The Worlds Within Her

by Neil Bissoondath

This beautiful novel from the acclaimed, award-winning author of A Casual Brutality and The Innocence of Age, joins politics and love in a powerful story set in both the Caribbean and Canada. Neil Bissoondath draws us with a startling grace of language into the lives of a mother and daughter whose worlds and dreams collide to release deeply buried secrets.  

Genres: France, Fiction

417 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1998

About the author

Neil Devindra Bissoondath, novelist, short-story writer, essayist (b at Arima, Trinidad and Tobago 19 Apr 1955). He attended St Mary's College in Port of Spain before emigrating to Canada in 1973, when he became a student at York University (BA 1977). After graduating, he began teaching English as a second language and French in Toronto. Bissoondath began writing short stories in the late seventies, and attended the Banff School of Fine Arts in 1983. He credits his uncle, author V.S. Naipaul, for providing inspiration. Bissoondath's first book, a collection of short stories called Digging Up the Mountains (1985), deals with feelings of cultural alienation, exile and domestic upheaval - themes he has continued to explore in his other writings. The book was a commercial and critical success, enabling Bissoondath to leave teaching for a number of years and devote himself to writing full-time. In 1995 he relocated to Québec City, where he teaches Creative Writing at Université Laval.
Bissoondath published a second collection of short stories, On the Eve of Uncertain Tomorrows, in 1990. Most of his fiction has taken the form of novels, beginning with A Casual Brutality (1988), set in the fictional Caribbean republic of Casaquemada. The Innocence of Age (1993) is the story of intergenerational tensions in an increasingly racist Toronto. Bissoondath's novels often focus on characters confronting their respective pasts. The protagonist in GOVERNOR GENERAL'S AWARD nominee The Worlds Within Her (1998) returns to her Caribbean birthplace in order to deliver her mother's ashes. In Doing the Heart Good (2002), an elderly anglophone Montrealer reevaluates his life after losing his possessions to an arsonist. The Unyielding Clamour of the Night (2005) deals with a young schoolteacher who leaves a privileged upbringing to encounter political, religious, and racial unrest in a fictional island state modelled on Sri Lanka.
Bissoondath's most controversial and best-selling book is Selling Illusions: The Cult of Multiculturalism in Canada (1994, rev. 2002). In this nonfiction work, Bissoondath criticizes the 1971 MULTICULTURALISM Act for emphasizing differences rather than similarities amongst the country's various ethnic groups. He argues that the country's multicultural policies, though well-intentioned, have only encouraged the isolation and stereotyping of cultural groups.

Reviews

[Judith Hewko · Rating 4 out of 5]

Insightful look into the lives of Indio Trinidad and descendants in Canada

[Jaclyn]

Got bored. And the chapters in the voice of someone speaking to another character were kinda eh for me. I'm thinking literary fiction just isn't my thing these days.

[Panthère Rousse]

J'ai beaucoup aimé ce récit de quête identitaire. Et les tous derniers mots du livre, ceux de la mère de Yasmin, qui parle à une amie : I am not a final product, Mrs. Livingston. I am a process. As are you. As is everyone. It is to me the most unsettling, and most reassuring, truth about what young people today call "identity". My dear, I haven't got an identity. None of us does. What a great tragedy that would be, don't you think?

Je trouve ça encourageant comme réflexion. Personne n'a d'identité fixe, l'identité est fluide, toujours en mouvement, au fil des expériences de la vie...

Présentation de l'éditeur
En s'envolant vers l'île qui l'a vue naître, Yasmin n'a qu'un but, y disperser les cendres de sa mère. Mais elle doit accepter que, là-bas, les langues se délient et les souvenirs sortent de l'ombre pour tisser l'histoire de ses parents, Indiens des Caraïbes. Son père, Vernon Ramessar, obsédé par sa carrière politique à l'heure de l'indépendance, et sa mère Shakti, une femme fière et captive de son destin. Derrière les anecdotes, les non-dits et les légendes se cache souvent une vérité trop douloureuse à dévoiler, et Yasmin comprend qu'il est impossible de remonter le temps sans se perdre un peu.

Extrait de la quatrième de couverture
Issu d'une famille originaire de l'Inde établie aux Caraïbes vers le début du siècle (il a pour oncle l'écrivain V.S. Naipaul), Neil Bissoondath fait ses études au Canada anglophone, et vit aujourd'hui au Québec dans un environnement francophone. On lui a reproché son refus des appartenances, son dédain des revendications ethniques ; il répond qu'un citoyen d'aujourd'hui n'a d'autre patrie que celle qu'il s'est choisie. Affirmation dont ses lecteurs savent qu'elle est le fruit d'un long questionnement, repris par quasi tous les héros de ses romans.

[M.A. Wohl · Rating 4 out of 5]

Un roman tout en finesse, qui s'envole du froid au chaud, de souvenirs en lendemains.

[Foreign]

French editor: Daniel Arsand