In addition to the street scenes and architectural descriptions, there are vivid descriptions of family life. Car horns would hoot in varying lengths and tones, sounding, with a little imagination, like a modernist noise symphony that would include outbursts of the nut seller’s arcing melody, ‘Nuuuuhts, nuts, nuts, nuts, nuuuuhts, fiiiift-ty cents a baaahg.’ You’d hear theatrical steupses, and people hawking unabashedly, dredging the recesses of their craniums before spitting.” You would descend into a cacophony of sound and a cacophony, yes, of smell. It is also deliberately cinematic in its effect: “Imagine you are a tourist let down from the sky, blindfolded, in the middle of a weekday, onto one of those traffic islands. But for the first time the novel is set in a real place, Trinidad, rather than an imaginary or disguised place that stood in for any post-colonial locale in the Indian diaspora.Įach section in the novel opens with a description delivered in a mock tour-guide tone. Valmiki’s Daughter is Shani Mootoo’s third novel and like her earlier work, Cereus Blooms at Night and He Drown She in the Sea, it is vividly set, full of elaborate physical details in the way you’d expect from a writer who also works as a visual artist and filmmaker.
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