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Literary Review
Eternity in a frame
The Match, Romesh Gunesekera, Bloomsbury, 2006, p.308, paperback, Rs. 495.
THE MATCH begins, more or less, and ends with a cricket match. Two very different kinds of matches. Straddling the two is Sunny Fernando's journey towards finding a personal equilibrium with his world.
For, it is a ruptured world in many ways. A journalist father in downtown Manila who sees causes everywhere, has words for world-shaking events but who cannot connect at a personal level, either in the past with his wife, or in the present with his son. A man who, in the words of his friend Hector, wants the world but can't see what's in front of him.
The first match, played by a bunch of amateurs with the sole aim of winning, in many ways represents this rupture for Sunny. Between his father and himself, and, after finding out the truth about his mother's death, inside himself.
Words, Sunny discovers, are elusive. A conversation is a complex thing, he says, at a loss for words when he finds himself alone with a girl he fancies. Words repeatedly fail him later on. A void within that spills over and isolates him from those around him, his past, present and the future. Timing is everything, says Hector elsewhere. Even love needs the right moment, the right place and a little bit of luck. Will Sunny find his moment of epiphany and make his peace with himself and the world around? The Match is a tenderly affirmative novel, which works through subtle resonances and echoes. It affirms the possibility of hope and finding renewal, often "unexpectedly and undeservedly". It affirms the possibility of a vision, however brief, of eternity when one is in sync with everything else and the possibility, finally, of finding the right words to live life in.
SUBASH JEYAN
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