Adjacentland

by Rabindranath Maharaj

Today is a new day but yesterday was the same day. In this disquieting new work from award-winning novelist Rabindranath Maharaj, a man awakens in a strange institution called the Compound with no memory of his past. Struggling to make sense of his surroundings, he is skeptical of the administrators who try to convince him he is mad and dangerous, and begins to suspect he has been the subject of recurring experiments, which have caused episodes of amnesia. In dreamlike prose Maharaj weaves a story of fragments, where our narrator comes to believe that he was once a comic book writer who warned in his stories that the reliance on artificial intelligence would make the imagination obsolete and subversive. As the narrator searches for clues he may have left for himself before his memory loss, both he and the reader learn of Adjacentland, a primitive land of misfits and outsiders. It is only in Adjacentland that the imagination has survived. With a motley group of other inmates from the Compound, the narrator decides to make his way there, but during the journey he discovers a terrible secret about himself and his companions.

325 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 2018

About the author

Rabindranath Maharaj was born in the fifties in South Trinidad. He received a B.A., M.A. and Diploma in Education from the University of the West Indies, Saint Augustine. In Trinidad he worked as a teacher and as a columnist for the Trinidad Guardian. In the early 1990s Maharaj moved to Canada and in 1993 he completed a second M.A. at the University of New Brunswick. Since 1994 he has been living in Ajax, Ontario and teaching high school there.Maharaj is now well recognized in Canada for his published fiction and short stories, which tend to deal with everyday situations that challenge and stimulate the lives of men and women from Indo-Caribbean communities in Canada and in Trinidad.
Both the Toronto Globe and Mail and the Toronto Star recognized his literary worth when his book, The Lagahoo’s Apprentice, was published. A previous novel, Homer in Flight, had been nominated for the Chapters/Books in Canada First Novel Award.
Two collections of short stories, The Book of Ifs and Buts and The Interloper were nominated for a Regional Commonwealth Prize for Best First Book.
His most recent novel A Perfect Pledge, published in 2005, seems to engage some of the issues and themes that Vidia Naipaul, who was also born in Trinidad, tackled in his earlier novels. Maharaj’s approach, however, is less scathing and dismissive. Although he obviously sees the shortcomings and inadequacies of life in this “now for now” immigrant society of Trinidad, he treats his characters with greater sympathy and with humane understanding.
Rabindranath Maharaj is also one of the founding editors of Lichen a literary magazine that in his own words: “ferrets out new voices, throws the spotlight on recognized ones, and adds to the broth a distinct flavour: a mix of city and country, of tradition and innovation.”

Reviews

[Naomi · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you like a mind-boggling challenge, give this book a try. But first, check out my navigation guide... https://consumedbyink.ca/2018/04/04/a...

[Pierre · Rating 2 out of 5]

interesting idea, but the book was born too soon, it needed more gestation.

[Alex Harvey · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting narrative structure. I like how the book plays with memory and identity with respects to its protagonist, and the book does a pretty swell job at creating a bleak atmosphere.

That being said, I feel like the ideas put forth in the book could have been explored in a more meaningful way and that the character interactions were sometimes repetitive or a chore to read through. Some great moments, though, and definitely worth a read if anything to see how a book can become a jigsaw puzzle.