Uncertainty and the Future: A Reading of V.V. Ganeshananthan's Love Marriage

Abstract

This essay thinks of V.V. Ganeshananthan's recent novel Love Marriage (2008) as a novel of movement. Indeed, one finds movement everywhere in the novel—the escape; the flight; the diaspora; the unsettled; acts of interpretation; the embrace of the unknown. Importantly, it is this very environment of uncertainty that Ganeshananthan shows is vital not just to the Sri Lankan Tamil community but the wider Sri Lankan community as a whole. As the figure of Yalini makes clear, far from being a negative or disabling condition, such uncertainty is the key to beginning the process of reconciliation in Sri Lanka.