SOURCE: A review of Digging Up the Mountains, in The Hudson Review, Vol. 40, Spring, 1987, pp. 139-40.

Below, Gorra feels some of Bissoondath's stories reach too far in an attempt to create personae different from himself, but lauds the writing and Bissoondath's potential.

Many of the stories in the Trinidadian writer Neil Bissoondath's first collection are also cast as dramatic monologues, often in the voices of those who are for one reason or another exiled from or disenfranchised by their homelands. But his attempts to speak in the voice of a peasant girl living under a Latin American dictatorship in "In the Kingdom of the Golden Dust," or in that of a Japanese girl from a traditional family in "The Cage," ring false to me: Here is the latter story's first paragraph:

My father is an architect. Architects are good at designing things: stores, houses, apartments, prisons. For my...