My view is that if you come to Canada and you decide that you are not going to change, you are setting up yourself for failure. You can’t ignore your experience. You can’t ignore your traditions. You can’t ignore the things that shaped you. But at the same time you have to understand the way this society operates and you have to see how you are going to succeed here.
“You cannot allow yourself to be defined. You are who you are. The greatest power in my view that a newcomer has is the power to determine who he or she is going to be. You must make this your core centre belief.”
He makes contact — sometimes fleetingly — with a variety of people in the city, and each of them, in their own way, affects the way that he feels about this unfamiliar place.
“Make contact. I liked the phrase and it made me feel like a shadowy hero with a secret identity. Shy and often puzzled on the surface but understanding everything, all the confusing Canadian customs and laws, in my hero identity.”
As often as not, his point-of-view is influenced by seeing the anger and frustration and sadness of other people who are new to this place, by wanting to find an alternative to that unhappiness and conflict.
But on the third floor of the Toronto Reference Library, he meets a man who has a way of looking at things that really speaks to him.
“Presumptuousness and innocence must be poured in equal parts into the same container. It is only then that one can discover magic. The way he went on it had seemed that magic for him was not spells and frogs and Ra’s al Ghul, but a new way of looking at some old thing.”
For the most part, he merely leads us around the city, meeting people who spend their days ruminating on – you guessed it – being an immigrant in Toronto.

Everything he sees is fresh and new, and he gains new experiences every day through the conversations he has with different people. At a coffee shop he sits with seniors who recall war stories and complain about the government; at a rally in Nathan Phillips Square, he talks to protesters who fight every week for their cause, and it opens his eyes to the many things that people can feel strongly passionate about. Sammy also talks to his co-worker Paul about the Maritimes, and he becomes fascinated with descriptions of “mysterious lamps and corked bottles strewn all over Newfoundland’s coast.”

I understand why Maharaj sets his novel up in this manner; Canada is a brave new world, to Samuel's eyes a constantly evolving universe that threatens to overwhelm him at every turn. Other than Sam, there are practically no recurring characters; his father is so distant as to be a ghost in the apartment, his family is back in Trinidad, and every person he meets disappears within a few pages. Keeping him disorientated is crucial to his triumph over the odds, but it also disorients the reader, and only past the halfway point (when Samuel makes a few crucial life decisions) does the narrative move beyond being a parade of random absurdities and encounters and become a full story.
While Samuel seems to be an appealing young man and makes acquaintances easily, none of his relationships seem to be long-term. He sees the world by constantly exploring new parts of his city, but he doesn’t interact in meaningful ways or build lasting connections. None of his new friendships become stable. We reflected on the fact that people can easily move to Canada and live here for an extensive length of time but not be embraced by society. We wondered about the people we see and acknowledge every day – in the stores we frequent or on the streets we live on – that have come here from other countries. Talking about these people makes us more aware of the immigrants around us that we never really notice.
We marveled at the resilience of Samuel and other immigrants in The Amazing Aborbing Boy. They manage to figure out the system – paperwork, lineups, and red tape – with little or no help. They survive by tapping into social services and taking advantage of community resources like libraries and ESL classes. And they build networks to look out for each other and support their fellow newcomers. Regent Park becomes an important new community for Samuel as he comes under the wing of this network, finding a new “family” in his new country.


Quotation 1: After the Creole woman knocks on Samuel’s door and asks for his father, she tells him: Is then and only then you realize that you don’t have a neighbor you could call from across the road to help fix your car. Or a third cousin to check out that loose wiring or fix the leak below the sink. Is you and you alone and with every passing minute the place start getting colder and the ice slipperier and the smiles more frozen and the pace of everybody faster. […] Like if they running away from you.(page 296)
We have to know that Toronto is a very multicultural city, and most of the immigrants come to live in Regent Park, where the woman lives. The new immigrants being disoriented, they






Question 1: Why does Samuel think that: Maybe my father was from the future. When (p 298), during Dr. Fang's course, ''he said that soon films and books and television shows would have to be shorter because nobody wanted to be tied down to the same thing for too long.
Hint: what I said before, his dad could not integrate, thus everything had to be short-term for him, loneliness, felt he could not rely on anybody, so no long-term relationship or being settled in one place for long.
Question 2: In which way does Samuel's almost absent relationship with his dad affects his integration in Toronto? Hint: makes him meet other people, does not want to stay in his house, does not have enough money so works, independence, coming of age p.283




















In the Amazing Absorbing Boy, a novel written by Rabindranath Maharaj in 2010, after the death of Samuel’s mother, the boy moved to Toronto to live with his father. His almost absent relationship with his father slows down but also facilitates his integration in the new city, Toronto. In fact, although his dad does not approve any of Samuel’s decisions that lack of support makes him seek for new connections from which he greatly benefits.
On one hand, Samuel’s father complete refusal to be in accordance with his son’s point of view decelerates his integration in the society. In fact, for example, his father avoids signing the sponsorship papers for Samuel, and he had to wait a long time before they were signed: “Each night when I got home, I checked for a signature, waiting till my father went into the washroom or his bedroom” (page 191-192). In the previous quotation, it is clear that Samuel’s dad slows down his integration in Toronto. In fact, without the signature, Samuel could not be admitted to college. That hinders him to being more educated.

On the other hand, the lack of support from his dad encourages Sam to seek for new relationships in order to fill the void caused by the bad relationship with his father. He is conscious that Dilara helped him integrate in the society of Toronto with her knowledge: “[…] I would be reminded of Dilara, who would never know she had encouraged me to get this job more than four months earlier or that she had got me thinking of signing up at some college so that I could get a student visa” (page 151). In the previous quotation, Samuel is acknowledging the contribution of the girl he met: she helped him integrate in the society by getting a job, going to college and applying for a student visa. All of these new possibilities helped him understand the way the society works, and assure his future. In fact, a student visa protected him from being deported; he would not be an illegal immigrant anymore, and education would be the starting point to a professional career.
In conclusion, although the lack of support from his dad first hinders him to be integrated, he soon compensates for it by connecting with others and learning about his different possibilities in life. His facility to rapidly adapt in that new environment makes his dad even more reluctant to communicate with him.