A Casual Brutality - Softcover

Neil Bissoondath

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140118233 ISBN 13: 9780140118230

Publisher: Minvera, 1989

Synopsis

Nominated for the Books in Canada First Novel Award and the Guardian Fiction Prize, A Casual Brutality is a powerful, dark novel about the failure of a decent man to come to terms with the moral disintegration of the Caribbean island of his birth. Casaquemada is a fragile West Indian republic divided by racial antagonism, lured into a spurious nationalism by impotent rulers, awash in a mindless consumerism fostered by easy money and a lust for an imported version of the good life. Raj Ramsingh is a Toronto doctor who returns to his native island only to leave it again, having paid a tragic price for his unwillingness to recognize the cruel imperatives of the men who will determine Casaquemada's fate. A Casual Brutality takes the reader into a world of terrifying dualities: illusion has become destruction; decency had become helplessness; nationhood has become tribalism; and a violent future looks only towards a brutal past. A novel as timely now as when it was first published in 1988.

About this title

About the Author:

Neil Bissoondath was born in Trinidad, in 1955. He studied for his BA at York University, Toronto, and went on to receive a scholarship for the Advanced Writing Programme at the Banff Centre for the Arts. Since 1985 he has published seven award-winning books, the most recent of which is DOING THE HEART GOOD, published by Scribner in 2002.

From Publishers Weekly:

Setting an ominous tone from the first page, Bissoondath ( Digging Up the Mountains ) develops this powerful novel with consummate skill. He creates a picture of a fictional Caribbean island on the verge of chaos, and of one man in exile from his heritage, caught between two alien worlds. Raj Ramsingh is a 35-year-old physician who took his medical training in Canada, then returned to Casaquemada; now he is leaving the island for good. In oblique, beautifully nuanced flashbacks, we come to understand the circumstances that have tinged his life with "the darkening rubble of shattered dreams." Using the Ramsingh family as a microcosm of the island culture, Bisoondath depicts a society as rigidly ruled by caste as the India of Raj's ancestors. Successful businessmen and professionals, the Ramsinghs disdain blacks, and other Indians who have not prospered. "We recognized a racial brotherhood, but we saw too in them a version of ourselves as we might have been, and this earned them our distrust and our contempt." Raj's ruthless cousin Surein typifies the disintegration of values in a family that prides itself in its high character and good breeding. On Casaquemada moral corruption is occurring at breakneck speed; the prosperity of the oil boom has succumbed to the politics of greed. The country is in shambles. For Raj, the free-floating violence will take a tragic toll. Bissoondath's bleak, despairing picture of this world is particularized by indelibly vivid characters and minutely observed detail. Writing in tightly controlled yet supple prose, conveying the true island patois, he constructs his narrative in fragments that build to a nightmarish intensity as irrevocable as the forces he describes. His view of man's inhumanity to man is sad rather than cynical; finding racism in Canada as well as Casaquemada, Raj understands that it exists everywhere. At the end of the novel, he muses "I go, like my forebears, to the future, to the challenge that lies elsewhere of turning nothing into something . . . . " But the passage does not ring with hope; rather, it is the futility of hope that we read between the lines. This is a book that can make a difference in the way we perceive the modern world.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Minvera
• Publication date: 1989
• ISBN 10: 0140118233
• ISBN 13: 9780140118230
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 378