Soma is the second novel by Martin Wickramasinghe (1890-1976), first published in 1920, the year he joined the editorial staff of the newspaper Dinamina. This is a Sinhala-language edition. The original full title carried the subtitle "or Eternal Love", which states the book's theme plainly.
After his first novel, Leela, had used fiction to argue for modern scientific ideas and failed to find readers, Wickramasinghe turned in Soma to the sentimental romance that was then popular in Sinhala, following writers such as M. C. F. Perera and his friend W. A. Silva. The plot is built on a love triangle: twin brothers, Edmund and Peter, both fall in love with Soma, the only daughter of a neighbouring family. Soma loves Peter and regards Edmund as a brother, and the story is complicated by an earlier exchange of love letters with a young man named Sextus, which leads to a confrontation. The heroine is drawn as a model of virtue raised in Sinhala Buddhist values, and the narrator breaks off at points to reflect on the nature of love and to defend women against the low view of them found in classical Sinhala poetry.
The book sold out within a few months of publication. Wickramasinghe himself later described it as a romantic melodrama in the European manner, without realistic characters or language, and the novels he wrote soon afterwards were attempts to move away from it. Critics treat it as an early, apprentice work, but a revealing one: it shows the young writer's sympathy for women, a thread that runs through his novels of the 1920s.
This edition will interest Sinhala readers following Wickramasinghe's work in order of writing, and anyone curious about popular Sinhala fiction in the years before Gamperaliya.
- Author: Martin Wickramasinghe
- Published: 1920
- Language: Sinhala
