What really has brought Dr Raj Ramsingh back from Toronto's urbanity to this Caribbean island of his birth? Has he been seduced, like so many, by the lure of Casaquemada's easy, oil-acquired wealth? But now the flow of money is drying up, the orgy of acquisition replaced by the anger of sudden deprivation. The economic boom has left in its wake a dislocated society, fraught with violence and fear.
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Setting an ominous tone from the first page, Bissoondath ( Digging Up the Mountains ) develops this powerful novel with consummate skill. He creates a picture of a fictional Caribbean island on the verge of chaos, and of one man in exile from his heritage, caught between two alien worlds. Raj Ramsingh is a 35-year-old physician who took his medical training in Canada, then returned to Casaquemada; now he is leaving the island for good. In oblique, beautifully nuanced flashbacks, we come to understand the circumstances that have tinged his life with "the darkening rubble of shattered dreams." Using the Ramsingh family as a microcosm of the island culture, Bisoondath depicts a society as rigidly ruled by caste as the India of Raj's ancestors. Successful businessmen and professionals, the Ramsinghs disdain blacks, and other Indians who have not prospered. "We recognized a racial brotherhood, but we saw too in them a version of ourselves as we might have been, and this earned them our distrust and our contempt." Raj's ruthless cousin Surein typifies the disintegration of values in a family that prides itself in its high character and good breeding. On Casaquemada moral corruption is occurring at breakneck speed; the prosperity of the oil boom has succumbed to the politics of greed. The country is in shambles. For Raj, the free-floating violence will take a tragic toll. Bissoondath's bleak, despairing picture of this world is particularized by indelibly vivid characters and minutely observed detail. Writing in tightly controlled yet supple prose, conveying the true island patois, he constructs his narrative in fragments that build to a nightmarish intensity as irrevocable as the forces he describes. His view of man's inhumanity to man is sad rather than cynical; finding racism in Canada as well as Casaquemada, Raj understands that it exists everywhere. At the end of the novel, he muses "I go, like my forebears, to the future, to the challenge that lies elsewhere of turning nothing into something . . . . " But the passage does not ring with hope; rather, it is the futility of hope that we read between the lines. This is a book that can make a difference in the way we perceive the modern world.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
About the Author
Neil Bissoondath was born in Trinidad, in 1955. He studied for his BA at York University, Toronto, and went on to receive a scholarship for the Advanced Writing Programme at the Banff Centre for the Arts. Since 1985 he has published seven award-winning books, the most recent of which is DOING THE HEART GOOD, published by Scribner in 2002.
Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
More About the Author
Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.
Customer Reviews
|
There are no customer reviews yet.
|
|||
|
Video reviews
|
Tag this product(What's this?)Think of a tag as a keyword or label you consider is strongly related to this product.
Tags will help all customers organize and find favorite items. |
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
