More by Austin Clarke
My rating: 3/5 cats
how many of you would groan if i said i just wanted more from this novel?
don’t care.
parts of this book batter me with how well he gets into the mind of this character, and her perceptions and fears and shifts between confidence and a wish to hide herself away from the world are fantastic and uncomfortably recognizable. the parts that are good are amazing.
however, i don’t usually have a problem with a nonlinear story, but this one was more difficult than usual. i don’t know if i was ever sure what was memory and what was fantasy. sometimes a distinction like that doesn’t matter, but in this case, i would argue that it does. the perspective is so limited, it would just be helpful to know whether we are in reminiscence territory or madness.
i do know it is deeply sad. hope is frequently scorched, opportunities are dangers in disguise, children and men will disappoint you, the expectations of other women are confusing, the racial tolerance of toronto is a sham, and you are left alone in a basement apartment, pretending to be naomi campbell on the catwalk.
i can’t think of anything more depressing than that.
this is the second of his novels i have read (of the whopping three of eleven that are in print here), and while i liked them both, i think i had higher expectations for both of them. (but that may also be because of my deepest love for that “other” afro-canadian author whose last name is clark-without-an-e. they are right next to each other on the shelf, is how i discovered him in the first place) and although this one, unlike The Polished Hoe, was not written in dialect, i could not help but insert it into the text. i like books in dialect, when they are done well. and Polished Hoe was really well done in that respect.
dunno—i still want to read MORE from him (heh), since i do have that one option left and all. and there were lots of great elements to this book, but my expectation-to-enjoyment ratio leaves me stuck with a high-three star cat rating.
also: the first sentence is three full pages long, and you have to applaud that.
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