SOURCE: "Uncertainty," in Canadian Literature, Spring 1993, pp. 146-7.

In the following, Hastings reviews several stories from On the Eve of Uncertain Tomorrows.

In "Cracks and Keyholes," perhaps the best story in Neil Bissoondath's recent collection of short fiction, On the Eve of Uncertain Tomorrows, Lenny, a Caribbean immigrant who has lived in Canada for fifteen years and presently finds himself washing beer mugs at a run-down strip-joint in Toronto, proclaims, "I's livin' proof that not every immigrant is a multicultural success story." For Lenny, as for a number of characters in this uneven collection of ten stories, life doesn't always work out the way it is supposed to. Consequently, the individual effort to take control of the future by making sense of the present moment is an important theme in these stories. As the collection's title suggests, Bissoondath's characters stand precariously on the eve of a better tomorrow...