Digging Up the Mountains: Selected Stories

Nicholas Pashley was a bookseller and a freelance writer and editor in Toronto.

It is no secret that Neil Bissoondath is the nephew of noted writers V.S. and Shiva Naipaul; the dust jacket of Digging Up the Mountains includes a rave review from V.S. Naipaul proclaiming this relationship. Like his uncles, Bissoondath has an independent, perhaps pessimistic streak, particularly when he writes of his native Trinidad. Like his uncles, Bissoondath is also a talented writer, and this collection of stories has already brought him a measure of recognition denied to most young writers on the publication of their first book.

Born in 1955, Bissoondath moved to Toronto in 1973 to attend university, and several of his stories deal with the plight of the West Indian immigrant in Canada. The dislocation of the Trinidadian in Toronto, or even of the Trinidadian who returns to his island, is much in his thoughts. But this is not that simple a set of short stories; Bissoondath writes with a variety of voices, and Digging Up the Mountains is a remarkably diverse collection.

The title story is that of Trinidad businessman Hari Beharry, a successful man who gets caught up in a State of Emergency, a political upheaval that ruins his dream of a perfect lawn. For all his mockery of Beharry’s bourgeois notions, Bissoondath draws a sympathetic portrait of a man who sees his future vanishing at the hands of a mindless, vengeful revolution. In a story called “Insecurity,” a self-made man sends his money to a son in Toronto, stashing it away against the time when his sort will be driven from Trinidad. “The Revolutionary” is the story of a young Trinidadian university student and his meeting in a cafeteria with an earnest young countryman, the assistant librarian of a tiny expatriate revolutionary group. Bissoondath’s revolutionary is too easy a target, naive and unread and difficult to take seriously. Clearly Bissoondath shares his uncle’s disregard of revolutionary political answers to Third World problems.

The author of these stories is at his best dealing with individual concerns. His characters, apart from the inept revolutionary, are first-rate, and he has a gift for writing about women. “Dancing” tells the story, written in the first person, of an ill-educated young woman who leaves Trinidad to join her relatives in Toronto, while “The Cage” is a bold account of an intelligent Japanese woman trying to escape her culture.

There is always a sense of alienation and danger in Bissoondath’s stories, written with a maturing that belies his years. We shall be hearing more of this young writer.