Love Marriage
V. V. Ganeshananthan

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an interview with V. V. Ganshananthan

reviews of Love Marriage

The Independent

Asian Review of Books

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synopsis

‘In this globe-scattered Sri Lankan family, we speak only of two kinds of marriage. The first is the Arranged Marriage. The second is the Love Marriage. In reality, there is a whole spectrum in between, but most of us spend years running away from the first towards the second.

Among the categories that bleed outside these two carefully delineated boundaries: the Self-Arranged Marriage, the Outside Marriage, the Cousin Marriage, the Village Marriage, the Marriage Abroad. There is the Marriage Without Consent. There is the Marriage Under Pressure. There is even Marrying the Enemy, who, it turns out, is not the Enemy at all.’

Yalini (the narrator and the end product of many marriages) and her generation are the children of their parents. But they live in other countries where the old rules of marriage – Love Marriage, Arranged Marriage and everything in between – do not apply. And parents who left Sri Lanka to escape the ethnic violence and to give their children opportunity, look on helplessly as those children embrace the one opportunity they didn’t intend them to take: Western Marriage.

V. V. Ganeshananthan

has had her writing published in Atlantic Monthly and American Prospect. She is a graduate of Harvard College, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University. Love Marriage is her first novel.

V. V. Ganeshananthan's website

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