Rakesfall

January 1, 2024

Chandrasekera's debut The Saint of Bright Doors was a NYT Notable Book of 2023. His latest follows Annelid and Leveret as they meet in the aftermath of war; events link their souls, binding them together through endless lifetimes as they reincarnate ever deeper into the future. Prepub Alert.

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Copyright 2024 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 1, 2024
Chandrasekera’s beautiful yet murky sophomore outing (after The Saint of Bright Doors) takes a certain amount of work to unlock. Through gorgeously rendered fragments, it tells of two friends, Annelid and Leveret, growing up in the wake of the Sri Lankan civil war—and then reincarnating over multiple lifetimes. There are elements of fantasy, science fiction, and the surreal throughout. The first section, for instance, is told from the perspective of fans watching a television show about Annelid and Leveret years in the future. Demons also make frequent appearances. However, the nonlinear plot, ever-changing narrators, and mix of genre elements means there’s very little for the reader to grasp onto. Though some will give up in the face of these challenges, others will sink into Chandrasekera’s lyrical and evocative style: “I chew the leaf and spit out my red days. They splatter. You chew the leaf and spit out your hours of mad redder.” Readers who put in the effort will be rewarded by this rich and sweeping epic.

Starred review from April 1, 2024

Leveret and Annelid star in a television show with a bloody finale; Vidyucchika is stalked by the corpse of the boy she betrayed; Viramunda hunts down her betrayer on a sun-scorched Earth. This novel is a sweeping slipstream epic that follows two intertwined personalities as they recur in new guises through time, moving from the mythic past to modern Sri Lanka to a far-future Earth abandoned by humanity. One of them always dies, but is there an escape from the cycle--and should they take it if there is? Chandrasekera challenges readers but rewards them with a breathtaking narrative that invokes sci-fi, fantasy, and myth to express the endless struggle of revolution. As they recur throughout worlds and time lines that draw inspiration from South Asian culture and religion, the duo at the story's heart are reshaped by their experiences until they reach a conclusion that guarantees the fight will go on. VERDICT In Chandrasekera's (The Saint of Bright Doors) newest, the characters' journey through fantastical worlds across millennia is reminiscent of This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone. Recommended for fans of ambitious speculative fiction that tackles systems of oppression in fresh ways.--Erin Niederberger

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June 1, 2024
"[T]his is how she and I have spent our long and convoluted journey through time: joined at the hip, joined at the death, haunting each other, carrying each other." Chandrasekera follows two entwined souls through an endless cycle of reincarnation and destruction in this slipstream novel, a poetic saga about identity and memory, colonialism and revolution, connection and commitment. It begins with a hauntingly enigmatic analysis of a TV show starring teenagers Annelid and Levert and set during a "war which is now over but never over." Annelid is possessed by a demon in the jungle, and Leveret, a newly made revolutionary, is murdered. Though the show, watched by fans in the far future, ends with Leveret's death, their story continues in the many nonlinear lives and worlds into which they reincarnate. These worlds, from ancient legends to a ruined, abandoned Earth, are woven from South Asian culture and populated with corrupt politicians and kings, revolutionaries, demons, living corpses, old gods, posthumans, artificial intelligences, and more. Chandrasekera employs multiple narrative forms and storytelling styles in this often difficult to parse but impossible to forget surrealist experience.

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July 1, 2024
Transcendence doesn't come easy in this short but labyrinthine tale of reincarnation. What actually happens in these pages is difficult to describe or quantify. It's a hallucinatory, often nonlinear work, constantly and confusingly shifting perspective. It concerns a small group of people, or gods, bound by love and violence across many lives, each time grasping for some kind of satisfaction or resolution as the Earth withers. Various sections are set in a magic-infused, seemingly contemporary Sri Lanka, in which the dead exist, work, and make trouble alongside the living, and demons are always lurking nearby. Other sections are post- or even post-post-apocalyptic, blending science fiction with fantasy as a small group struggles to help a barren Earth to heal, even as others escape to the stars. The author is clearly content to let readers sink or swim in the flotsam-strewn river of story, as interesting scraps of plot begin but then peter out, flowing, not entirely seamlessly, into other pseudo-plots. What seem to be local legends, mythology, and history of the area are referenced but not fully explained. Apparently there's also some kind of age-old conflict between the kingdoms of the Rake and the Yoke, whatever those are? Meanwhile, there are clearly some points being made about the dark legacy of colonialism, the dangers of codependent relationships, and the way the living often can't shake free of the legacy of the dead. But if there's a throughline here, you're going to have to work to find and fully understand it. Poetic and unique, but possibly not worth the effort to plumb its depths.

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