SOURCE: "Home is Where the Death Squads Are," in The New York Times Book Review, February 26, 1989, Sec. 7, p. 14.

Keneally is the best-selling author of numerous books, including the widely acclaimed Schindler's List. Below, he finds A Casual Brutality's language sometimes strained and stilted, but feels Bissoondath is a writer of great potential.

Neil Bissoondath is a Canadian writer, born in Trinidad. He is also a nephew of the brothers V. S. and Shiva Naipaul, though he makes little of it. After all, this first novel shows he has his own fish to fry, even though they might derive from that same broad, blue, troubled sea, the Caribbean.

And like his uncles, Mr. Bissoondath writes well about the contingencies that brought Indians as indentured laborers to the West Indies, that saw the more enterprising of them become small businessmen living in awkward conjunction with former African slaves. "So there...