No Pain Like This Body

Rating:
Summary: Difficult Lives
Review: Harold Sonny Laddoo lived a brief and intense life, if we are to believe the little that is known about him, publishing a handful of short stories, and two novels before he was found brutally beaten, in a drainage ditch. He died shortly after, at the age of 28. An Trinidadian of East Indian background, this first novel, NO PAIN LIKE THIS BODY, and a second, YESTERDAYS, published posthumously, is all the published work we have left from this young and brilliant writer. Historically, indentured workers from India supplied the forced labor that Emancipation "took" from Caribbean plantation owners when slavery itself was abolished in the Anglophone parts of the region, roughly from the 1830's to mid-century. The conditions under which East Indians worked were cruel, and NO PAIN LIKE THIS BODY recounts the legacy of this elemental struggle in its tale of a poor Trinidadian family during the rainy season in Trinidad.

The themes of brutality, of supertitious clinging to the old beliefs, of fate emerge in an intense day-in-the-life-of a village community. The effect is a sustained prose poem the the reader will not be able to put down once the book begins.

I highly recommend it and am saddened to see this go out of print.