Into this setting Chariandy introduces a cast of characters strikingly complete despite being minimally drawn. It’s a bleak place, and Chariandy does an excellent job evoking the concrete landscape, but offering occasional respite for both his characters and the reader in the lush greenery of the nearby Rouge Valley. Instead, the Park, the downtrodden east-end neighbourhood in which the main characters live, is presented as a harsh climate dominated by crumbling apartment towers, rundown townhouse complexes, scabby strip malls and underserved bus routes (the area wasn’t nicknamed “Scarberia” for nothing). The Toronto suburb (which was swallowed up by the Greater Toronto Area megacity with amalgamation in 1998) of Chariandy’s conjuring is a far cry from the bucolic ideal of sleepy bedroom communities replete with quiet cul-de-sacs and wide front lawns. Since then, the Toronto-raised author has been teaching at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver and working on his sophomore effort, the highly buzzed-about novel Brother.Ĭhariandy returns to a familiar time and place for Brother: Scarborough in the early 1990s, scene of his own adolescence. It’s been 10 years since David Chariandy’s debut novel, Soucouyant, charmed literary award juries across Canada (and beyond - in addition to being shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award and longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize among many others, the book also made the longlist for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award).
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