These days, I’ve been totally consumed with the politics and literature of the late 1960s and early 1970s in Canada, so my “editor’s pick” is coming at you from that time and place.
It’s a book called No Pain Like This Body by an author named Harold Sonny Ladoo. Ladoo was born in Trinidad in 1945, and he immigrated to Toronto in 1968. Over the following few years, he wrote and published two novels with House of Anansi Press, but the second one, entitled Yesterdays, appeared posthumously. He was murdered on a visit back to Trinidad in 1973.
I read No Pain Like This Body in one sitting. The novel is set in 1905 on a fictionalized island that resembles Trinidad, and it explores the legacy of indentured labour in the region through a devastating episode in the lives of one Indo-Caribbean family. Ladoo’s unique style of narration heightens the impact of the story. The novel is focalized through the perspective of the children of the family, so there is a kind of innocence in the narrative voice—but the prose is also utterly unsentimental, relentless in its focus on action and dialogue. In his poem “The Death of Harold Ladoo” (1976), Dennis Lee calls the novel “a spare and / luminous nightmare.” I’ve never read anything quite like it.
Norah is a fiction editor for Broken Pencil. 