“Wave” by Sonali Deraniyagala

Wave

By Sonali Deraniyagala
2013
240 pages. Audio: 5 hours and 24 min.
Nonfiction

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What do you do when life hits you with grief and pain that is so overwhelming that there are no words for it? If you are a writer with Sonali Deraniyagala’s skill, you write the unspeakable. This she has done in the short book, Wave, published in 2013 and chosen by the New York Times Book Review as one of its 10 Best Books of the year.

This, from the back cover:

In 2004, at a beach resort on the coast of Sri Lanka, Sonali Deraniyagala and her family – parents, husband, sons – were swept away by a tsunami. Only Sonali survived to tell their tale. This is her account of the nearly incomprehensible event and its aftermath.

She lost both parents, her husband, and two young sons. The five people who mean the most to her are dead. This tsunami killed, by best estimates, over 200,000 people.

In the immediate aftermath she is suicidal and resolves to never go outside again. She turns to alcohol and pills. Every ordinary object becomes a reminder of the family she has lost.

When after four years she finally allows herself to return to the family home in London, “The boys’ shoes are by the kitchen door, dried mud on them still.” [1] And seven years later as she writes this bracing memoir, the grief is still very real as she imagines her sons as teenagers though she will never witness what she imagines.

It is hard for me to convey just how good this heartbreaking book is. I am very skittish of memoirs, but this one is relentlessly honest. Life goes on for the author, yet there can be no happily ever after in this story.

This is a great book for anyone because often something like a tsunami feels like abstract concept to us. This book makes clear that these are very real events, and people who are far away and speak a different language love their families just like we do and experience almost unfathomable loss in the midst of such a disaster.

For preachers this is a great book for the beauty of its writing and the depth of the meditation on grief and loss. It is a significant piece of a minister’s work to sit with those who have experienced loss so deep there may be no words for what they are feeling. This book is about as good a preparation for that as you are apt to get in words.

The author is an academic (an economist, in fact) but there is nothing academic (in the worst sense of the term) about the book. Julia Kristeva got me to thinking many years ago about the way we use words to try to exert control over “the powers of horror” that confront us. If I can put it into words then perhaps I can master it.

In Wave, however, Deraniyagala makes no attempt to use words and descriptions as a hiding place from the very real pain that inhabits every page. While most of us don’t want to spend all of our time reading books that inhabit such painful places of the heart, you really ought to read this one. It is an education in being fully human.

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[1] From chapter 4.

[2] Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection.