Romesh Gunesekera
Reef
Reef is a love story set in a spoiled paradise. It is told by
Triton, who at the age of eleven goes to work as houseboy to Mister Salgado, a marine biologist obsessed by swamp, sea movements and the island's disappearing reef. Triton learns to polish silver; to mix a love cake with ten eggs, creamed butter and fresh cashew nuts; and to steam the exotic parrot fish for his master's lover. As Triton recounts his story, an extraordinary voice emerges: naive and knowing, fearful and brave, a boy becoming a man in a world on the brink of chaos.
First paragraph...
At the petrol station the forecourt was empty except for my car, an old red Volswagen that used to be Mister Salgado's. I unlocked the tank and filled it right to the top as he had taught me to. Thick fumes rose in the old night air. Then I wrote down the mileage, the volume, the date in a little logbook and went up to the cashier to pay.
Reviews
"A book of the deepest human interest and moral poise...Very few contemporary novels combine at so high but natural a pitch qualities of epic strength and luminous intimacy." - Independent on Sunday
"Gunesekera has created a work of strange, slow-motion, underwater intensity. Put your ear to the page and you can almost hear the ocean whisper." - Independent
"A kind of Asian Tempest, drenched in the unreal, tropical colours of dream...One of the best novels published this year." - Guardian
'Book of the Month' The Economist
'Dark as one of Graham Greene's tropical undergrowths, funny in the way that Naipaul can be, multi-layered in the manner of Joyce, evocative as Narayan, Reef
is a thing of Beauty.' Scotland on Sunday'A sensuous feast of delight, incessantly pleasurable to read…a book to slowly devoured, page by page.' Times
'Reef, one of the outstanding novels of our decade...' Independent on Sunday
'Lost innocence in the final years before the war is the theme of this eloquent first novel by Romesh Gunesekera, whose Monkfish Moon, a collection of stories about his homeland of Sri Lanka attracted critical attention here in 1993....[This] powerful novel preserves that memory beautifully...Reef is peopled with colorful, memorable characters....The book is incandescent." -- New York Times Book ReviewReef was shortlisted for the 1995 Booker Prize and won other awards.