BOOK REVIEWS 137

mericana. Este tipo de libro ayuda a matizar y enriquecer los studios lite-
rarios sobre Latinoam6rica, en los cuales predominaron, a lo largo del siglo
XX, los anailisis de los g6neros narrativos (cuento, novela, testimonio, nove-
la testimonial) y po6ticos.

 Juan G. Gelpi
 Universidad de Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras




Brand, Dionne. What We All Long For. Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005.

In What We All Long For (2005), Dionne Brand disowns her early fascination
with the Caribbean to explore the life of a group of second generation
immigrants to Toronto. Unlike her previous two novels In Another Place, Not
Here (1996) and At the Full and Change of the Moon (1999), none of the main
characters in her latest work of fiction belong to the Caribbean. However,
Brand has not shifted gears entirely, for this novel continues to focus on
Canada's "visible minority" and how they read and inhabit the city. For
example, there is Tuyen an artist born and raised in the city who yearns to
free herself from the pull of her Vietnamese family and their fixation on the
tragic loss of their eldest son; there is Oku, a Black Canadian who struggles
to remove himself from his father's dreams and from what seems to be the
inevitably violent fate of all black men in the city; there is Carla, a bike courier
whose Italian mother commits suicide leaving her and her newborn brother
in the care of a reluctant Black father and his wife; and Jackie, a Black Nova
Scotian who only dates white men in order to detach herself from a life that
may even slightly resemble that of her parents. Finally, there is Quy, the lost
Vietnamese son who hasn't yet reached Canada but who throughout the
novel is seen both searching for a place and being searched for. His is the
only story narrated in first person, giving his travel through refugee camps
and seedy apprenticeships a special poignancy.
 What We All Long For points to human dreams and longings and how they
become distorted and diluted in the large metropolitan centers. As an
installation artist, Tuyen embarks on a project to explore what the people in
the city long for. She stops people in the streets to ask them about their
dreams and hopes. The answers vary from the sublime to the mundane.
The response that holds the key to the novel comes from a Bengali woman
who tells the young artist, "Why long for anything? Longing is suffering. We
have to stop desire. Desire nothing." Tuyen is eventually forced to come
face to face with her own longings, and that of her friends and her family.
The reader caught in the web of the artist's artwork, begins to yearn for a
glimpse of the installation, a lubaio (an ancient Chinese signpost), that