War and unknowing

A wonderful new review for The Seasons of Trouble in The Caravan focusses on one of the hardest experiences of living in a postwar society: unknowing. The reviewer Vidyan Ravinthiran seems most drawn to the disappearance of Sarva in the book. This pleases me no end, given that it is Mugil, the former female child soldier, that most readers have connected with most till now. I had begun to feel bad for Sarva, as I am guessing many writers do for their less loved characters, so this review is reaffirming as it acknowledges the struggles of living in a "bleak, windblown space, in which rumour and cultural superstition projected their own horrors". More:   

Mohan has a writer’s eye for the telling detail, whether psychological or sensuous, and reading this passage, it struck me that a short story, even a novel, could be written about a Tamil mother’s “hours of not knowing.”

Another unexpected review in Bookforum continues the idea of unknowing, extending it to how governments wield the absence of information to wage war against communities, people, individuals. The author is the fantastic Anand Gopal, who wrote No Good Men Among the Living, on America and its war in Afghanistan through the eyes of Afghans. His piece is an astute treatise on conflict writing itself, and on how 9/11 and the "war on terror" narrative has influenced international politics. 
 
Terrorism, terror, or terrorist, or Kottiya (Tiger), he writes, 

is perhaps one of the greatest linguistic and legal tools for repressive governments ever devised: By branding an opposition movement a terrorist organization, they can justify all kinds of atrocities against anyone they suspect of being associated with that group. Political dissidents and social critics of all stripes are languishing in prison cells from Damascus to Cairo to Colombo because of the term’s sheer power, as codified in an ever-expanding web of anti-terrorism laws.

On the book itself:

The effect of these three interwoven narratives is haunting, and The Seasons of Trouble is a work of daring empathy.

... after the prologue, Mohan’s first person is entirely absent... This form, for all its shortcomings, can work as an act of translation. The Seasons of Trouble and its predecessors appear to be animated by a deeply political concern: How to make the lives of the poor, the remote, the brown and the black, legible? How to make their actions and aspirations meaningful, their deaths grievable? By doing away with the traditional authorial intrusions, and by recruiting the full array of techniques from literary realism, these works sometime succeed in grounding us so thoroughly in the inner logic of others that empathy becomes easy and solidarity possible.