![]() ![]() In a compulsively readable narrative that leaps deftly about in time, Mootoo gradually discloses the circumstances leading up to Mala’s withdrawal: Chandin’s reluctant marriage to his fellow native Sarah and his frustrated love for her white mistress Lavinia Sarah’s panicked abandonment of her husband and children and the solace that the aggrieved Chandin sought from Mala and her sister Asha. ![]() Mala Ramchandin is part of the island’s (Asian) Indian population, and-as Tyler painstakingly learns-one of the two daughters of her ambitious father Chandin, a native educated by white Christian missionaries and destroyed by his yearning to cross inflexible social and racial boundaries. The setting is a town called Paradise on a Caribbean island (Lantacamara) where male “nurse Tyler,” a timid homosexual who describes himself as “neither properly man nor woman, but some in-between, unnamed thing,- ferrets out the history of a mysterious, mute old woman whom he cares for at the Paradise Alms House. ![]() ![]() An intricate plot and vigorously inventive prose are the distinguishing features of this highly praised first novel by Mootoo (stories: Out on Main Street, not reviewed), a Canadian writer and visual artist born in Ireland and raised in Trinidad. ![]()
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