Tsunami

What are the odds that a writer survives being in the exact location and at the exact time of a terrible tragedy and then has the chance to tell the story?. Without exerting any effort, he is presented with something challenging to accomplish: a story, and not just any story, but one of those stories that sinks our bones, with real and massive death.

It is sufficient for this author to recount his personal experiences using his talent. Writing his irrelevant daily dramas to put together a book that, although it ultimately turns out to be a good work, in the process it has been enduring lurches from one side to the other, in a binge of nonsense and boredom, is no longer necessary for him. He also no longer has to scratch the testimonies of others, or rack his brains to achieve a correct fiction, or resort to the subterfuge of someone who cannot find a story.

I'll come back to this subject of the writer who made it through the disaster in a moment. I want to start by going back to December 26, 2004, which was a Sunday.

In Sri Lanka, it is currently 07:58. Breakfast was disrupted and 35,322 people's lives were lost due to an underwater earthquake with a magnitude of 9.1 on the Richter scale.

Children made up 40% of the population. Similar to what Boccaccio said in The Decameron, thousands of people dined peacefully that evening with their ancestors in the afterlife after having a peaceful breakfast with friends and family that morning.

at the time. Sonali Deraniyagala, who now calls london home but was born in the island's capital and had visited for the holidays, was attempting to escape in a jeep with her family, including her husband and two kids.

She made her escape without even thinking about knocking on the door of the hotel room where her parents were staying; instead, she simply gathered her two children and fled from one unknown to another. Sonali claims that during that flight, the jeep was not suddenly overturned by a hit of water, but rather suddenly. Sonali says that in our collective imaginations as those of us who have not experienced a tsunami, we see enormous waves breaking like mountains of water on the land.

As the water slowly started to rise from below, rather than from the sea, it appeared as though it had erupted from the earth itself. Sonali describes it as a tsunami, but in my imagination it was more like a deluge of apocalyptic proportions where the water flowed in the opposite direction, from the earth to the sky.

Following the same path as the more than 35,000 dead, I flew from the ground to the sky. Sonali lost her husband, her parents, her mother, and her best friend that Sunday in addition to her two children, who were five and seven years old.

Sonali's rescuer claimed that he had never seen an image as strange as Sonali's: half naked and completely covered in mud, not looking for her friends. He claimed that this was true even among the confusion he witnessed that day and in the days that followed. She did not ask for assistance from the kids; instead, she simply spun around on herself, just like in the game where kids spin around and around until they are dizzy and then fall to the ground.

Consequently, he went in search of her. Sonali was acting in a way that neither the man nor she ever understood.

Sonali had to wait nine years before she could share her story in the Wave book. Up until a couple of days ago, I had no interest in him.

I made a long-since fixed error when I believed I understood the tsunami from Emmanuel Carrère's internationally acclaimed book De vidas ajenas, which I both respect and read regularly. My error was believing once more that literary talent could create a better story, especially when the author has starred in it. This was a mistake because Carrère was also on vacation in Sri Lanka on that day, where the tsunami allowed him to live to tell the tale.

However, Carrère either chose not to tell it or chose not to tell it in its entirety. Although she did not experience a particularly severe tragedy—she did not lose anyone—she did witness the dead, smell their bodies, hear their cries, and run away from the madness that had been imprinted on the faces of those who, like Sonali, had witnessed the last links in their DNA chain become permanently lost in the muck and abandoned from the past—their parent's deaths—to the present—the deaths of their children.

absence of yesterday. absolutely no tomorrow.

No more than a top that spins inward. Before writing this book, Sonali Deraniyagala had never written anything, and as far as I am aware, she has never written another book.

She may or may not have been an avid reader, but I am certain that she lacked no literary training to produce a book that was more literary than Carrère's. What makes a great writer extraordinary? The question is impossible to answer, but I am certain that there are some accidents that stand between a writer's talent and his work: the display of erudition, the ballast of criticism, the obsession with permeating the text with what is considered one's own style, and an egomania that in turn is marked by the haughtiness of self-importance.

All of this works against the work when it comes to exhibiting it, otherwise, what would be the explanation for the thousands of works by authors who have only written a single excellent book without knowing little to nothing about literature? However, those books are not in our bookstores, and we all end up reading the same thing, but the fact is that even the most acclaimed author should not let his personal library, his academic reading, or the most recent trend in literary theo. I hardly remember Carrère's narration of himself as a tsunami victim from the book.

I do, however, remember the other, more tedious parallel story about the French judicial system that I found to be. The explanation I give myself is that Carrère's eyes were obscured by the cataracts of the intelligentsia, of his literary education, of criticism, explaining why a story about the most bureaucratic aspect of a judge's career won out over a story with a potential for creation as great as the lives it claimed.

Carrère was unable to accurately describe the tsunami because he was unable to see it without the aid of literature, despite the fact that he personally experienced it. After reading Sonali's book, I can attest that the best way to write is to allow that which is greater than ourselves, that which is unwaveringly true, to speak.

Unfiltered and with excessive freedom, talent is a natural force that writes itself. Sonali suffered the loss of his family but nonetheless produced a piece of work in which the water level rises in the form of creation and truth.

The before and after in a good book are always catastrophes. If this is understood, even the most unimportant detail can be related with the force of the greatest tsunami in human history.

At some point in our lives, we must all learn to survive in the waters that engulf us within the four walls of our bodies. With the grip of the strongest tsunami in recorded history, even the most insignificant detail can be narrated.

At some point in our lives, we must all learn to survive in the waters that engulf us within the four walls of our bodies. With the grip of the strongest tsunami in recorded history, even the most insignificant detail can be narrated.

At some point in our lives, we must all learn to survive in the waters that engulf us within the four walls of our bodies.

The question is impossible to answer, but I am certain that there are some accidents that stand between a writer's talent and his work: the display of erudition, the ballast of criticism, the obsession with permeating the text with what is considered one's own style, and an egomania that in turn is marked by the haughtiness of self-importance.