by Ruvanee Pietersz Vilhauer
Quiet stories that consistently astound
How did I miss this 2018 Iowa Short Fiction Award winner by my friend Ruvanee Vilhauer? The stories in this collection are a wonder, excavating layers of concealment to reveal the rawness of a past that still smarts, the difficult negotiations required to navigate an ordinary life.
Ruvanee and I were in Nancy Zafris’s section at the 2012 Kenyon Review Writers Workshop. There, we wrote to prompts daily and assembled, bleary-eyed from lack of sleep, each morning to discuss what we’d come up with. What Ruvanee came up with, I recall, were quiet, solidly-built explorations grounded in the ordinary, in contrast to my tattered ventriloquist’s suitcase of voices, my klugdy attempts to dramatize, with the stakes amped up high.
Not that the stakes weren’t high in those stories she workshopped each morning, just as they are in those in this marvelous collection. They explore the intersection between the quotidian and the sometimes harsh realities confronting immigrant Sri Lankans around issues of race, ethnicity, or social hierarchies. Around the violence from civil strife in the home country or from prejudice in the States. There are human dramas here as well, ones all people suffer—the loss of a loved one, the incursions of sickness and old age.
In this collection we find an astonishing range of human entanglements. A lonely widow neglects her life and is torn between prophesies of end times and an urge to reconnect. A boy faces bullying at school with a determination to tough it out and fit in. A Meals on Wheels volunteer’s fateful delivery brings her face to face with the terrible loss she and her family experienced during the internecine violence in Sri Lanka. A young woman and her best friend’s lives are upended by the prejudices surrounding skin color in their tight-knit Sri Lankan community. A literal-minded young woman on the spectrum carves out a life amid ambiguity through a love of butterflies.
With straight-forward language that rarely draws attention to itself, the invention and humanity of these quiet stories consistently astounds.