[.ca] The Second Life of Samuel Tyne (ISBN 0060736046)

Amazon.ca:
Esi Edugyan's atmospheric first novel has all the ingredients of a 1970s horror flick. A mild-mannered civil servant inherits a rambling old house in the country from a mysterious uncle. Convinced that this is his second chance, he quits his job and moves with his wife and twin 12-year-old daughters to the quiet town of Aster, Alberta. Before long the twins are behaving very strangely. They speak to no one but each other and only in an odd gibberish. They collect cast-off hairbrushes, lining them up on the floor of the room they share with their visiting friend Ama, and disappear alone into the bush each day. Then there are the accidents. Surely the twins wouldn't leave Ama to drown on purpose, but what about their mother's fall from the ladder and all those fires? What saves The Second Life of Samuel Tyne from the cheap melodrama of films like The Stepford Wives and The Bad Seed is race. For Samuel is a black man, and colour lies over this gothic-hued tale of evil and stupidity like the thick grey dust coating the rooms of the Tyne mansion. In Samuel, the Calgary-raised Edugyan (whose fiction was recently featured in Best New American Voices) has created a Canadian Mr. Biswas. Like the hero of V.S. Naipaul's A House for Mr. Biswas, this middle-aged immigrant from Ghana pursues his new start in life with an obstinate naïveté that is excruciating to behold. His relationships, however, become increasingly swathed in obscurity. It's as if the furtive secrecy that marks the twins' communication infects all other interactions in the novel. By the end, it is impossible to say why any of the characters do or say the things they do. This unfortunately leaves the reader feeling as shut out from the action as the Tynes are from Aster society. --Lisa Alward

uncompromising and masterful:
Praise comes cheap in the literary world and Edugyan has been so highly touted by the likes of the New Yorker and Joyce Carol Oates and the Globe and Mail that one can't help but be suspicious. I picked Second Life up thinking, "Great, just what we need, another important new voice." But this truly is an astonishing first novel. Despite its "gothic" elements it is never anything but literary and uncompromisingly so - do not buy this book if you like Stephen King, you will be disappointed. The ending is not "obscure" but rather "mysterious"; a crime is left unsolved but the emotional turmoil surrounding this is addressed with a terrifying delicacy. And that is really what the novel is concerned with, it seems - not who did what to whom at precisely what moment, but how it is possible to go on in the face of failure and loss. The book is funny and heartbreaking and very wise and it is in the end about all of us. While Samuel Tyne is a black man and living in Canada and while the novel addresses this, the book is not about "race" at all and to suggest otherwise seems to me a misreading of the book. It is no more a novel about blackness than David Adams Richards' novels are about whiteness (in fact this novel made me think of Mercy Among the Children). Edugyan is interested in the human condition, in the hopes and failures and potential for redemption we all share. I was blown away. This is not "beach reading." Buy the latest Margaret Atwood or Maeve Binchy if you have an airplane to catch. But if you want compelling literature by one of our future stars, read this.

Not recommended:
I found this book to be a slow and painful read. The writing is overly descriptive and the plot moves extremely slowly. The real tragedy is Samuel and his wife's inability to actually do anything! For me, this does not make for an interesting read. I was happy when the book finally ended!

A Ghanaian interpretation of loneliness in Canada:
A bleak look at the life of a migrant from an entirely different culture. Edugyan retains the cadence of Ghanaian speech ( as well as references to the Gold Coast instead of Ghana) and captures the essence of the migrant of colour on the vast wilderness of the Canadian landscape. Perhaps not for those who are not prepared to step outside of the box and experience the intense loneliness of the ride.