Reviewed by Anne Borden

"Can you remember it now, Mother? Can you tell me this last thing? Today, before I go?"

She was smiling at me and I caught it. I caught her reading me all the way through. The person I'd become, despite all her efforts. A boy so melancholy despite the luxuries she'd worked so hard for him to enjoy. A boy moping for lost things, for hurts never his own…

In this debut novel by David Chariandy, a son of Trinidadian immigrants returns home to Scarborough to care for his mother who has suffered for decades from early-onset dementia. With his father dead and his brother gone, he struggles to understand his family's past by coaxing stories from his mother, Adele, in her more lucid moments.

Returning to his childhood home, he is also confronted with his own memories of a childhood spent in the shadows of a woman known to neighbors as "the wandering lady". Forced to care for his mother while he was still young ("What do you do with a person who one day empties her mind into the sky?"), he ran away from the family at the age of 17, and has just returned after 5 years' absence. His sense of loss over those missing 5 years is heightened as he gets to know his mother's caregiver Meera -- whose knowledge of his mother's life he finds unsettling.

Adele's own memory is clouded not just by her dementia, but by her effort to reconcile the beauty of her childhood village – warm, fragrant, fertile – with the adolescent experiences that eventually drove her from her home. Adele's Trinidad is enmeshed in the complex encounters between locals and soldiers at the nearby military base, and her recollections are coloured by her desire to assimilate into Canadian life.

She cannot answer questions about her husband's past, for example, because that past was simply lost in migration: the couple had agreed "never to wax nostalgic" about the times before they met in Toronto. Adele seems to suggest that they were too busy all those years for weepy reflection or cathartic discovery, let alone a return to the island that was once home. But, as her son suspects, it's more complicated than that.

At times, Adele views her son's quest for the past as a small luxury, and her son as slightly spoiled in his searching for a clearer picture of that past, for the taste of backyard mango or the alchemy of island cures. Her son's tears surprise her, for example, as he asks her about a pivotal moment when she is forever wrenched from the life she once knew in Trinidad.

"You crying?" she asked. "Why you crying child of mine, child of this beautiful land?"

"I don't know, mother. I don't really understand it all."

"You crying and you don't really understand it all. Come now, child. Who people children do such silly, silly things?"

A parent's trauma – once removed – can be felt by second-generation sons and daughters like a pang in a phantom limb, and this sense is especially keen when there is no recognizable homeland to return to. The world of deceased grandparents and other ancestors can only be sketched out at the kitchen table thousands of miles from the experiences of an island landscape now radically transformed by history. Although the narrator is well-read on Trinidadian history, he is not satisfied; he wants to know his mother's own Trinidad, the place where he is truly "from". But he can never fully grasp this history, because selective forgetting is a part of survival for his family – and all parents, of course, keep secrets.

In the case of Adele, forgetting is also a cruel trick repeating itself as she spirals into her illness, particularly when she "forgets to forget" and an unwanted fragment of memory surfaces. It is at those times where she is most vulnerable to her son's questions, and it is a bittersweet moment when he captures each new truth.

Soucouyant was nominated for a Governor General's Award and a Commonwealth Writer's Prize for Best First Book.

Anne Borden is a Toronto writer and editor.