138 BOOK REVIEWS

represents the unexpressed aspirations of a city full of immigrants. "Yes,
that was the beauty of this city, it's polyphonic, murmuring. This is what
always filled Tuyen with hope, this is what she thought her art was about-
the representation of that gathering of voices and longings that summed
themselves up into a kind of language, yet indescribable."
 Despite the promising underlying story, What We All Long For lacks the
fascinating characters that inhabit Brand's previous two novels. Missing are
the likes of Verlia from her first novel, the troubled Black activist in search of
meaning in her life beyond the merely physical, or Elizete, the battered and
abandoned peasant that finds redemption in the arms of another woman in
whom she discovers the power of grace. Missing is also the depth of passion
and commitment found in her second novel's stories of Marie Ursule, and
Cordelia, or the moving madness of those beaten by life and history like that of
Sones sitting under a Tamarindus Indica and regurgitating the wrong done to
him in the mother country. Or the story of Adrian, the misfit homosexual who
in a final and contradictory search for clarity plucks his own eyes out. The
characters of this, her latest novel, are young kids brought up in the city who
have lost a connection to the past. Their problems do not seem to have the
urgency of the Trinidadian-Canadian writer's previous characters, or even stir
up much empathy. Although touched by tragic events, their lives are mostly
unencumbered by history or a search for identity (with the exception of Quy,
who unlike the other characters is raised in refugee camps among derelicts).
 What We Long For seems to be aimed at a different audience, one that
demands a consistent, standard, more linear narrative. Yet, Quy's story would
strongly benefit from the poetic sensuous intensity that infuses Brand's earlier
novels with a magical, suggestive quality. One has to wonder why she gave
up the experimental quality of her novels that from the very beginning could
throw the reader into a seemingly new realm as in the opening of In Another
Place, not Here: "Grace. Is Grace, Yes. And I take it, quiet, quiet, like thiefing
sugar." The demotic quality of Elizete's speech, the fierce political
commitment of Verlia, the pained yearning of Eula in At the Full, the insistent
intellectual pursuit for origins are all absent from this one. Still, there are
moments in which her prose tastes like the poetry that made her other novels
so compelling, especially in the narrator's musings on the city. "Lives in the
city are doubled, tripled, conjugated-women and men all trying to handle
their own chain of events, trying to keep the story straight in their own
heads...In this city, like everywhere, people work, they eat, they drink, they
have sex, but it's hard not to wake up here without the certainty of
misapprehension." Nevertheless, the most fascinating moment in the novel
is the unexpected ending that makes you wish you could undo the whole
thing and start all over; it is also the one incident that made this reader want
to re-read and reconsider the novel in its entirety.
 Although marketed as a novel about the city, it is actually a novel about
young people thrust into the often violent, confusing and complicated maze