Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist by Sunil Yapa

He spoke freely about how rocky his own road has been and was deservedly excited about his recent debut. The colors of leaves in bright morning, how the green seemed lit from within and the sky so endlessly blue.You may know or discover Sunil Yapa because his debut novel Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist, not coincidentally the first title released from Little, Brown’s new Lee Boudreaux imprint, is racking up glowing reviews faster than a riot-squad officer can herd protesters into a van (more on riots and protesters shortly).īut I met Sunil Yapa last year at the AWP conference when he was an as-yet-unpublished writer who had just finished a decade of sleeping on his father’s sofa while working on drafts of his book.

Unfortunately, Yapa lapses into sentiment as the riot winds down, his prose shading into purple: 'Victor screamed … He didn't want to die. His language is often vivid, as when Bishop surveys his officers: 'His line had broken and he saw clumps of black in the crowd like lumps of cancer in a radiated lung, the backs of his troops' hooded forms chopping through the crowd. Against this backdrop Yapa's riot sequence is graphic and stirring, challenging our most basic assumptions about democracy. 'Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist' delves into the perils of globalism but also posits potential benefits to a war-ravaged country such as Sri Lanka. Yapa explores his characters' back stories, but only three emerge fully formed: Victor and his father, whose near-brushes throughout the day tease out the love and loss they both feel and King, a female advocate of nonviolent resistance, who harbors a devastating secret. The novel admirably takes on big themes - the threat of terrorism, economic inequality - and treats them with nuance, following a cast of seven over the course of one day: Victor, a nomadic biracial 19-year-old Bishop, his estranged father and the police chief a pair of officers patrolling the streets in an armored vehicle two protesters volunteering as medics, and an eminent finance minister from Sri Lanka. The World Trade Organization protests in Seattle in 1999 would barely register as a pinprick of light and yet in Sunil Yapa's vigorous if uneven debut, 'Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist,' the forces roiling the world today converged in a small but heated exchange 16 years ago, illuminating who we were and where we were headed. If we could peer back at recent history through a telescope, we'd see galaxies of unrest, from the explosive rise of ISIL to the financial crisis of 2008 to the invasion of Iraq, right through the supernova of Sept.

Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist by Sunil Yapa