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Ratings: ★★★★☆ (4.2/5)
Genre: Fiction, Memoir, Sri Lankan Literature, Social History

Book Review:
Ransiri Menike Silva's ''Worm's Eye View'' is a delightful surprise—a book written from a perspective we rarely encounter, by an author who published her first work at age seventy. The title itself announces the book's approach: this is history and social observation from below, from the ''worm's eye'' rather than the bird's eye, recording life as it was lived rather than as it was theorized.

The book covers the period from the early 1940s to the mid-1950s, encompassing World War II, natural disasters, and the Colombo Race Season—events that shaped Sri Lankan life but are here filtered through personal experience. The author's claim that these events actually took place, and the absence of denial from other parties, gives the work an authenticity that purely fictional accounts cannot match.

Silva's cast of characters is memorable: Appuhamy, who hews historic milestones; ''Mr. Abeynathy,'' a landlord with a difference; Vasantha, the compulsive runaway schoolboy; and Moulana, a tout who emerges as a ''modern-day Bodhisatva.'' These figures come alive through the author's observant eye and gentle humor.

The author's own story is as interesting as her book. A housewife and grandmother of five grandsons, she published her first book at seventy—a reminder that creativity has no age limit. Her previous collection ''The Seeing Eye'' won the State Literary Award 2007, and her second collection ''Weaver at Her Loom'' followed in 2008. She writes, she tells us, only when it pleases her, savoring ''the tranquility that is now hers.''

For readers interested in Sri Lankan social history, women's writing, or simply a well-told story from an unusual perspective, ''Worm's Eye View'' offers quiet pleasures. It reminds us that the most valuable histories are often written not by professional historians but by those who simply paid attention and remembered. Silva has given us a gift—a worm's eye view that reveals more than many bird's eye views ever could.