SOURCE: A review of Digging Up the Mountains, in World Literature Today, Vol. 61, No. 4, Autumn, 1987, pp. 673-4.

Below, Hawthorne lauds Bissoondath as a voice of marginalized peoples.

Digging Up the Mountains, a collection of fourteen short stories by the Trinidadian-born Canadian writer Neil Bissoondath, focuses with narrative urgency on themes of displacement, marginality, and political victimization. The protagonists of the stories are racially and ethnically diverse, such as the Japanese heroine of "The Cage" and the Latin Americans of "In the Kingdom of the Golden Dust" and "Counting the Wind." The majority of them however, are East Indian-Caribbeans who in many respects are the twentieth century's Wandering Jews. The stories about them put on view their status, actual and metaphorical, as exiles, especially their more recent evictions from (or pressured abandonment of) the Caribbean homeland. Bissoondath clearly blames politics and revolutionary ideas of the post-colonial, independent West Indies...