The Amazing Absorbing Boy

By Gerald Eyes Paul

Some two-hours in a /lime/gaff/interview with the charming and engaging Trinidad born Rabindranath Maharaj - no relation to my Managing Editor, Raynier M.-at the Random House of Canada Limited, left me sated with his hot off the press ‘The Amazing Absorbing Boy.’

Indeed, it’s quite a book to keep you and yours stimulated -- mentally of course - in these wintery climes.

Also, at a Different BookList, Bloor and Bathurst you can get your copies with 20% off and gift it to the Africentric School.

Yes, reading fiction can also help you in fitting into a society and give a sense of identity. So, there is the need for more Caribbean people to buy more books and support the writers.

By the way, this book is about to trying to fit in and trying to understand Canadians, with the book’s hero eventually arriving to the conclusion that there is no such creature like a typical Canadian. Then, presto, our hero has this brain wave: a typical Canadian is one who fusses all the time, the place is too cold…too hot…too much hockey, too little, too much American shows on TV, too little.

Maharaj is an incredibly gifted writer that everybody should know about. Over the course of his career he has received glowing reviews (his last novel, the superb A Perfect Pledge, was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Prize and the Rogers Writers Trust Award for Fiction).

The Amazing Absorbing Boy looks at Canadian city life - Regent Park - through the eyes of Samuel, a young man from Trinidad who has come to Toronto to live with his estranged father after the death of his mother. Through comic books and life’s hard knocks, readers experience Samuel’s coming of age in the tough surroundings of Regent Park. “It was a real balancing act for me. I wanted to write a book about the immigrant experience, with how people are new to a big city, the kind of problems they have to deal with; also, I wanted to present Toronto in such a way that most people have not seen before,” the author said.

“I should tell you this, with regards to Haiti, a member of the Caribbean family. I felt very unnatural. What’s the point of you going on a tour and talking up your book, when there are people suffering. It took me a while to get over that I had to force myself not to look at the images.

“Then again, the things that I want to do in my writings, it bears a kind of indirect relationship. Because when these people come here as orphans, ten, fifteen years from now, they grow up and face some of the same problems that Samuel is facing in Regent Park.

“One of the things that I wanted to do in this book was really show that we don’t have to give up. We don’t have to give up as immigrants or as anybody.

“My view is that if you come to Canada and you decide that you are not going to change, you are setting up yourself for failure. You can’t ignore your experience. You can’t ignore your traditions. You can’t ignore the things that shaped you. But at the same time you have to understand the way this society operates and you have to see how you are going to succeed here.

“You cannot allow yourself to be defined. You are who you are. The greatest power in my view that a newcomer has is the power to determine who he or she is going to be. You must make this your core centre belief.”

The Amazing Boy, is a treat. Indeed, it returns you to otherness, whether in yourself or in friends, or in those who may become friends.

The Amazing Absorbing Boy is also available on The Amazon Kindle e-reader.