Elephant Complex

December 21, 2015
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.

December 15, 2015
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 Ceylon--a 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 behind--e.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 again...starting anew, unencumbered by the certainties of war." An exuberant, eye-opening travel quest.

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January 1, 2016

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

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