Joined in 2023 
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A dissection of class, disloyalty, extreme poverty, colonialism, generational trauma, abuse, explosive barbarity, (disclaimer: if you can’t handle reading about violence against animals, don’t go here). Starting in markets in 1991, he opened his first store in the Sydney suburb of Newtown in 1994. I gave up my own career as a government scientist to join him in 2000 and soon convinced my partner Ian to join us in what was to become the Family Business. I found the Sri Lankan sections of the book to be well written and dramatic, and they captured the vernacular and the Cinnamon Gardens culture (i.e. the moneyed class) very well. Selvadurai offers no apologies or translations for Sri Lankan words and expressions that litter the text, and I found no glossary to assist the non-Sri Lankan reader. He captures the rudeness, the temperamental natures, the deceits, and the rather coddled behaviour of grown men from the Colombo 7 milieu. The relationships between Shivan and his male lovers are also fraught with petty jealousies, silly arguments and possessiveness, mirroring perhaps the relationship Shivan has with his grandmother.
of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with
From an unforgettable new voice in Caribbean literature, a sweeping story of two families colliding in 1940s Trinidad—and a chilling mystery that shows how interconnected their lives truly are
Media Reviews
Selvadurai recounted an account of the discomfort he and his partner experienced during a period spent in Sri Lanka in 1997 in his essay "Coming Out" in Time Asia's special issue on the Asian diaspora in 2003. Sometimes, images are wonderful, striking, unusual – but when a writer is doing this almost on every line, there is something which gets in the way of the necessary forward propulsion of a novel Absent too is Hans and Shweta’s infant daughter, Hema, whose death from a rapidly catastrophic illness they never speak about, although their grief remains acute. Krishna, born later, knows nothing of the sister he never met. Elsewhere, other parents and children are lost to one another, and lives are ruptured – Marlee herself has ascended to the position of local lady of the manor from beginnings so insalubrious that they fuel a low-grade but insistent motor of local gossip. To put into brief context—these are the words from the Lord of Dharma to a future king, Yudhishthira. When told that his brothers were in hell, the future king demanded to be taken there. Once there, he searched but could not find them. Instead, he found himself smothered under the screams of souls hollowed by unending fright. At first, Yudhishthira could not stomach it—he was tempted to leave many times. But he spent a long time there, surveying suffering and blight, only to eventually learn that his brothers were in heaven.
In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction
When we flee our vulnerability, we lose our full capacity for feeling emotion. We may even become emotional amnesiacs, not remembering ever having felt truly elated or truly sad. A nagging void opens, and we experience it as alienation, as profound as ennui, as the sense of deficient emptiness…”
by Kevin Jared Hosein
Hosein takes the idyllic, fairytale world Americans believe T&T to be and gives us Pure, Honest, and Unadulterated truth. The truth is that not everything is like a magazine cover, with gorgeous tropical beaches. First, we follow Hans Saroop, his wife Shweta, and their son Krishna. At first glance, Hans and Shweta seem like a happy couple, Shweta a dutiful wife and Hans a hardworking, faithful husband. Their son Krishna on the other hand is full of mischief and tends to get into trouble.
Hungry Ghosts by Kevin Jared Hosein review – lyrical
From the latin word vulnerare, ‘to wound’, vulnerability is our susceptibility to be wounded. This fragility is part of our nature and cannot be escaped. The best the brain can do is to shut down conscious awareness of it when pain becomes so vast or unbearable that it threatens to overwhelm our capacity to function. The automatic repression of painful emotions is a helpless child’s prime defence mechanism and can enable the child to endure trauma that would otherwise be catastrophic. The unfortunate consequence is a wholesale dulling of emotional awareness. ‘Everybody knows there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression,’ wrote the American novelist Saul Bellow in The Adventures of Augie March; ‘if you hold down one thing you hold down the adjoining.’ While there are sections of lovely prose, I got tired of the metaphor of the hungry ghost (I got it the first half a dozen times) and the idea that people can't escape their fate added another dreary and fatalistic layer. The leif motif 'like rain on a parched land' became a cliche and revealed itself as a lie after the first 2 or 3 times it was used.
Author Kevin Jared Hosein has noted that in Hindu tradition a hungry ghost is destined never to get what it wants because its mouth is too small to satisfy its appetite. This image is a metaphor that enhances the author’s portrayal of Trinidad and Tobago in the 1940s, when the island was lurching through the final stages of American occupation and British colonialism. The author employs graphically suggestive imagery and richly textured prose laced with patois that illuminate the struggles of a society on the cusp of self determination and heightened expectations.
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