Elephant complex : travels in Sri Lanka

Title:

Author:

Gimlette, John, 1963- author.

ISBN:

9780385351270

Edition:

First edition.

Publication Information:

New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2016.

Physical Description:

xx, 399 pages : maps ; 25 cm

General Note:

"A Borzoi book"--Title page verso.

Bibliography note:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents:

Map -- Colombo Jumbo -- All Quiet Among the Reservoir Giants -- The Cinnamon Forts -- A State of Perpetual Vacation -- The Garden in the Sky -- Kandy -- Land of Hope and Tea -- The Wild East -- Trinco, Trinco, Little Star -- Multi-barrel Love Enforcer -- The Jaffna Peninsula -- The Shoes on the Shore -- Green As Ever -- Afterword.

Summary:

"John Gimlette takes us from Sri Lanka's exuberant capital city of Colombo to the dry interior where more than 5,300 wild elephants congregate around its ancient reservoirs; from the Portuguese-built forts of cinnamon country to the tsunami-ravaged south-east; from the tea plantations of the highlands and the Shangri-la-ish city of Kandy to the desiccated Jaffna Peninsula in the north. He examines Sri Lanka's colonial history (Portuguese, British, Dutch and Arab); the centuries-old strife between Sinhalese and Tamils; and the most recent civil war, which lasted from 1983 to 2009. He describes his encounters with world-class cricketers, terrorists, a former president, ancient tribesmen, British expats, survivors of the civil war massacres, and with the island's amazing flora and fauna, including the world's greatest concentration of leopards. He discovers a place of both extravagant beauty and profound devastation, a place capable of being both heavenly and hellish at the same time, and succeeds in bringing it to vibrant, fascinating life on the page"--

Subject:

Gimlette, John, 1963- -- Travel -- Sri Lanka.

Gimlette, John, 1963-

Historic sites -- Sri Lanka.

Natural history -- Sri Lanka.

TRAVEL / Asia / Southeast.

TRAVEL / Essays & Travelogues.

HISTORY / Asia / Southeast Asia.

Sri Lanka -- Description and travel.

Sri Lanka -- Social life and customs.

Sri Lanka -- History.

Sri Lanka.

History.

Available:*

Library	Material Type	Item Barcode	Call Number	Status
Searching... Anderson - Anderson Main Library	Book	22960001168805	915.493 GIMLETTE JOHN	Searching... Unknown

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Summary

No one sees the world quite like John Gimlette. As The New York Times once noted, "he writes with enormous wit, indignation, and a heightened sense of the absurd." Writing for both the adventurer and the armchair traveler, he has an eye for unusually telling detail, a sense of wonder, and compelling curiosity for the inside story. This time, he travels to Sri Lanka, a country only now emerging from twenty-six years of civil war. Delving deep into the nation's story, Gimlette provides us with an astonishing, multifaceted portrait of the island today.

His travels reveal the country as never before. Beginning in the exuberant capital, Colombo ("a hint of anarchy everywhere"), he ventures out in all directions: to the dry zones where the island's 5,800 wild elephants congregate around ancient reservoirs; through cinnamon country with its Portuguese forts; to the "Bible Belt" of Buddhism--the tsunami-ravaged southeast coast; then up into the great green highlands ("the garden in the sky") and Kandy, the country's eccentric, aristocratic Shangri-la. Along the way, a wild and often desperate history takes shape, a tale of great colonies (Arab, Portuguese, British, and Dutch) and of the cultural divisions that still divide this society. Before long, we're in Jaffna and the Vanni, crucibles of the recent conflict. These areas--the hottest, driest, and least hospitable--have been utterly devastated by war and are only now struggling to their feet.

But this is also a story of friendship and remarkable encounters. In the course of his journey, Gimlette meets farmers, war heroes, ancient tribesmen, world-class cricketers, terrorists, a former president, old planters, survivors of great massacres--and perhaps some of their perpetrators. That's to say nothing of the island's beguiling fauna: elephants, crocodiles, snakes, storks, and the greatest concentration of leopards on Earth.

Here is a land of extravagant beauty and profound devastation, of ingenuity and catastrophe, possessed of both a volatile past and an uncertain future--a place capable of being at once heavenly and hellish--all brought to vibrant, fascinating life here on the page.

Reviews (4)

Publisher's Weekly Review

Sri Lanka, the seemingly paradisiacal island at the tip of the Indian subcontinent, has a troubling, obscured past that's slowly revealed in this vivid travelogue. Gimlette (Wild Coast) takes in the colorful polyglot metropolis of Colombo, lunching with slum-dwellers and chatting with a former president. He visits ancient ruins and reservoirs as well as modern ruins from the 2004 tsunami; meets farmers who live in trees to evade marauding elephants; chats with boy prostitutes in the island's sex tourism mecca; and strolls the old forts of European colonialists, who left behind townlets that look like Dutch watercolors. Gimlette's writing is in fine form, featuring his usual gorgeous evocations of landscapes, sharp-eyed thumbnails of characters and eccentrics, and an endless font of amusing anecdotes drawn from his own picaresque adventures and from the follies of royals and imperialists. He finds the people friendly, gossipy, and cosmopolitan, but beneath that veneer lies the memory of the country's brutal civil war between the majority Sinhalese and the Tamil minority's Tamil Tigers terrorist group, whose suicide bombers besieged Colombo for years. The appalling violence left a historical shadow that, Gimlette observes, many Sri Lankans hide behind an evasive good cheer. Gimlette's blend of dry wit, entertaining reportage, and perceptive insights makes for another tour de force of travel writing and history, lushly green but edged in darkness. Color photos. Agent: Georgina Capel, Capel and Land. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Kirkus Review

An intrepid journey to the famously reclusive island unearths a paradise amid trauma and obfuscation. Inspired by his intriguing Sri Lankan neighbors in Tooting, London, British travel writer Gimlette (Wild Coast: Travels on South America's Untamed Edge, 2012, etc.) decided to venture to the country formerly known as Ceylona tear-shaped tropical island the size of Ireland off the coast of India and made up of 20 million people, mostly Sinhalese, Tamils, and Muslims, and just emerging from a vicious long-running civil war (1983-2009). Gimlette moves geographically in his work, from Colombo, the teeming capital, to the perilous interior once replete with the sites of ancient kingdoms; the western coast, which was plundered by the Portuguese for pearls and cinnamon; the south coast, which was transformed by the next invaders, the Dutch, into a canal-laden vision of their home; and the eastern coast, which contains the gorgeous harbor of Trincomalee, where the British invaded in 1795. Each of the occupiers left something behinde.g., the British administration and education network, which swept away feudalism and left a system of tea-growing estates in the highlands and a Pax Britannica lasting more than a century. The northeast still retained a trace of the "rogue state" founded by the breakaway Tamil Tigers in 2002. An effortless, elegant writer, Gimlette chronicles the stories of these truculent, traumatized people. He explores the still-reigning caste system that made the "Tea Tamils," the women tea pickers, the most poorly paid workers in the country. The author was especially attuned to the nuances between Sinhalese and Tamil, a hostility stoked in the 1950s by the Sinhalese chauvinism of S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike into civil war. While the war wounds are deep and ugly, Gimlette finds a vibrant country "full of people beginning their thinking againstarting anew, unencumbered by the certainties of war." An exuberant, eye-opening travel quest. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Booklist Review

The Sri Lankan Civil War between the Sinhalese majority and the Tamil minority may have died down in 2009 when the last of the Tamil Tiger strongholds was stamped out by the government, but simmering tensions remain. As Gimlette (Wild Coast: Travels on South America's Untamed Edge, 2011) finds out in his expansive travelogue of the lush, pearl-shaped island situated just off India's southeast coast, the war not only substantially altered the urban landscape but is also just one of many layers of conflict-laden history that Sri Lankans have had to contend with. Inspired to explore the island by Tamil neighbors back in London, Gimlette embarks on a whistle-stop tour that is breathtaking in its scope and liveliness as it hops from coast to coast and practically every city in between from the seaside Colombo to Kandy in the mountains. Even if one wishes for an occasional breather in a packed itinerary and more details about such lost, ancient cities as the glorious Anuradhapura, Gimlette's entertaining armchair adventure is bound to fit the bill nicely for staycationers.--Apte, Poornima Copyright 2016 Booklist

Library Journal Review

Award-winning British travel writer and lawyer Gimlette (Wild Coast; Panther Soup) explores all the regions of the island nation of Sri Lanka, moving between the present and the past (Sri Lanka was consecutively colonized by the Portuguese, the Dutch, and the British from the 16th century on). The narrative is peppered with history, legends, descriptions of scenery, and encounters with Sri Lankans. There are fascinating tidbits: in one episode elephants are kept away from a treehouse by the singing of elephant-scaring songs. A number of topics are covered: the cities of the reservoir kings of ancient Sri Lanka; the kingdom of Kandy, where for ".222 years the Sinhalese kings kept the Europeans at bay"; the Tamils of the tea plantations; the aboriginal community of Veddahs; and the tsunami of 2004. The most harrowing account is of the civil war that raged from 1983 to 2009, and its grim aftermath. Titles for further reading are listed. Gimlette's prose is vivid, engaging, and sprinkled with humor; his perspective is that of the outsider. VERDICT Armchair travelers, tourists, and students of contemporary Sri Lanka will relish this enthralling account.-Ravi Shenoy, -Naperville, IL © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.