The Second Life of Samuel Tyne

Matt Hartman is a freelance editor and cataloguer, running Hartman Cataloguing, Editing and Indexing Services.

Victoria writer Esi Edugyan was raised in Calgary and has degrees from
both Johns Hopkins and the University of Victoria. She situates Samuel
Tyne and his family in the small Alberta town of Aster, once an
all-black farming community.

Samuel arrived in Calgary from Ghana (“the country would always be
Gold Coast for him”) accompanied by his wife, Maud, and twin
daughters, Chloe and Yvette. Now a successful civil servant in Calgary,
he’s become bored and disgruntled. But “just when thoughts of
quitting his job ha[ve] grown ominous,” Edugyan says, “he force[s]
himself to forget them. This [is] how Samuel deal[s] with things by
ignoring them.” When an uncle dies and leaves him a large, ancient
house in Aster, Samuel realizes a long-held dream: he quits his job at
last, moves his family to Aster, and opens a fix-it shop.

Edugyan’s version of the immigrant experience is intensely personal.
Samuel’s new life contains varying amounts of fear and confusion.
“Despite the loosened tie and new lease of life,” Edugyan says,
“Samuel found himself incapable of that pride so attractive in a man
on the verge of success.” Maud, for her part, not having wanted to
leave Calgary in the first place, is both angered and disturbed,
especially by her daughters, who are involved in their own improbable
dramas. On occasion, Edugyan’s characterizations seem to be forced and
artificial, more imagined than real. But this is a successful first
novel and introduces a strong new voice to Canadian fiction.
Recommended.