‘Super’: An immigrant novel about life’s absurd dramas driven by the meaninglessness of desire

What is modern life but an endless chase of the ever-receding star of desire? Poetic as it may sound, this is an undeniable and unavoidable reality that fashions the contours of modern life. Unavoidable because chasing desire is no longer a matter of wish; it is a carefully designed mode of market capitalism where anyone and anything can be sold, where human life is always the surplus. We are not unaware of this leash that drives us along, but we are unable to act against it; such is its control on our being, such is our being a mere nothing before this giant. We are the modern Frankenstein, slaves of the darkness we have fed.

A new life

Lindsay Pereira’s Super takes us into the vortex of the storm that swirls the lives of young Punjabis as they prepare to cross over to foreign lands in order to flesh out their skeletal dream of a good life. Mapping through the slow morning rituals of Sukhpreet’s life in Brampton, we learn in snippets about the complicated lives of those like him who migrate from Jalandhar to Brampton or Toronto looking for a life that is richer than what they leave behind. Such stories, however, are tucked in...

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