I don't often do book review posts, generally preferring to reserve my literary commentary for my diary. Blog posts are for exceptional books. These are not necessarily perfect books (indeed, some are deeply flawed), but they are books that make me feel both fed (spiritually and/or intellectually) and travelled (spatially and/or historically).

J.G. Farrell's The Singapore Grip, for example, or Tan Twan Eng's superb The Gift of Rain. Isabella Bird's The Golden Chersonese, or Pierre Loti's Angkor Pilgrim. Even Malcolm Bosse's Dalang.

But I recently finished Shyam Selvadurai's The Hungry Ghosts, and I feel it will live with me -- haunt me, even -- for a long time.

This too is a flawed book. It is narrated by the main protagonist, Shivan, a young, gay Sri Lankan who is attempting to make a new life for himself in Canada. When he writes of his own experience, his voice is very powerful indeed. At one point in the story, however, he starts narrating his mother's development (supposedly "as told to him later"), and this part of the narrative jars.

He also has an interior decorating fetish... The descriptions of Canadian interiors are weird... Possibly they are meant to reflect the rather naive, wide-eyed impressionability of the migrant who is still very much an outsider and unsure of his social status. But they sound just plain clunky...

And, it has to be admitted, sometimes Shivan is altogether too much. He is like one of those needy friends you can only take in small doses. By the time he settles in Vancouver, and still seems intent on destroying his own career and happiness, you start to want to close the book, and pack him off to a therapist.

Most of the time, however, the book's anguished intensity draws us painfully in.

The descriptions of Sri Lanka are very evocative. Here, the details of place shimmer and resonate. You can see and feel his grandmother's house and its locality. Hear the seaside. Smell the slum areas where some of his grandmother's property is situated. His depiction of Sri Lanka's racial troubles also powerful conveys the fear, violence, and anarchy that engulfed the country for decades.

The grandmother is a brilliant character -- indomitable, grasping, controlling, cruel, and ultimately pathetic. She keeps talking about her karma, and the terrible effects it is having on her, apparently totally oblivious to the fact that most of her suffering is caused, over and over again, by her own selfishness, vindictiveness, and manipulation.

Of course, I like it partly because it's a migrant's book. Here is another migrant who ultimately feels at home nowhere. And I empathize with his restlessness, even though his is induced by trauma that I have never, thank God, experienced.

But the haunting part is that ultimately this is a book about destiny, fate, the inability to escape, the eternal and perfectly predictable return to patterns that have always destroyed us, and will always remain destructive. It is the fate of the abused, the book implies, to be always drawn back to their abuser.

The story is temporally anchored by the evening/night when Shivan is preparing to return once again to Sri Lanka. As he methodically cleans his mother's house, or impetuously goes off for walks in the neighbourhood, he relives his life in flashbacks.

His emotionally fraught childhood in the bosom of this extraordinarily nasty, damaged family. His "escape" to Canada. His inability to fit in. His return to Sri Lanka, his relationship with Mili, Mili's tragic death as a result of grandmother's manipulative, vindictive hatred. His return to Canada, his move to Vancouver, his career progression, his new relationship with Michael -- and his inability to break free of the scars of the past. His mother and sister actually grow a skin of normalcy, it seems. But Shivan cannot.

I didn't cotton on until the very end where this was going, all this backwards and forwards between the remembered horrors of the past and the symbolic cleaning out of the present. Only at the very end do you realize, with sharp dismay: Oh no, he's going to stay; he's not coming back to Canada and to Michael; that old bitch has somehow sucked him in again; or if not she, then Zerrissenheit, that old migrant's bane; whatever it is, this guy is bent on self-destruction... And you want to shout at him: You're crazy, don't go, don't go, don't go. (A desire which, of course, is a splendid tribute to an author.)

But the story centres round a "Buddhist myth in which those who desire too much in life are reincarnated as disfigured, hungry ghosts whose appetites may never be satisfied". Too much what? Too much material gain? Or too much happiness, too much love, too much security? It certainly seems as if the latter is the guise in which this warning has saturated Shivan's soul, such that any blessing he receives becomes a curse.

So the book challenges us: IS he crazy, or is he -- in his resignation, his acquiescence in a stronger, ultimately irresistible fate -- the only one who is sane?

Mesmerizing. Bravo, Mr Selvadurai.

There are good reviews here, here, and here.