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NOONTIDE TOLL PDF, EPUB, EBOOK Romesh Gunesekera | 256 pages | 07 May 2015 | GRANTA BOOKS | 9781783780174 | English | London, United Kingdom ‘Noontide Toll’, by Romesh Gunesekera | Financial Times Accessibility help Skip to navigation Skip to content Skip to footer Cookies on FT Sites We use cookies opens in new window for a number of reasons, such as keeping FT Sites reliable and secure, personalising content and ads, providing social media features and to analyse how our Sites are used. Manage cookies. Review by Randy Boyagoda July 4, Reuse this content opens in new window. Promoted Content. Close drawer menu Financial Times International Edition. Search the FT Search. Lorenzo Pavolini , sec. Roberto Cazzola , ter. Eugenio Baroncelli , sec. Milo De Angelis , ter. Edoardo Albinati , sec. Paolo Di Paolo , ter. Andrea Canobbio , sec. Valerio Magrelli , ter. Irene Chias , sec. Giorgio Falco , ter. Nicola Lagioia , sec. Letizia Muratori , ter. Marcello Fois , sec. Emanuele Tonon , ter. Stefano Massini , sec. Alessandro Zaccuri , ter. Alessandra Sarchi Poetry prize: Antonio Riccardi But in a story involving a fashion shoot in a cricket stadium, the various parts, including a mob of schoolboys who unexpectedly swarm the pitch, all seem to bear more than one fixed meaning. It is a sort of status symbol that they cannot resist. Not all foreigners do. NOONTIDE TOLL | Kirkus Reviews The convention that the rich regard the people they hire as invisible has allowed many authors before Gunesekera to embed servants as the reporters of stories and the rooters-out of secrets. But each story here poses the question in some closely related form, rendering the dynamic predictable. Certain characters and features blatantly embody the past Vasantha himself; an inn that Leonard Woolf visited in , now scheduled for renovation , while others betoken the future a flippant teenager, ignorant of history; various personifications of carpetbagger capitalism. One measure of literary merit is how well a work resists simple thematic summary. But in a story involving a fashion shoot in a cricket stadium, the various parts, including a mob of schoolboys who unexpectedly swarm the pitch, all seem to bear more than one fixed meaning. Maurizio Cucchi , ter. Paolo Di Stefano , sec. Mario Fortunato , sec. Toni Maraini , ter. Andrea Bajani , sec. Antonio Scurati , ter. Mario Desiati , sec. Osvaldo Guerrieri , ter. Lorenzo Pavolini , sec. Roberto Cazzola , ter. Eugenio Baroncelli , sec. Milo De Angelis , ter. Edoardo Albinati , sec. Paolo Di Paolo , ter. Andrea Canobbio , sec. Valerio Magrelli , ter. Irene Chias , sec. Giorgio Falco , ter. Nicola Lagioia , sec. Letizia Muratori , ter. Marcello Fois , sec. Emanuele Tonon , ter. Stefano Massini , sec. Alessandro Zaccuri , ter. Alessandra Sarchi Poetry prize: Antonio Riccardi Translation Award: Evgenij Solonovic Identity and dialectal literatures award: Gialuigi Beccaria e Marco Paolini Romesh Gunesekera - Literature For those who have unanswered questions and personal traumas, moving on is not so easy. For others, there is the natural desire to get as much distance as possible from a bad time. And, for a few, those bad moments are tied up with guilt and complicity, as Vasantha observes, which may not let them move on. What makes Vasantha different? Why is he so curious about the world, and about his countrymen? He is on the road a lot. He has time to think. He meets a range of people and is often forced to test his assumptions and prejudices. If you are a reader, something similar happens as you embark on a book. Luckily, not everyone is asleep at the wheel. Is that dead rat in the hotel dining room symbolic of something larger? Some things grow larger in the mind, especially in memory. Fiction needs to work with that. There is more than one animal killed in the story, and there are an untold number of human deaths that we are aware of in the area of the Spice Garden Inn. Even the random death of a roadkill will make any driver think, if only briefly, about deeper things. Later in the same story, Vasantha makes one of many apparently casual yet invariably pointed comments about how war has affected his country. It seemed as though the transport of a nation had been gathered here and turned to scrap. My friend has a car where every component has been salvaged from a different vehicle. But I am afraid war seems to have changed the attitudes of the younger generation. They have become more used to the idea of a disposable society. The landscape through which Vasantha drives his Chinese party is badly scarred by lingering traces of war. Gunesekera, who often echoes the great RK Narayan , has no difficulty in allowing his narrator to speak freely, yet is also generous in evoking vivid images, particularly of the wreckage of war littering the landscape. For all the free discussion of the new tourism, history provides a haunting backdrop. I am always in the van. And wherever I go in the van, I reach the edge and have to turn back like an ant on a floating leaf. I go everywhere in this country [Sri Lanka], but nowhere in my mind. Maybe you can never really leave the past behind. It is in your head and outside your control. By far the strongest, stand-alone story in the book is Roadskill. It is set in Kilinochchi, formerly the capital of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and where they had held their press conferences. Dressed — rather pointedly — in a grey trouser suit, she is further indication of how change has supplanted tradition. Her welcome is terse. The scar on her neck and her callused trigger finger suggest she had previously been a soldier. Although not the best of the versatile Gunesekera, this minor work is an interesting collection, marked by several illuminating narrative asides. Vasantha begins the book as a pragmatist. There is nothing more to it. One might level the same criticisms as those directed at the heroes of The White Tiger and Slumdog Millionaire. What driver or tour guide born of the subcontinent's working classes would speak like this? This matters a great deal to some, less so to me. That said, Vasantha serves more as a point-of-view device than as a rounded protagonist. While there is mention of his past, his family and his regrets, Noontide Toll is less about his journey than about those he transports. Noontide Toll comes from the same wellspring as Gunesekera's early work, the Booker-shortlisted Reef and the underrated Monkfish Moon. In all three books, simple stories told in delicate prose reveal curious insights, powerful ideas and painful losses. Many Sri Lankan writers face internal dilemmas when describing this island of contradictions. New Book by Man Booker Prize Shortlisted Author Romesh Gunesekera to Hit Stands in November May 18, Audrey rated it liked it. Vasantha is a taxi driver in post-Civil war, post-Tsunami Sri Lanka. As he tries to make sense of the "new" Sri Lanka, his interactions with his western clients cause confusion and disillusionment. This novel provides a glimpse into the physical scars on the landscape and people as well as the feeling of upheaval or imbalance in the country at large. Quietly beautifully funny, sad and at times, shocking. Poetic in that every word is worth its weight. Characters sketched lightly, as seen through the eyes of a taxi driver, Vasantha, who has the measure of his passengers, telling their stories in the context of the recent troubled history of Sri Lanka. Wonderful real life stories of modern Sri Lanka after the 'Troubles'. Subtle writing of serious themes done in a non threatening way. Really enjoyed this, especially after traveling around Sri Lanka many years ago in a van seeing all the nooks and crannies during the time of troubles. I just couldn't get through it. It did not work for me.. It's extremely hard for me to DNF a book but this just wasn't working. Aug 16, The Bamboo Traveler rated it it was amazing Shelves: literary-fiction , sri-lanka. In , Japan was a dump. Nobody thought the Japanese could make even a cup of tea anymore, but now Toyota is the biggest car company in the world. Its a funny business, I tell them. No one knows who will have the last laugh. Look at Germany, same thing. German tourists are rolling in it now. Their chancellor is the boss of Europe. It makes you wonder about this business of defeat and victory. I just love this book. I love the style of writing. It's witty and sharp. I love how philosophical it is. Vasantha retired early from his office job, bought a used van, and started a business of driving tourists, NGO employees, business people, expatriates, etc. Each chapter of the book covers one ride. In chapter 1, it's some Dutch tourists visiting the fort in Jaffna, in chapter 2 priests visiting an army base, in chapter 3 a Sri Lankan Tamil who immigrated many years ago and his son visiting the father's childhood home, and so on. I sometimes don't need a lot of action or suspense in my books. Sometimes books that just make me think deeply about an issue or raise questions that I myself have often wondered about spark my interest. Truth, lies your government tells you, forgiveness, history, forgetting the past, holding onto the past versus moving into the future. These are all things that I think about and ask myself. Fake news! Fake new! This book brought up so many questions about the importance of truth. Can a country move forward and can it heal if it continues to cover up the truth? Can a country sustain itself if some of its citizens still feel wronged? What happens when no one knows the truth of what happened? How important is truth? How important is justice? There are several standout chapters.