March
21, 2010
The
Kingdom of this World, Alejo Carpentier y Valmont (Cuba)
A
few years after its liberation from French colonial rule, Haiti experienced a
period of unsurpassed brutality, horror and superstition under the reign of the
black King Henri-Christophe. Through the eyes of the ancient slave, Ti Noel,
The Kingdom of This World records the destruction of the black regime – built
on the same corruption and contempt for human life that brought down the French
– in an orgy of voodoo, race hatred, erotomania, and fantastic grandeurs of
false elegance.
April
18, 2010
In the Falling Snow,
Caryl Phillips (UK/St. Kitts)
Keith—born in England in the
early 1960s to immigrant West Indian parents but primarily raised by his white
stepmother—is a social worker heading a Race Equality unit in London whose life
has come undone. He is separated from his wife of twenty years (whose family
“let her go” when she married a black man), kept at arm’s length by his
seventeen-year-old son, estranged from his father, and accused of harassment by
a co-worker. And beneath it all, he has a desperate feeling that his work—even
in fact his life—is no longer relevant.
May 16, 2010
Black Midas,
Jan Carew (Guyana)
Astonishingly
vivid, bawdy, and tempestuous, this novel is a cautionary tale about greed and
class conflict in postcolonial Guyana. Comparing ruthless 20th-century
prospectors to the long-ago Spanish explorers who raped a continent in their
quest for El Dorado, the novel follows the dreams and delusions of Aron Smart,
a youth orphaned early in life and brought up on a farm by his grandparents who
impressed upon him the value of an education. When Aron’s schooling is cut
short after a reversal of fortune, however, he becomes deeply discouraged by
his lack of opportunity and decides to follow in his father’s footsteps as a
diamond prospector. He quickly becomes very rich—his companions in the mines
call him “Shark”—and he is determined to use his new wealth to buy his way into
the middle class. But Aron is out of his element in the world of property
and prestige, and, cheated of his fortune, he returns to the interior, mining
with a reckless madness that leaves him terribly maimed in an accident—and
causes him to dream of returning to his grandfather’s life, built on the solid
rhythms of farming and caring for the land. June 20, 2010 More, Austin
Clarke (Barbados/Canada) At
the news of her son BJ’s involvement in gang crime, Idora Morrison, a maid at
the local university, collapses in her basement apartment. For four days and
nights she retreats into a vortex of memory, pain, and disappointment that
becomes a riveting expose of her life as a Caribbean immigrant living abroad.
While she struggled to make ends meet, her deadbeat husband, Bertram, abandoned
her for a better life in New York. Left alone to raise her son, Idora has done
her best to survive against immense odds. But now that BJ has disappeared into
a life of crime, she recoils from his loss and is unable to get out of bed,
burdened by feelings of invisibility.
July 18, 2010
Outliers,
Malcolm Gladwell, US/Can/Jamaica
Now
that he's gotten us talking about the viral life of ideas and the power of gut reactions,, Malcolm Gladwell poses a more
provocative question in Outliers: why do some people succeed, living
remarkably productive and impactful lives, while so many more never reach their
potential? Challenging our cherished belief of the "self-made man,"
he makes the democratic assertion that superstars don't arise out of nowhere,
propelled by genius and talent: "they are invariably the beneficiaries of
hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that
allow them to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in ways others
cannot." Examining the lives of outliers from Mozart to Bill Gates, he
builds a convincing case for how successful people rise on a tide of
advantages, "some deserved, some not, some earned, some just plain
lucky."