SOURCE: "Cooking Up a Storm," in Los Angeles Times Book Review, February 19, 1995, pp. 3, 11.

[An American critic and educator, Eder has received the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for criticism. In the following review of Reef, he praises Gunesekera for providing the reader with a deeper understanding of the novel's characters and events than its narrator/protagonist possesses.]

It was 10 years or so into the bloody political and ethnic violence that, since the late 1950s, has afflicted the beautiful island that once was Ceylon and now is Sri Lanka:

All over the globe revolutions erupted, dominoes tottered and guerrilla war came of age; the world's first woman prime minister—Mrs. Bandaranaike—lost her spectacular premiership on our small island, and I learned the art of good housekeeping.

Reef, a novel about a youth who comes precariously together in a disintegrating world—like learning to fly...