Much like the upper-class Colombo world it portrays, Cinnamon Gardens is a polished and elegant work. Five years ago Shyam Selvadurai, a Sri Lankan-born writer who has spent the better part of the past two decades in Canada, published his well-received first novel, Funny Boy, a touching story about a young man coming to terms with his homosexuality. Now he takes up the theme of high-society morality and hypocrisy in a second book that reads like a turn-of-the-century Sri Lankan novel of manners.
The trouble is that -- again, like the world it portrays -- Cinnamon Gardens is a little too polished. It lacks the idiosyncrasies and the unpredictability that would give it life. In aspiring to write a grand social epic, Selvadurai has put all the cultural and historical scaffolding a little too neatly in place. Historical incidents obviously gleaned from archival research feel artificially woven in; quotations from the Triukkural, an ancient work of Tamil philosophy, are copiously (and indiscriminately) cited, not only by several characters but also by the author, at the head of each chapter.
There is more than a little exoticization in the use of such elements, and like all exoticization, this case tends to emphasize the general at the expense of the particular. Selvadurai is so eager to tell the big social story that he neglects the human elements. Thus he grafts his characters' lives and relationships onto the age's great concerns; the results read like stereotypes. The Mudaliyar Navaratnam, the patriarch of the family at the center of the book, fights against universal suffrage and stifles his son Balendran's passion; he represents the old generation. Annalukshmi, the headstrong young teacher who rides a bicycle and refuses to marry, is the voice of women's emancipation. Mr. Jayaweera, the teacher from a rural village who fights for the rights of laborers, points up the economic exploitation of the colonial era. His conversations with the urbane and well-educated Annalukshmi -- he intrigues her with his talk of spirit possessions and snakebites in the country's interior -- sound like parodies of interclass interaction.
These characters and many more populate a sprawling narrative. They find love and friendship, and they struggle through conflicts with family members, social mores and their own repressed desires. Selvadurai holds his complicated story line together adeptly, but he is less successful at fleshing it out, at giving it emotional and psychological depth. When Balendran meets his long-lost lover, Richard, after 20 years (they had been forced apart when Balendran's father discovered the true nature of their relationship), the reunion is, all too characteristically, linguistically stilted and psychologically shallow. Balendran is "speechless" and "stung by [Richard's] words"; later, he feels "a terrible emptiness." "The sure apprehension of another mind / Is the mark of a God," runs another verse from the Triukkural (one that Selvadurai doesn't cite). It's the mark of a good novelist, too.
Curiously, as the veneer of respectability and propriety begins to wrinkle near the end of the book, Selvadurai's starched tone acquires a little life. Sentiments become less lachrymose, memories more vivid, and the conclusion, in contrast to the rest of the plot, is a surprise. There are traces in the final pages of the sensitivity and insight that distinguished Funny Boy. The effect is uplifting, but also a little disappointing. Selvadurai obviously has tremendous potential; we'll have to wait at least until his next book to see it fulfilled.
— Salon
In a breezy, yet old-fashioned style - part Vikram Seth, part Jane Austen - Sri Lankan author Shyam Selvadurai draws back the curtains on the 1920s private lives of an upper-crust suburb of Colombo, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), in this eagerly awaited second novel...Whether or not this South Asian Victorian-style novel is your cup of tea, it certainly is elaborately and gracefully drawn. Selvadurai deserves credit, as well, for his apt criticisms of a society still mired in anachronistic divisions and repression.
— Time Out New York,
Faultlessly elegant but familiar in its depiction of nostalgic regret and repressed desire, Cinnamon Gardens has a sepia-toned cover and an oddly sepia-toned style, yet it is also surprisingly light reading — it's unfettered by any attempt at highbrow heaviness.
— The New York Times Book Review
Selvadourai embroiders this narrative with the kind of details that demonstrate a clear grasp of the subtleties that define romantic relationships...Every kind of union is in question as Selvadurai carefully explores the hazy boundaries between passion and repression, freedom and commitment, love and loneliness.
— Paper Magazine
The second novel by Selvaurai is an old-fashioned page-turner with a literary heart—the perfect book for beachgoers who want melodrama that doesn't ignore the mind...[An] ambitiously plotted novel, which Selvaurai describes as his most personal effort yet.
—The Advocate
An ambitious, often moving, but ultimately unsatisfying second novel—set in the former Ceylon in the 1920s—by the Sri Lankan–born (now Canadian) author (Funny Boy, 1996). Selvadurai's frustratingly lax narrative juxtaposes two personal stories of oppression and lost opportunities that reflect the experience of their homeland ("a complex society with numerous horizontal and vertical divisions"), poised between colonization by the British and separate (and opposed) religious faiths (Hindu and Tamil) and independence movements. Annalukshmi Kandiah is a spirited young woman who prefers her teaching career in a mission school, and her friendships with a freethinking teacher and the latter's ward, to her father's plans to arrange her marriage. Annalukshmi's Uncle Balendran has been even more rigidly controlled by his father, the Mudliyar Navaratnam, a British-appointed official whose estate his son dutifully manages, 20 years after the Mudliyar had "rescued" Balendran from a homosexual relationship, steering him into marriage, and respectability. Selvadurai moves confidently among these major characters and their numerous relations and acquaintances, most of whom live in comparative luxury in the upper-class "Cinnamon Gardens" section of the city of Colombo—and are variously affected by the spirit of rebellion seeping slowly into their hitherto complacent, enclosed little world. But the story is mired in complicated, overextended exposition—its characters' byzantine personal, political, and religious affiliations require a good deal of sorting out—and we're rushed rather too summarily through an otherwise very moving double climax, in which Annalukshmi at lastunderstands and accepts the consequences of her defiance, and Balendran finds the courage to emerge from his father's domineering shadow. An impressive near-miss. Selvadurai appears to be still learning his craft, but his gifts for compassionate characterization and clarity of statement augur well, and suggest that this very interesting new writer may be on the verge of producing major work.
A near-miraculous capturing of life and love (both gay and straight), family tensions, political upheaval, labour unrest and feminism in the Ceylon of the 1920s.…”
–Edmonton Journal
“Faultlessly elegant.…Selvadurai is expert in capturing the nuances of this particularly precious time and place.”
–New York Times Book Review
“Subtle and deeply humane…Shyam Selvadurai has established himself firmly as an important chronicler of the complexities of social and cultural difference.…”
–Books in Canada
“Selvadurai’s nuanced prose evokes the country’s dense climate and lush beauty.”
–Toronto Star
“Richly rewarding.…This is a novel that deserves, and will surely gain, a wide readership.”
–Sunday Times (U.K.)
