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Maybe someday
45
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
45/100Critics
44/100Scholars
Author:
Hasanthika Sirisena
Publisher:
Mad Creek Books
Date:
December 10, 2021
Weaves reportage, cultural criticism, and memoir to excavate sites of personal, cultural, and political trauma and find wider truths about sexuality, art, language, and identity.
What The Reviewers Say
Reading Hasanthika Sirisena’s Dark Tourist is like sitting down with the most interesting, smartest friend you know.
The book’s jacket copy suggests the collection is organized around the titular dark tourism, which Sirisena defines as 'tours to former sites of any type of catastrophe, natural or man-made,' including war tourism. In reality the collection feels more thematically chaotic and intuitively arranged than that, which is a breath of fresh air. So many essay collections today feel forced into strict harmonies, becoming essentially full-length nonfiction narratives. The complexity and breadth of Dark Tourist complements Sirisena’s own take on meaning-making and art. This is not to say the essays don’t hold together—they do. But rather than focusing on dark tourism, per se, their connective threads lie in the author’s ability to weave their eclectic interests and associations into a cohesive fabric.
Sirisena makes good use of research throughout her personal narratives, incorporating information about the mysterious Lady Windermere syndrome into a chapter about her mother’s illness, musing about an Elizabethan marriage that purportedly inspired Romeo and Juliet in a chapter about her father’s secret marriage, and describing a plane crash in the chapter about her father’s career trajectory. Several of the essays are formally inventive.
While the early essays work together well, the second part, where the pieces are largely on the art world, feels a bit less cohesive. Still, Sirisena’s searching spirit leaves readers with plenty to dig into..
