Abeng

ISBN-13: 9780452274839 / Angielski / Miękka / 2008 / 176 str.

Michelle Cliff

Opis

Ever since Abeng was first published in 1984, Michelle Cliff has steadily become a literary force. Her novels evoke both the clearly delineated hierarchies of colonial Jamaica and the subtleties of present-day island life. Nowhere is her power felt more than in Clare Savage, her Jamaican heroine, who appeared, already grown, in No Telephone to Heaven. Abeng is a kind of prequel to that highly-acclaimed novel and is a small masterpiece in its own right. Here Clare is twelve years old, the light-skinned daughter of a middle-class family, growing up among the complex contradictions of class versus color, blood versus history, harsh reality versus delusion, in a colonized country. In language that surrounds us with a richness of meaning and voices, the several strands of young Clare's heritage are explored: the Maroons, who used the conch shell--the abeng—to pass messages as they fought a guerilla struggle against their English enslavers; and the legacy of Clare's white great-great-grandfater, Judge Savage, who burned his hundred slaves on the eve of their emancipation. A lyrical, explosive coming-of-age story combined with a provocative retelling of the colonial history of Jamaica, this novel is a triumph.

Recenzje

"The beauty and authority of her writing are coupled with profound insight."
Toni Morrison

"Her keen eye for detail and pithy anecdotal descriptions bring Jamaica's present and past to life."
New York Times Book Review

"Powerful and often lyric an important work."
Library Journal

"Jamaican history, lore, and lanscape are evocatively re-created in this multilayered novel. Through its richness and diversity of detail, Abeng achieves a timeless universality."
Publisher's Weekly

"Abeng is a solid achievement, a book that offers a wealth of history and culture. [Cliff's] perception of character, her receptivity to sensuous detail, her rendering of the language, make our journey a richly textured experience."
Plexus

O autorze

Michelle Cliff (1946-2016) was a Jamaican-American author whose writing explored colonialism and racism. Her body of work includes novels, Abeng, its sequel, No Telephone to Heaven, Free Enterprise, and Into the Interior; short story collections, The Store of a Million Items and Bodies of Water; and poetry collections, The Land of Look Behind and Claiming an Identity They Taught Me to Despise.