The Match
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Product Description
Scotsman
`Gunesekera has that essential gift of the novelist: the ability
to make words live, to create life on the page'
to make words live, to create life on the page'
Review
'Gunesekera has that essential gift of the novelist: the ability to make words live, to create life on the page' Scotsman 'So complete a match ... between empathy and artistry, between lively observation and intellectual grasp of cultural tensions, always surprises' Independent 'Gunesekera is strikingly adept at delineating the landscape of rootlessness ... [He] has a gentle, generous, deceptively light touch and a quiet genius for comic set pieces' Sunday Times 'Few novelists have so skilfully underlined the beauty of patience as a redeeming virtue' Times Literary Supplement
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This book is a satisfying piece of global fiction. It brings 3 island countries to life: the Philippines, Sri Lanka, and Britain. The story is of a Sri Lankan who grows up in Manila and moves to London where he raises a family.
Cricket, which is huge in Sri Lanka but unknown in Americanised Manila, ties the story together. Also, along the way, our central character takes up photography. Personally I prefer football to cricket but, as a photographer, I could learn from cricket. The story tells of the passion, tolerance, and - last but not least - the patience necessary to live a life.
Cricket, which is huge in Sri Lanka but unknown in Americanised Manila, ties the story together. Also, along the way, our central character takes up photography. Personally I prefer football to cricket but, as a photographer, I could learn from cricket. The story tells of the passion, tolerance, and - last but not least - the patience necessary to live a life.
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
Though the dates don't tally exactly, I seem to detect a strong autobiographical element in this novel. Our lives are often made up of a string of events that are connected with each other only because they happened to us, but not because there is an inner logic or development about them. At any rate, that is how the life of Sunny Fernando strikes me. He was born around 1956 in what was then still called Ceylon; his mother had died in Colombo when Sunny was eight; he had then moved to the Philippines (1967) with his father, who was originally a journalist; they get up a cricket team in a country where they don't play cricket (1970); the teenage boy fantasizes about a girl he is too tongue-tied to talk to properly; he discovers something that makes him turn against his father (1972); he goes to England (1973) to study and stays there; he finds it hard to make contacts there except, initially, with a fellow Sri Lankan in London who takes him to see his parents and their Sri Lankan friends in Birkenhead; up there he is again captivated by a girl, Clara, but this time he eventually overcomes his timidity (1983); he becomes a father (1986); he takes up and makes some money from photography (something about capturing moments before time swallowed them up, particularly his son's childhood before his adolescence would create distance between them as it had in the case of his own youth) and then from selling cameras; there is a family camping holiday on the Welsh coast (1994) - the first time we find Sunny philosophizing and reflecting on the meaning of life and the slipping away of time. It is at this rather late point, just over half way through, that the novel acquires some depth and direction. Sunny feels the need to recapture something of his past by visiting the country of his birth (1995) during a brief truce between the government and the Tamil Tigers - only to find that the house in which he had spent his childhood like so much else of his world, had disappeared; he goes into depression as the world sped past him and as the dreaded distance between himself and Mikey, his son, did indeed appear; then a team from Sri Lanka comes to England for a test match and then a one-day international against India (2002). Cricket has appeared only sporadically between that scratch game in Manila and this test match over thirty years later. Sunny goes to see the matches, and there (we are told) all sorts of things fall into place for him at last. Frankly, I didn't get it.
Every one of these stages is full of incidents, some trivial, some less so. There are some good set pieces, a few of them quite funny; many evocative descriptions and nice turns of phrase. Other characters in the story very well drawn (except, oddly enough, for Clara, who never really comes alive. Is it because she is the only English person among them?). Throughout, in the background, there are reports of political violence, both in the Philippines and in Sri Lanka. And the British political scene. And 9/11.
I thought it was a patchy book - a little desultory in the first half, more reflective in the second, partially elusive (to me) in its message at the end.
Every one of these stages is full of incidents, some trivial, some less so. There are some good set pieces, a few of them quite funny; many evocative descriptions and nice turns of phrase. Other characters in the story very well drawn (except, oddly enough, for Clara, who never really comes alive. Is it because she is the only English person among them?). Throughout, in the background, there are reports of political violence, both in the Philippines and in Sri Lanka. And the British political scene. And 9/11.
I thought it was a patchy book - a little desultory in the first half, more reflective in the second, partially elusive (to me) in its message at the end.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
1 review
Time's wingéd chariot
8 April 2012
Format:Hardcover
Though the dates don't tally exactly, I seem to detect a strong autobiographical element in this novel. Our lives are often made up of a string of events that are connected with each other only because they happened to us, but not because there is an inner logic or development about them. At any rate, that is how the life of Sunny Fernando strikes me. He was born around 1956 in what was then still called Ceylon; his mother had died in Colombo when Sunny was eight; he had then moved to the Philippines (1967) with his father, who was originally a journalist; they get up a cricket team in a country where they don't play cricket (1970); the teenage boy fantasizes about a girl he is too tongue-tied to talk to properly; he discovers something that makes him turn against his father (1972); he goes to England (1973) to study and stays there; he finds it hard to make contacts there except, initially, with a fellow Sri Lankan in London who takes him to see his parents and their Sri Lankan friends in Birkenhead; up there he is again captivated by a girl, Clara, but this time he eventually overcomes his timidity (1983); he becomes a father (1986); he takes up and makes some money from photography (something about capturing moments before time swallowed them up, particularly his son's childhood before his adolescence would create distance between them as it had in the case of his own youth) and then from selling cameras; there is a family camping holiday on the Welsh coast (1994) - the first time we find Sunny philosophizing and reflecting on the meaning of life and the slipping away of time. It is at this rather late point, just over half way through, that the novel acquires some depth and direction. Sunny feels the need to recapture something of his past by visiting the country of his birth (1995) during a brief truce between the government and the Tamil Tigers - only to find that the house in which he had spent his childhood like so much else of his world, had disappeared; he goes into depression as the world sped past him and as the dreaded distance between himself and Mikey, his son, did indeed appear; then a team from Sri Lanka comes to England for a test match and then a one-day international against India (2002). Cricket has appeared only sporadically between that scratch game in Manila and this test match over thirty years later. Sunny goes to see the matches, and there (we are told) all sorts of things fall into place for him at last. Frankly, I didn't get it.
Every one of these stages is full of incidents, some trivial, some less so. There are some good set pieces, a few of them quite funny; many evocative descriptions and nice turns of phrase. Other characters in the story very well drawn (except, oddly enough, for Clara, who never really comes alive. Is it because she is the only English person among them?). Throughout, in the background, there are reports of political violence, both in the Philippines and in Sri Lanka. And the British political scene. And 9/11.
I thought it was a patchy book - a little desultory in the first half, more reflective in the second, partially elusive (to me) in its message at the end.
Every one of these stages is full of incidents, some trivial, some less so. There are some good set pieces, a few of them quite funny; many evocative descriptions and nice turns of phrase. Other characters in the story very well drawn (except, oddly enough, for Clara, who never really comes alive. Is it because she is the only English person among them?). Throughout, in the background, there are reports of political violence, both in the Philippines and in Sri Lanka. And the British political scene. And 9/11.
I thought it was a patchy book - a little desultory in the first half, more reflective in the second, partially elusive (to me) in its message at the end.
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