Deb Stone's Reviews > Wave

The book opens with a line that depicts Deraniyagala’s not-knowing; the not-knowing so many shared before that day when we saw news accounts of the destruction caused by the tsunami. By page two, we know the inescapable horror from which the author attempts to flee.

We clasp hands with her and run. We leap with her in the jeep, feel the rising water, feel the weight of her children hanging by their armpits, feel the jeep overturn in the churning wave. We share her numb disbelief, too, and in the next chapters as she returns to a life devoid of husband, children, and parents, the author brings us along the path where she might have escaped the torment, if she could have died or gone mad.

As a reader, I have the luxury of escape that the author will never have. The capriciousness--the no-making-sense-of-it-ness--made the middle chapters of Wave a difficult read. In this section, the author lives in an unbearably muted world, and the hopelessness of it made me crave a lighter narrative touch. Her details are haunting. Her prose is well-executed, but in the middle section I wanted her sentences to be punctuated by plenty of white space.

Space to breath. Space to reconcile myself with loss.

I would have liked the author to break some paragraphs into bits. To let some of her sentences stand alone. To let the weight of awfulness spill around the edges of the prose like the wave, filling everything, carrying the reader along.

By the end of the book, I wanted to feel relief that she managed to return to their home. I wanted to feel ready (for her) to move on with a life that did not include the ones she had lost. I wanted to believe she could feel glee as she imagined them laughing. Instead, I felt as if I were still numb. As if the waters had never receded.
Although I wanted to, I never quite caught my breath. And maybe that is the point. After such loss it is almost unimaginable to go on.