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Funny Boy: A Novel, by Shyam Selvadurai
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An evocative coming-of-age novel about growing up gay in Sri Lanka during the Tamil-Sinhalese conflict—one of the country’s most turbulent and deadly periods.
Arjie is “funny.”
The second son of a privileged family in Sri Lanka, he prefers staging make-believe wedding pageants with his female cousins to battling balls with the other boys. When his parents discover his innocent pastime, Arjie is forced to abandon his idyllic childhood games and adopt the rigid rules of an adult world. Bewildered by his incipient sexual awakening, mortified by the bloody Tamil-Sinhalese conflicts that threaten to tear apart his homeland, Arjie painfully grows toward manhood and an understanding of his own “different” identity.
Refreshing, raw, and poignant, Funny Boy is an exquisitely written, compassionate tale of a boy’s coming-of-age that quietly confounds expectations of love, family, and country as it delivers the powerful message of staying true to one’s self no matter the obstacles.
- Sales Rank: #210338 in eBooks
- Published on: 2015-07-14
- Released on: 2015-07-14
- Format: Kindle eBook
From Publishers Weekly
Set in Sri Lanka, this poignant coming-of-age novel charts a boy's loss of innocence as he grapples with family conflict, political realities and his homosexuality. At seven, narrator Arjun Chelvaratnam hates sports and enjoys wearing his aunt's jewelry and playing the role of bride in imaginary weddings; yet his playmates' taunts of "girlie-boy" and "faggot" don't seem all that different from the monickers that attach to other children (e.g., "fatty-boom-boom" and "Diggy-Nose"). But when Arjun enters his teens, his worried father, a wealthy hotelier, sends him to a strict private academy, hoping it will force his son "to become a man." Instead, Arjun, rebelling against a sadistic principal, strikes up an intense friendship with a fellow renegade pupil, Shehan, who is rumored to be gay. After their first sexual encounter. Arjun's immediate feelings are anger and guilt, but he gradually comes to accept his sexuality and his love for Shehan. The story is shot through with the tensions and bloody violence between Sri Lanka's Buddhist Sinhalese majority and its Hindu Tamil minority. In loving Shehan, a Sinhalese, Arjun, who is Tamil, breaks two taboos. Retribution follows, and in 1983 Arjun and his family migrate to Canada as penniless refugees. With deft humor and a keen eye, Selvadurai, who was born in Sri Lanka and now lives in Toronto, captures his protagonist's difficult passage into his own identity-of which his homosexuality is just one component. And it is with deep, wistful feeling that he ties that story to larger themes of family and country. Author tour.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Although this falls into the crowded coming-of-age category, Selvadurai adds the foreign, funny, and unusual in a novel that is as personal as it is political. While growing up in Sri Lanka amid Tamil and Sinhalese conflicts, Arjie, a young boy who likes to play with dolls and girls, observes the social constraints abhorred and perpetuated within his own family and in society at large. Through the details of family life, the intimacies and exchanges, Selvadurai, much like E. M. Forster, reveals truths subtly, with poignancy and grace. Selvadurai has created an endearing character in Arjie, an impish boy who is always in trouble with his rigid parents, yet gains the confidence of "outsiders," those attempting to rebel against foolish social injustices: an aunt almost ready to reject family and social pressure by marrying a Sinhalese man; a schoolboy who is sexually abused by the head prefect and who wants to disclose his own homosexuality. Arjie's witnessing of prejudice and violence shatters his security by degrees, awakening him to the acceptance of his own gay identity and his isolation from both his family and conventional society. Janet St. John
From Kirkus Reviews
A marvelous first novel, about growing up gay in Sri Lanka, that displays a precociously assured command of structure, pace, and tone. Selvadurai's protagonist and narrator is Arjun (``Arjie'') Chelvaratnam, the second son of a prosperous Tamil family who cast a common disapproving eye on Arjie's avoidance of other boys and their games, and on his disturbing preference for playing ``bride- bride'' with the neighborhood girls and trying on his favorite aunt's clothing and makeup. Arjie's emotional passage--through both a fractious boyhood and a culture marked by ethnic conflict and recurring violence--is charted in a series of elaborately developed extended episodes that Selvadurai handles with an almost casual mastery. Such episodes include Arjie's hilarious confrontation with a stentorian playmate and rival (whom he mockingly titles ``Her Fatness''); his fascinated observation of a young aunt's foredoomed flirtation with a young man their family can't accept; his incipient crush on a handsome young family employee; and eventually his experiences at a Dickensian boarding school (which, Arjie's father had proclaimed, ``will force you to become a man''), where he discovers both sex and the courage to defy the abuses practiced by those who wield arbitrary power (``How was it that some people got to decide what was correct or not, just or unjust?''). Selvadurai can make family squabbles resonate with almost epic force and weight, and his beautifully manipulated plot powerfully expresses the manifold connections among familial, political, and sexual identity and destiny. Arjie himself is only the most appealing of a dozen or more generously observed and vividly rendered characters. And, almost as an incidental bonus, the novel delicately, knowingly records the subtlest permutations of mistrust and contention among Sri Lanka's Sinhalese (Buddhist) and Tamil (Hindu) populace. First-rate fiction, from a brilliant new writer whose next book cannot arrive here quickly enough. The Toronto-based Selvadurai has already won the Smithbooks/Books in Canada First Novel Award for 1994. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Most helpful customer reviews
19 of 20 people found the following review helpful.
So much more than it's classification
By Edward Aycock
I am a librarian (at least i think I am, I have the degree but am working here at a dotcom). Anyhow, classifying and cataloguing is a big part of what we do. Unfortunately, when it comes to this novel, people seemd to content to only classify it as gay fiction, and that is where I found it in my local ..., in the gay fiction section. This is such a tragedy to me as this novel is about so much more. In fact, the homosexuality is only a small (albeit important) part of one of the most entertaining and well written "bildungsromans" that I have read in a long while. Selvadurai deftly describes his childhood within a well to do Sri Lankan family, and the devastation that the political upheavals (between the Sinhalese and the Tamils) made on his life. This book describes the horrors visited upon his family (the fate of the grandparents is too horrible to even try and contemplate)while the narrator comes to consciousness in many ways.
I went from being heartily amused in the first chapter about children playing (so, so funny,..and so relatable to anybody who was ever terrorized by a tyrannical fat cousin)to being deeply saddened by the end of the novel, when Sri Lanka is no longer his idyllic home, but rather a place of danger that he and his family must escape. I do not hesitate in giving this novel five stars (despite the fact that it is very episodic) because it is so well written. Selvadurai is a huge talent, and I have Cinnamon Gardens waiting to be read at home.
I urge everybody to read this book, even if you aren't comfortable enough going to the previously unexplored "gay fiction" section. Books like this are an increasingly rare breed, so we may as well search thenm out while we can.
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful.
An excellent debut!
By A Customer
Life as seen through a young boy's eyes, Funny Boy, is narrated with an honesty that brings laughs and alternatively, immense sadness. Arjie, the protagonist in the story, captures the dilemma of growing up, and the struggle at times, to make meaning of the apparent contradictions in life as he comes to terms with understanding the issues of ethnic and sexual identity. Through him we re-discover our own journey through the vicissitudes of life and empathize with the innocence that once surrounded us all before accepting the harsh realities and cruelties of life. Shyam Selvadurai weaves his story through a backdrop of the ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka and a colorful range of characters - the gossipy aunts, the pecking order of cousins, the kindly grand-parents, the strict school principal, and the faceless mob - all of who evoke a range of emotions -smiles, annoyance, warmth and fear - as we nostalgically reminisce about these characters and situations from our own childhood. This is a well written and poignant book. I can't wait to get hold of the author's other book (Cinnamon Gardens).
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful.
A Compelling, Moving Tale
By Sunil
This novel, very much like Roy's "The God of Small Things," looks at life in South Asia and it political climate through a child's eyes. And like "The God of Small Things," this is a wonderful debut for Selvadurai.
As a gay man of Indian origin, I found myself relating completely to the main character, Arjie. Selvadurai's prose is poetic and precisely conveys the awkardness and roller-coaster nature of a gay child growing up in a tradition-based family. Add to the mix the portrayal of Sri Lanka's devastating political turmoil, and you get a history lesson and a coming-of-age story at the same time.
Although some of the plot seems incredible and out of place, "Funny Boy" is a quick, delightful read.
See all 54 customer reviews...
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