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The visionary masterpiece, tracing a riverboat crew's dreamlike
jungle voyage ... 'My new all time favourite book ... A
magnificent, breathtaking and terrifying novel.' Tsitsi Dangarembga
'An exhilarating experience ... Makes visions real and reality
visions ... Genius.' Jamaica Kincaid 'A masterpiece: I love this
book for its language, adventure and wisdoms.' Monique Roffey
'Revel in the inviolate, ever-deepening mystery of Wilson Harris's
work.' Jeet Thayil 'The Guyanese William Blake . Such poetic
intensity.' Angela Carter I dreamt I awoke with one dead seeing eye
and one living closed eye ... A crew of men are embarking on a
voyage up a turbulent river through the rainforests of Guyana.
Their domineering leader, Donne, is the spirit of a conquistador,
obsessed with hunting for a mysterious woman and exploiting
indigenous people as plantation labour. But their expedition is
plagued by tragedies, haunted by drowned ghosts: spectres of the
crew themselves, inhabiting a blurred shadowland between life and
death. As their journey into the interior - their own hearts of
darkness - deepens, it assumes a spiritual dimension, guiding them
towards a new destination: the Palace of the Peacock ... A
modernist fever dream; prose poem; modern myth; elegy to victims of
colonial conquest: Wilson Harris' masterpiece has defied definition
for over sixty years, and is reissued for a new generation of
readers. 'One of the great originals ... Visionary ... Dazzlingly
illuminating.' Guardian 'Amazing ... Masterly ... Near-miraculous.'
Observer 'Staggering ... Both brilliant and terrifying.' The Times
'The most inimitable [writer] produced in the English-speaking
Caribbean.' Fred D'Aguiar 'Extraordinary ... Courageous and
visionary ... It speaks to us in tongues.' Pauline Melville
'What Wilson] Harris is doing is to extend the boundaries of our
very conception of fiction.' Robert Nye.
First published in 1982, "The Angel at the Gate "is offered to
readers as Wilson Harris's analysis and interpretation of the
'automatic writing' of 'Mary Stella Holiday': an assumed name for
the secretary and patient of the late Father Joseph Marsden.
'Mary suffered from a physical and nervous "malaise" as "The
Angel at the Gate" makes clear. Through Marsden - the medical care
he arranged for her and the sessions he provided in Angel Inn which
gave scope to her 'automatic talents' - that illness became a
catalyst of compassion through which she penetrated layers of
social and psychical deprivation to create a remarkable fictional
life for 'Stella' (apart from 'Mary') in order to unravel the
thread that runs through a diversity of association in past and
present 'fictional lives.''
(From Harris's introductory 'Note.')
This volume, introduced by the author, brings together three novels
first published separately. 'The trilogy comprises Carnival (1985),
The Infinite Rehearsal (1987) and The Four Banks of the River of
Space (1990), novels linked by metaphors borrowed from theatre,
traditional carnival itself and literary mythology. The characters
make Odyssean voyages through time and space, witnessing and
re-enacting the calamitous history of mankind, sometimes assuming
sacrificial roles in an attempt to save modern civilisation from
self-destruction.' Independent on Sunday 'The Four Banks of the
River of Space is a kind of quantum Odyssey... in which the
association of ideas is not logical but... a 'magical imponderable
dreaming'. The dreamer is Anselm, another of Harris's alter egos,
like Everyman Masters in Carnival and Robin Redbreast Glass in The
Infinite Rehearsal... Together, they represent one of the most
remarkable fictional achievements in the modern canon.' Listener
"The Tree of the Sun," first published in 1978, begins where
Wilson Harris's previous novel "Da Silva da Silva's Cultivated
Wilderness "ended," "and thus forms a sequel.""
""
""The London-dwelling Brazilian painter Da Silva is deeply moved
by his wife's pregnancy after eight years of marriage. As he
contemplates the child to be born he recalls a painting he began on
the very morning he and his wife made love and conception occurred:
a painting that contained a growing image. This becomes the
evolving 'foetus' of imagination through which Da Silva begins to
relate himself and his wife to the former (childless) tenants of
their Kensington flat.
'I must admire the imagination and force of Wilson Harris'
writing.' Kevin Cully, "Tribune"
In this 1967 novel Wilson Harris explores the spiritual and
psychic realities beyond the mundane facts of relationships, boldly
constructing his story on the basis of fragments.
When the Forrestals died in an explosion that wrecked their home
and destroyed most of its contents, there survived a disjointed
diary - or 'log book', as Susan Forrestal called it. She had
suffered from an affliction of the eyes which, after three
operations, left her almost blind. Abandoned by her lover, who
disappeared without a trace, she eventually married a kind and
solicitous husband; nevertheless her lover continued to haunt her
in such a way that his presence had an almost living reality.
'I admire Wilson Harris's novels greatly; he is one of the very
few living novelists whose works are too brief for my tastes.'
Anthony Burgess
"'He ascended, eyes riveted, nailed to the steps leading up to
the top of the pyramid of the sun. How many human hearts he
wondered had been plucked from bodies there to feed the dying light
of the sun and create an obsession with royal sculptures, echoing
stone?... It was time to take stock of others as hollow bodies and
shelters into which one fell...'"
In "Companions of the Day and Night" (first published in 1975)
Wilson Harris revives figures from his earlier "Black Marsden" -
chiefly Clive Goodrich, the 'editor' of this text, who constructs a
narrative from the papers of a figure known as Idiot Nameless: a
wanderer between present and past, taking an Easter sojourn in
Mexico that lasts both for days and for centuries. The results have
the strangely hypnotic power characteristic of Wilson Harris's
fiction.
Wilson Harris's tenth novel, first published in 1972, is set in
Edinburgh but, like much of his subsequent work, bridges continents
by its imaginative reach. ''Doctor Black Marsden', tramp, shaman,
and conjurer, is an ambivalent Merlin-figure representing both the
hero's personal (and archetypal) shadow, and the creative,
magus-like activity of the author himself.' Michael Gilkes, Journal
of Commonwealth Literature '... my many visits to Scotland, and
books I have read, have given me the sensation of a tone or inner
vibrancy that may be due to the languages (English, Scottish,
Gaelic) that are present in the subconscious imagination of
sensitive Scots... [These] make for the cross-culturality (not
mono-cultural) that came into play in Black Marsden.' Wilson
Harris, 2008
'I was obsessed - let me confess - by cities and settlements in the
Central and South Americas that are an enigma to many scholars. I
dreamt of their abandonment, their bird-masks, their animal-masks
... Did their inhabitants rebel against the priests, did obscure
holocausts occur, civil strife, famine, plague? Was Jonestown the
latest manifestation...?' Jonestown (1996), one of Wilson Harris's
most acclaimed creations, is a fictional re-imagining of the
real-life ritual mass suicide orchestrated by Reverend Jim Jones in
the remote Guyana forest in 1978. The novel's narrator, Francisco
Bone, has survived the suicide albeit in a traumatized condition.
By way of a dream-book he tries to heal his psychic wound, under
the influence of the Mayan concept of time that twins past and
future. Faber Finds is devoted to restoring to readers a wealth of
lost or neglected classics and authors of distinction. The range
embraces fiction, non-fiction, the arts and children's books. For a
full list of available titles visit www.faberfinds.co.uk. To join
the dialogue with fellow book-lovers please see our blog,
www.faberfindsblog.co.uk.
The first of these two novels is about a painter, Brazilian by
birth and British by adoption, living and working in London with
his wife, whose equally varied spiritual and cultural inheritance
complements his. Wilson Harris evokes with vividness and
characteristic imaginative power the daily life and landscape of
the city. The setting of Genesis of the Clowns returns to the
jungle hinterland of its author's native Guyana. A government
surveyor and his gang, for whose work and well-being he is
responsible, are exploring and recording the course and currents of
the remote upper reaches of the ancient rivers. Unexpected
incidents and tensions in the formal and personal relationships
between the surveyor and his men have mysterious consequences with
effects and implications far beyond the immediate time and place.
Set in British Guyana, the final two books (first published in
1962 and 1963) of The Guyana Quartet continue Wilson Harris's
literary exploration of the legacy and future of the former colony,
which began with "The Palace of the Peacock."
"The Whole Armour "tells the story of Christo, accused of a
murder he didn't commit, and on the run in the jungle swamplands of
the Pomeroon River. When the man who is harbouring him dies, and
when it becomes clear that his resourceful mother, Magda, doesn't
believe he is innocent in either case, Christo stages his own death
and steps into a dangerous otherworld, where hallucinatory
premonitions keep pace with dreamlike reality.
"The Secret Ladder," the final book of the Guyana Quartet,
follows the government surveyor Russell Fenwick, an unwilling and
diffident captain of a strong-willed crew - all of them uneasy in
one another's company - on a journey along the Canje River. When
they encounter Poseidon, the oldest inhabitant of the area -
descendent, so it is rumoured, of an escaped slave - his
accusations of unfair dealings and the threat of rebellion that he
carries with him upset the group further. As Fenwick, a scientist
in a near-magical world, awaits the rain so that he can take his
measurements, the clash between interlopers and rebels builds to a
nightmarish climax.
This epic masterpiece is a radical landmark in modern literature,
reissued with a foreword by poet Ishion Hutchinson to mark Wilson
Harris' centenary. 'An exhilarating experience ... Genius.' Jamaica
Kincaid I dreamt I awoke with one dead seeing eye and one living
closed eye ... Guyana. An ancient landscape of rainforests and
swamplands, haunted by the legacy of slavery and colonial conquest.
It is the site of dangerous journeys through the Amazonian
interior, where riverboat crews embark on spiritual quests and
government surveys are sabotaged by indigenous uprisings. It is a
universe of complex moralities, where the conspiracies of a
sinister money-lender and the faked death of a murderer question
innocence and inheritance. It is a place where life and death, myth
and history, philosophy and metaphysics blur. And it is the
birthplace of an epic masterpiece. Wilson Harris' The Guyana
Quartet consists of four incandescent novels: Palace of the
Peacock, The Far Journey of Oudin, The Whole Armour and The Secret
Ladder. It is a landmark of twentieth-century literature, as
revolutionary today as it was over half a century ago. 'The
Guyanese William Blake . [Such] poetic intensity.' Angela Carter
'One of the great originals ... Visionary ... Dazzlingly
illuminating.' Guardian 'Amazing ... Masterly ... Near-miraculous.'
Observer 'Perhaps the most inimitable [writer] produced in the
English-speaking Caribbean.' Fred D'Aguiar 'An extraordinary writer
... Courageous and visionary ... It speaks to us in tongues.'
Pauline Melville 'Staggering ... Both brilliant and terrifying.'
The Times
Set like his first novel in The Guyana Quartet in the former colony
of British Guiana, the second novel The Far Journey of Oudin is
further proof of the intensity and originality of Wilson Harris's
imaginative power and literary skill. Against a background of
swamp, jungle and savannah a strange drama is played out in which
the chief characters are the money-lender Ram - an evil, presiding
genius - the illegitimate Beti whom all men desire, and Oudin the
beggar who works for several masters and belongs to none. Focusing
on the traumatising effects of slavery on West Indian society, the
novel depicts how the new-found freedoms and perceived social
progress experienced by former peasants mask the fact that the old
master-slave structure is reasserting itself among the descendants
of an exploited people.
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