"Blaise burns brightly"--& the Globe caught the spark

Today Steven Hayward published a review of The Meagre Tarmac in the Globe & Mail. Here's how it begins:

"'E.M. Forster, you ruined everything,' laments the narrator of a story from Clark Blaise's first collection of short fiction, published almost 40 years ago. 'Why must every visitor to India, every well-read tourist, expect a sudden transformation?'

It was that book, A North American Education, that launched Blaise’s remarkable literary career. It was also where he began to sketch the unique constellation of obsessions that would occupy him for the next few decades: the liquidity of personal and cultural identity, the vicissitudes of desire, and, at least somewhat as a result of his marriage to novelist Bharati Mukherjee, his knowledge of India and perspective on the Indian immigrant experience."

And the rest just gets better. Read the full article here.