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.
Product Description
The first novel from Canadian literary giant Neil Bissoondath, now reissued in Scribner: A dark and powerful novel about the failure of a decent man to come to terms with the moral disintegration of his Caribbean homeland. Dr Raj Ramsingh begins to wonder what has really brought him back from Toronto's easy urbanity to the Caribbean island of his birth. Was it for the sake of his aged Hindu grandparents who had proudly brought him up when he was orphaned, or so that his small son Rohan would know his extended family? Or had Raj, like so many others, been seduced back by the rumour of wealth easily acquired in the island's unexpected oil prosperity? But now, in the decline of the economic boom, the flow of easy money is quickly drying up, the orgy of acquisition being replaced by the anger of sudden deprivation. Raj believes he detects paranoia in his cousin Surein's talk of weapons. But houses are being turned into burglar-proof bunkers, policemen on street patrol clutch rifles and sub-machine guns, and the modest shop that had enabled his grandfather to send Raj to medical school in Toronto has been firebombed...
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