Chinaman

Reviews

The strength of the book lies in its energy, its mixture of humour and heartwrenching emotion, its twisting narrative, its playful use of cricketing facts and characters, and its occasional blazing anger about what Sri Lanka has done to itself... Carries real weight...a mixture of, say, CLR James, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Fernando Pessoa and Sri Lankan arrack...essential to anyone with a taste for maverick genius Karunatilaka has a real lightness of touch. He mixes humour and violence with the same deftness with which his protagonist mixes drinks Chinaman is a debut bristling with energy and confidence, a quixotic novel that is both an elegy to lost ambitions and a paean to madcap dreams Chinaman's free-wheeling, zany tempo is part of its charm too. Its picaresque action, mainly based in Colombo and narrated in short bite-sized chunks, gives a vibrant comic pulse to Sri Lankan life, even though Karunatilaka's portrait of the country is scathing...it confirms that cricket, a game that is largely played in the head and inhabits a bizarrely detailed parallel world to our own, is ideally suited to the purposes of fiction Expand reviews