The Legend of Pradeep Mathew

Viktor Arnar Ingolfsson The Flatey Enigma Brian FitzGibbon, tr. AmazonCrossing The Flatey Enigma, Viktor Ingolfsson’s sixth mystery novel, is set on a remote Icelandic island during the 1960s. One by one, several inhabitants are murdered and mutilated. The investigation reveals a perplexing connection to a Viking legend, which may provide clues for solving the puzzle. january–february 2013 • 63 Jacek Gutorow The Folding Star and Other Poems Piotr Florczyk, tr. BOA Editions The poems of Jacek Gutorow capture both the joy and melancholy of life through precise illumination of moment-by-moment experience. These translations, skillfully rendered from Polish, are presented en face with the originals. Gutorow’s work as a literary critic, translator, and poet has won him international recognition (see WLT, March 2012, 30). Nota Bene thread, the story of three teens walking a railroad line to view the remains of a mangled body, is delivered with some precision, the subplots meander alongside rather than contribute to the final punch of the conclusion. The narrator’s static persona undermines the impact of the event under consideration and, ultimately, leaves Blue feeling like more of an excursion than an exegesis. At ninety-six pages, its promise may exceed its reach, but the result is provocative enough to keep an eye on Grant as a creator with the potential for greatness. Rob Vollmar University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma Shehan Karunatilaka. The Legend of Pradeep Mathew. Minneapolis. Graywolf Press. 2012. isbn 9781555976118 Shehan Karunatilaka’s first novel brilliantly exemplifies the best capacity of contemporary literature to make the stuff of local lives absolutely relevant, indeed necessary, to readers all over the world. W. G. (Wije) Karunasena, a rapidly aging alcoholic sportswriter obsessed with cricket, spends his last days in Colombo, Sri Lanka, writing scripts for a series of films about Sri Lanka’s greatest cricketers and researching a book about the enigmatic bowler Pradeep Mathew. The films go largely unwatched because of power cuts, and the book remains unfinished at the time of Wije’s death. Suchdisappointmentsarenotunusual for Wije. Although recognized as Ceylon Sportswriter of the Year in 1969, he sums up an uneven career—“I had won a few more awards, done a stint in radio, been sacked twice from reputed newspapers and acquired a reputation as a belligerent drunk”—that extends to his personal life, marked by petty quarrels, heavy drinking, a strained marriage, and estrangement from his son. During his best moments, Wije shows calm insight into his own condition : “There are things that Sheila will never know. She will never know how much I regret. She will never know that I disappoint myself more than I disappoint her. She will never know that even though I love her more than anything, I will always hate myself a tiny bit more.” Written with humor, pathos, empathy, bittersweet cynicism, and bittersweet hope, Karunatilaka’s novel deftly balances the claims of the local and the expectations of the universal . Most explicitly a novel about cricket, complete with statistics, lists of the greatest players, discussions of test matches, descriptions of bowling deliveries, and reports of the cutting insults exchanged among players , the novel deftly leads the reader into its primary setting of Colombo and the contemporary history of Sri Lanka and its fractured society. At the same time, The Legend of Pradeep Mathew addresses numerous dimensions of the human condition that belong to all localities. This novel is as much about love, death, dependency , obsession, hope, fulfillment, and despair as it is about cricket. Karunatilaka brings the local and the universal together in compelling passages: “Explain the differences between Sinhalese and Tamils? I cannot. The truth is, whatever differences there may be, they are not large enough to burn down libraries, blow up banks, or send children onto minefields. They are not significant 64 World Literature Today reviews enough to waste hundreds of months firing millions of bullets into thousands of bodies.” Read this book if you are interested in cricket, Sri Lanka, or South Asian anglophone writing. More urgently, read this book if you want to know what it means to be human in a complex , changing, challenging, and sometimes rewarding and enriching world. Jim Hannan Le

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