Book: Weanasa: Anthology of Short Stories
Publisher: Saddeepa Prakasayo
Reviewed by: Dr. Namel Weeramuni
Sumana Weerasekera was well known and popular short story writer in the 1950s. I used to read her short stories published in the Sinhala daily newspapers, especially in Lankadeepa and Silumina. Her first collection appeared as a book in titled Ran Thodu. Reading them was a treat then.
She published the second collection of her short stories thirty years back before her third collection came out in 2022. She titled this anthology as Wenasa.
It contains rich and life brimmed15 short stories. I find in most of them the raw and anunsophisticated village background. They are rich picturisations she presents to the reader binding him or her to her dazzling revelation. She has crafted her stories elegantly driving the reader to ask for more. She is able to enliven the reader crazily. The plots she embodies in her stories are simple, yet remarkable for the liveliness they demonstrate. That’s why her stories become generic and can be expanded to be of grippingly novelistic.
Some of Sumana Weerasekara’s short stories are humouristic, awe inspiring, of incidences and character dimensional. H. G. Wells communicated the effectiveness of the short story as “The jolly art, of making something very bright and moving; it may be horrible or pathetic or funny or profoundly illuminating, having only this essential, that it should take from fifteen to fifty minutes to read.”
The book cover is meaningfully designed and is with depth.