Wave by Sonali Deraniyagala

Wave by Sonali Deraniyagala is the perfect synthesis between perfection and destruction, beauty and horror, happiness and devastation, joy and sadness, life and death, sanity and insanity, re-birth and new starts.

It was Dec 26th 2004, in Sri Lanka when a violent Tsunami destroyed the life of thousand people, citizens and tourists enjoying their vacations in sunny tropical locations.

Sonali, her origins from that distant land discovers soon the strange activity of the Ocean thanks to the worries of a friend and she decides to leave with a jeep the hotel with all her family. Sonali was married with a British man, Steve, and they had two kids, Vikram and Malli still little. Her parents joined them for the vacation as well.

The arrival of this wave doesn't give any chance to  Sonali's children and partner, and also her parents will die as well in the hotel.

What will follow will be the mental and physical reconstruction of an identity passing through the most horrible shock existing in this world: the massive departure of most of family members and the lack of important roots, in particular the one created with the partner: children.

The thematic of the survivors and feelings survivors have in their mind are explained with great lucidity and passion in Wave.
Sonali's ideas are clear at first: giving up,killing herself, and then the perception of being lonely, and not helped at all by Steve who left alone her with all of this devastation...
The sweet memories of her two children, pieces of her heart, their habits, voices, favorite food and games, sports, and school activities, the most moving part of the book.

What I found terrible and magnificent at the same time is the description of the normality Sonali lived with Steve and their two sons, their tender moments all together and then all the time in the book again: Splash! the reader is back to the most brutal reality, the disappearance of normality,  joy,  happiness, tenderness, life for re-discovering again horror, death, disappearance, destruction.
Because the horror is this one: the disappearance of dear ones in this way create a dark hole in the soul, and a deprivation of reality. Our reality is made by normality and reassurance moments.

In the case of Sonali and Steve their family was the perfect one you can find in the most romantic book: the couple in love from the years of university, happily married with two children, a beautiful life, the possibility thanks to the double citizenship of Sonali of spending time both in Europe than in Asia, permitting to Vickram and Malli to grow up breathing an international citizenship in this world.

When all of it ends for the devastation of an event like a tsunami in this case or a quake or any other natural devastation, of course the survivor must fight against a lot of demons.

Sonali describes the first phases of shock, the terrible moments when she drunk too much assuming too many pills, and when she started slowly slowly to return to life, re-visiting the places once she loved so badly, re-discovering in the London's house and in the garden her children, her husband thanks to their drawings, writing, clothes, normality, habits, webs.
I loved a lot the chapter when she tried all the best for creating mess to the people who lived after the tsunami in the house of her parents, a powerful place rich of memories, of her old life.

The book of Sonali wants to be also a celebration of life. Her life spent with her family in a relaxing normality able to comfort the soul and body because close to the perfection, in a family where there was a lot of love and joy and harmony and where possibilities endless.

This books speaks also of delicious Asian food, traditions, exotic animals, and what can keeps calm your soul.

But remember that there is a wave and this wave will transform all of it. The book is like a wave: violent and calm, destructive and incredibly harmonic, it depends what you will read, if the after or the before, but this mixture creates where possible a less stressing impact to the soul of the reader according to my point of view, because there is also a past, there was happiness, there was joy. There are plenty of great memories to remember for Sonali and this is incredibly important.

So let's speak of transformation. Now Sonali lives in NYC because London to her is still too painful and rich of memories.
Her London-house is still speaking too much of her kids, of her husband of that past that was her life, her daily life, people she loved the most, of her creatures she brought in her belly. A chapter forever closed to her.
That one was her life. At long she thought she was born cursed, she was born with some lack and this one had to happen to her because maybe in another life a horrible person.
At the moment Sonali doesn't think anymore that this horrible Tsunami destroyed her life because of her past lives but she tries thanks to her work at the Columbia University of going on.
I guess Sonali will always feel the voices of her beloved ones because they have been part of her life-project, part of herself, but I want to hope for her that with the time these voices will become great guidance for a re-born and new joy and happiness because our dead ones want the best for us. May Sonali's sufferance be like the one of a big tree able to give with its big shadow some rest to everyone tired of sufferance or too sad for going on. With this book she started to do that wonderfully well.

Highly recommended.

Edizioni Mondolibri.

Anna Maria Polidori