The Whistling Thorn: South Asian Canadian Fiction

Caroline Sin is a Ph.D. candidate in English at McMaster University in
Hamilton.

This anthology serves as a useful introduction to South Asian Canadian
fiction written in English. Thirteen writers are featured, including
such established Canadian literary figures as Mistry, Vassanji, and
Bissoondath, together with their lesser-known, but sometimes equally
talented, peers. Of these 13, only three are women, in spite of the
wildly exaggerated claim on the back cover that “nearly half the
writers in the collection are women.”

The stories are deliberately eclectic in subject, style, and genre.
They include Uma Parameswaran’s fairly conventional “The Door I Shut
Behind Me,” which tells of a group of Hindu immigrants to Canada
caught between two different sets of values; Neil Bissoondath’s
unusual “The Cage,” which is set is Japan and tells the story of a
young woman rebelling against her traditional Japanese upbringing;
Hubert de Santana’s “Dublin Divertimento,” which is set in Ireland
and focuses on the trials of the working-class poor; Reshard Gool’s
spy story, “Operation Cordelia”; Arnold Harrichand Itwaru’s prayer
in “Matins”; and Surjeet Kalsey’s surreal and experimental
narrative in “Mirage in the Cave.”

In addition to the stories, the anthology provides brief introductory,
biographic, and bibliographic notes. The biographies are useful, but the
introduction is skimpy and regrettably does not situate the stories
within the larger context of “minority” or “ethnic” Canadian
writing. The quality of the stories themselves is generally high, and
although none of the individual stories is especially controversial or
demanding, the anthology as a whole is carefully selected and manages to
be representative while at the same time broadening the range of fiction
considered under the rubric “South Asian Canadian.” Overall, this is
welcome introduction to a new and vibrant Canadian literature.