By David Chariandy. Arsenal Pulp Press, 192 pp, $19.95, softcover

Forgetting lies at the heart of Soucouyant, the first novel from SFU English prof David Chariandy. Adele forgets more each day as early-onset dementia turns her recollections to tatters. For his part, her grown son–this beautiful book's protagonist–seems unable to forget anything, but then, in a typically lyrical passage, we see what he fears most: that he will forget to hold the past at bay. "Memory is a bruise still tender," he thinks. "History is a rusted pile of blades and manacles. And forgetting can sometimes be the most creative and life-sustaining thing that we can ever hope to accomplish. The problem happens when we become too good at forgetting. When somehow we forget to forget, and we blunder into circumstances that we consciously should have avoided."

Chiefly, the narrator had hoped to avoid his unravelling mother, whom he abandoned two years earlier. Now returned despite his fear of her unpredictable moods, he suffers lingering guilt over running away.

Chariandy, whose book has been long-listed for this year's Giller Prize, builds his story glancingly. Through poetic repetition, allusion, and suggestion we come to understand the overlapping moments that set his people's feet onto their life path. (Some characters feel more solid than others.) The narrator is adamant that his mother should be more than a recitation of her lapses and weaknesses. "I wanted to portray her growing, not diminishing," he concludes. "I wanted to imagine her awakening to something that we wouldn't have guessed at otherwise. The possibility beyond the here and now, beyond the official stories and proper meanings."

The tale becomes not just one of Trinidadian immigrants coming to intolerant Scarborough, struggling, and sickening. Rather, it speaks to identity-building, to the way that as we age, we become not less but more.

David Chariandy reads from Soucouyant at the Vancouver International Writers Festival on October 19, with Jen Sookfong Lee, Ameen Merchant, and Neil Smith, beginning at 1 p.m. at the Waterfront Theatre.