Digging up the Mountains

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Alienation, terror and essential homelessness inform the lives of all the characters evoked by this Indian writer from Trinidad, who makes his home in Canada. From the title story, in which Hari, once a substantial Port-of-Spain businessman, is stripped of his dignity and his patrimony and abandoned, to the final surrealist tale, ``Counting the Wind,'' in which a cemetery-keeper's wife and baby are brutally murdered in a struggle for power, there is no place of sanctuary or welcome. The dilemma is reduced almost to a formula in ``Dancing,'' when Sister James is lured from her little sunlit house in the islands and her pitiful monthly wage to wintry life in Toronto, where the pay is higher and the housing more sophisticated, but no warmth seeps in. The author's manifest despair, his quest for a solution, is poignant enough, but the writing is too self-conscious and the thesis too repetitive for the tragedy of these small peoples' lives to seize the reader's mind and heart. (August 12)

Library Journal

First published in Canada, this collection of 14 stories deals mostly with the Third World and particularly with Trinidad, where the author was born. (He is the nephew of V. S. Naipaul and the late Shiva Naipaul.) The shorter stories, about half the collection, are primarily character sketches. They are pleasant and generally well done but lack fire. The longer stories are broader in context and far more successful. Extremely moving, even harrowing, the title story and ``Counting the Wind'' effectively present characters trying to survive anarchy and the overpowering shadow of unknown authority as they suffer the indignities and terror of civil war and revolution. These poignant portraits of ``pawns of the unpredictable'' more than compensate for the weaker stories and make the overall collection well worth acquiring. Thomas Lavoie, formerly with English Dept., Syracuse Univ., N.Y.