Novel
Reef
Romesh Gunesekera · 1994
Synopsis
In 1962, young Triton leaves his father's house to enter the service of Ranjan Salgado, a well-off scholar who studies marine life and worries about the coral reef of an island, threatened with disappearance. A devoted servant, Triton becomes an accomplished cook, attentive to every gesture of service, to the point of not seeing the rising political unrest and the Marxist insurrection spreading through the country. The arrival of Nili, his master's mistress, upsets the balance of the house.
Context
The novel was published in the United Kingdom by Granta in 1994, then in the United States in 1995. Triton tells, thirty years later, of his years of service, in a prose that Pico Iyer described as an unusual prose-poem; the gentleness of domestic gestures becomes a way of speaking of loss, both political and intimate. Marie-Odile Fortier-Masek translated it into French as Récifs, for Le Serpent à plumes, in 1995, and the book was reissued in 2024 by Zoé.
Who it is for
For readers drawn to novels of cooking and the senses, which tell the history of a country through the daily life of a house.
Prizes and reception
The novel was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Guardian Fiction Prize in 1994, and won the Yorkshire Post first book prize.