SOURCE: "Keeping It Short: A Season of Stories; Trading One World for Another," in New York Times Book Review, May 26, 1991, p. 3.

Below, Shephard feels that Bissoondath's sensibilities intrude too much into the narrative of On the Eve of Uncertain Tomorrows, but the stories are important statements about the disenfranchised.

The Polish poet Adam Zagajewski, in his poem "Song of an Emigre," has his exiles begin their address to us in this way: "We come into being in alien cities. / We call them native but not for long. / We are allowed to admire their walls and spires. / From east to west we go, and in front of us / rolls the huge circle of a flaming / sun through which, nimbly, as in a circus, / a tamed lion jumps."

Neil Bissoondath's On the Eve of Uncertain Tomorrows, concerned as it is with that spiritual and material anguish of exiles, seems both...