac in mood and rich in evocations of character and setting, a novel that gracefully limns the origins of a domestic—and national—tragedy.