...the most exceptional book about grief I’ve ever read. In prose that’s immaculately unsentimental and raggedly intimate, Deraniyagala takes us deep into her unfathomable loss ... That she allows us to experience that same alertness without smothering us in sorrow is the miracle of this beautiful book. I was thunderstruck by Deraniyagala’s loss, yes, but most of all by her ability to reveal the whole 'outlandish truth' of her grief ... She has fearlessly delivered on memoir’s greatest promise: to tell it like it is, no matter the cost. The result is an unforgettable book that isn’t only as unsparing as they come, but also defiantly flooded with light.
Wave is really two stories in one. The second story is about remembering the life of a family when they were happy. The first is about the stunned horror of a woman who lost, in one moment, her past, present, and future ... In witnessing something far-fetched, something brought out before us from the distant perimeter of human experience, we are in some way fortified for our own inevitable, if lesser, struggles ... The book gradually reveals itself to be about that greater thing on the other side of loss: love.
The restraint of her prose, with its short, simple declarative sentences, makes the scale of the horror all the more unbearable ... This is possibly the most moving book I have ever read about grief, but it is also a very, very fine book about love ... And while in Wave love reveals itself by the bleak intensity of the pain of absolute, irreplaceable loss, it is in the end a love story, and a book about the importance of love.
...a torrent of shame floods this bracing and ruthlessly self-confrontational memoir. But the shame is owned by the author herself, who shouldered the unfathomable burden of a grieving woman convinced that, in the final count, she failed the mother test ... Deraniyagala reinhabits this tempestuous period with graphic immediacy, exposing “the outlandish truth of me” in terse, impressionistic thought waves that make manifest the tenuous line separating grief from rage and cruelty.
At times, Deraniyagala’s honesty shocks ... Uncomfortable and unsettling, it is a reminder of the horror of this mass tragedy as well as a brave, brutal portrait of Deraniyagala’s own individual, inescapable grief and love.
Deraniyagala...writes sentences so stripped down they seem practically flayed. In their declarative tone, they reveal the barely controlled emotion she still feels, even after years of distance ... What makes Wave so remarkable is how Deraniyagala accepts her feelings of guilt and realizes she can move forward only by keeping her lost loved ones even closer to her heart and mind.
Deraniyagala is alone and desperate to share her sorrow. She responds to the world the way the tsunami treated her family—with a savage anger—and you share her sadness ... This memoir engages the reader more deeply than any piece of fiction. For tragedy fetishists, Wave has every possible permutation and combination of pain. On the one hand, it is so shocking to imagine one person going through this that it is hard to believe you are reading nonfiction. But perhaps because of that, you are constantly aware that you’re reading nonfiction ... This is much more than a sad book. This is a book that shifts something fundamental inside you.
Deraniyagala's new book, Wave, is, most profoundly, an answer to the question of how one can hold on to the knowledge of a world that preceded disaster ... She remembers her remembering, and then gives us her mind moving, in the present tense, to an image of one of her loved ones ... Each springs to vivid life through the particular window of her mourning ... As the book progresses, both Deraniyagala and the prose itself begin to re-engage with the natural world, and with the sensory pleasures in which her boys had reveled.
Deraniyagala is an economist, and her matter-of-fact account is all the more powerful for its lack of literary flourish, though the craft and control reflect an exceptional literary command. Every word in these short, declarative sentences appears to have been chosen with great care, as if to sentimentalize the experience or magnify the horror (as if that were possible) would be a betrayal of all she has lost.
This is a story not about overcoming grief and loss, but of embracing reality in the face of pain and sadness. It packs an immense punch for being so short—or perhaps because it is so short ... ...teaming with beautiful ruminations on the bittersweetness of memory and the precariousness of life.
There is a significant phase of numbness, accompanied by an attempt to simply shut out the world as the mind whirls in denial of what has happened. There are heartbreaking moments of mistaken identity—a voice, the glimpse of someone else's child—and the constant assault of unwanted memories. Eventually, there is the slow movement toward some kind of equilibrium, a phase in which those memories are welcomed and even accepted, although in this instance, 'acceptance' suggests something rather more pat than the reality ... Her voice is astonishingly measured throughout the book's many short sections, although she is unafraid to express her sense of loss with disarming baldness.
