When She Was Queen

W.J. Keith is a retired professor of English at the University of Toronto and author A Sense of Style: Studies in the Art of Fiction in English-Speaking Canada.

This is a collection of 12 assured, profound, beautifully written short
stories. Much of their action takes place in India, Pakistan, or
Tanzania, and most of the characters are Indian in origin, but all of
them are linked in some way with Toronto, more specifically with the
Asian community in Don Mills. Moreover, some of the characters appear in
more than one story, with the effect that, while remaining an example of
“short fiction,” the book attains the social amplitude and unified
focus more characteristic of a full-length novel.

Vassanji writes here on the fashionable topics of racial attitudes and
sex, but in such a human and mature way that we never, if we are reading
properly, consider him a propagandist, while to describe his work as
“sexy” would be as vulgar as it would be inaccurate. He is first and
foremost a writer, with a perfect command of his art. One feels that he
has reached the stage in which he can tackle any topic he wishes and
catch the desired tone with both confidence and ease. His characters may
be rich or poor, educated or ignorant, rural or urban. He can write
about all of them with the same convincingness and the same compassion.

Vassanji’s characters are ordinary people who, because of their place
and time of birth, have stories to tell that are new to Canadian
literature, and both their experiences and the social detail of their
lives come across (to traditional Canadian readers) as fresh and
original. They have worked and suffered on the way to more settled and
for the most part more prosperous lives. In telling their stories,
Vassanji makes the subject matter of most mainstream writing seem pale
and even trivial.

He is, of course, the acclaimed author of The Book of Secrets and The
In-Between World of Vikram Lall. This book of short stories belongs, in
terms of quality, with them. He may well be the finest fiction writer
currently working in Canada.