The Greatest Hotel On Earth, Eh?

(Doesn't have to be just Canajuns, though I'm interested in their input especially... I was surprised, for example, at how multi-cultural Canada has become when I wasn't paying attention. I still tend to think of it as a sort of uber-Minnesota, tending overwhelmingly toward lily-whiteness. 'Course, MINNESOTA isn't even that lily-white any more...)

Sozobe - i'm in toronto, which is the very epitome of multi-cultural canada. Montreal actually has a larger afro-canajun community, but toronto has large communities from around the world represented. It's quite extraordinary.

Perhaps we can find Blaise Daley and ask him to comment on your question. He was in Toronto in the summer, and had some interesting reflections on the multi-cultural aspect of the city.

I was conceived on the boat, while my parents were on their way to Canada. I think i can fairly say i'm first generation - almost an immigrant by virtue of actual experience, as english was my third language.

I think people can be lonely anywhere, and being an immigrant is not easy anywhere. Being an immigrant in the snow must be particularly difficult.

The Taj Palace in New Delhi. The service there is phenomenal. c.i.

Don't have a direct answer but it struck me that the first of the two observations - namely, that "the majority of the leading lights of [a country's] letters today are immigrants", or at least of immigrant origin - seems very generally valid now in the West. The same has been noted much lately about British literature - that the most challenging, the most renewing, the most striking newly published literature seems almost all of "multicultural birth" - with 'white British writing' ( a term never used, I'm sure) backing off into the mere ironic or trendy. Of course I have to add that that is an impression taken solely from reviews in the paper, as I haven't read much lately anymore.

I did read "Life of Pi", as it happens, it was the last book I read (now reading Rushdie's "Fury") - and I absolutely loved it. I was deeply impressed. Kept on wanting to read whole chunks of it to Anastasia - because it was witty, yes, but unlike, say, when a Nick Hornby novel or something like that makes you laugh, after finishing smiling it left you with a sense of wonder - about such imagination, such brilliance in putting improbable story elements together in a way that keeps you improbably convinced, about the tenderness of the descriptions of people, animals, places and religions, even, and about the difficult question it poses in the end.

Even in Holland, btw, I find that most of the interesting new writing - whether novels or just even columns in the enwspaper, is by writers of migrant origin. I hadn't noticed at first until I realised my favourite columnists were Iranian, Hindustani, half-Black and Jewish. Then I started noticing how the new writers the book reviews were celebrating, for the way they turned the Dutch language around and used it in wholly new ways, were Moroccan, for example (Hafid Bouazza, Abdelkader Benali). Heard the same about French literature.

I assume that the whole experience of moving home and finding oneself mixing up experiences, loyalties and insights or narratives from different cultures and (family) histories creates both a greater need for expressing oneself and a greater or more diverse, eh, pool or reservoir of stories to draw from? I doubt, meanwhile, purely on instinct, that the new home of Canada is especially more lonely than a new home in another country in the West, but - who knows? I've never been in Canada, so perhaps it's true? Perhaps more so than the US b/c the US has been multicultural for a generation longer already now?