Worlds apart drawn together, united by force of loneliness
Caryl Phillips has carved out a distinct place for himself as a writer. Drawing on his background as a Caribbean-born man of African descent who grew up in Great Britain, he explores, in fiction and nonfiction alike, what it means to have no real sense of home. In his work, alienation is as much a question of geography as it is the inner dynamics of the soul.
This double-barreled source of aloneness is illuminated in Phillips' latest novel, "A Distant Shore." It is the story of two improbable friends, retired English schoolteacher Dorothy Jones and African immigrant Solomon Bartholomew. Solomon lives and works as the handyman at Dorothy's housing estate (the British version of a subdivision), where both are Eleanor Rigby-like figures cast against a drab, cookie-cutter landscape. Both have no one to care about and no one to care about them.
Phillips tells the story backward, alternating between their viewpoints. First comes Dorothy's version of how they became acquainted. The author then shows how each arrived at a place, geographically and psychologically, where the sense of isolation overwhelmed their obvious differences.
"The death of your parents, your divorce, the death of your sister, early retirement, and then moving home, that's a lot of pressure for anybody to have to deal with in a short space of time," Dorothy's doctor tells her. This is Dorothy's lot: an ordinary life measured in losses, in which both circumstance and flawed judgment have conspired against her.
Solomon's more harrowing story — civil unrest and the brutal destruction of his family, which caused him to abandon the life he knew in Africa — follows, but not before the reader learns how the racism in his new surroundings brings more violence. Dorothy's obliviousness to the dangers Solomon faced testifies to her life of failed relationships.
"A Distant Shore" unravels competing needs: the thirst to connect and the power of not only stereotypes but also our own self-absorption to separate and divide us. Phillips makes no explicit judgments. Instead, he observes these mutually opposed impulses and crafts a moving tale around them.
— Ellen Emry Heltzel
Imagine an inner-city Atlanta community, run by a benevolent enforcer who keeps drug dealing and violent crimes at bay, insures the safety of elderly people, and is committed to making health food and espresso available in the 'hood.
This utopian swatch of urbanity is the epicenter of Pearl Cleage's new novel "Some Things I Never Thought I'd Do" — an enjoyable yarn, and an improbable one.
In this down-home fairy tale, Cleage's worldly wise narrator, Regina Burns, is a recovering substance abuser trying to get her life in order and keep the bank from foreclosing on her familial home in Washington, D.C. As she's about to take a temporary job in Atlanta to shore up her finances, a guardian-angel psychic aunt ("fond of long skirts, silver bracelets and those flat black Chinese shoes with flowers embroidered on the toes") has a vision of Regina becoming a "shero" (female hero) on this journey — slaying a dragon (symbolically speaking) and finding a prince charming with "ocean in his eyes" who has been searching for her "across time."
Though Regina's skeptical at first, wouldn't you know that first thing in Atlanta she meets up with former soul-singer turned neighborhood boss/businessman/landlord Blue, with baby-blue orbs. And that Regina's high-powered boss, Beth, is a treacherous dragon-lady running for governor against a preferable female candidate who is also African American.
"Some Things I Never Thought I'd Do" liberally mixes New Age spirituality and black feminist sass with romance-novel wish-fulfillment. Blue is not just a moneyed hunk with great real-estate holdings and a fancy car. He's also a defender of right-minded black people bedeviled by street toughs and drug lords, and a much-married guy willing to have his male consciousness lifted by Regina. And Beth is a scheming villain who is redeemed, in the end, by maternal love.
Like previous Cleage novels ("What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day," "I Wish I Had a Red Dress"), this is a lively, entertaining read that goes down easy if you're in the mood for some politically correct escapism. Just don't expect much plausibility.
— Misha Berson
Life must have been something for Renaissance explorers: momentous discoveries on the one hand, sheer terror on the other. The contrast is stark in Laurence Bergreen's "Over the Edge of the World."
It's not exactly biography. As any seventh-grade world-history student knows, Magellan didn't finish his voyage. What kind of biography is it when its subject dies halfway through?
It is, however, excellent popular history: even-handed, well researched, and thoroughly absorbing. Bergreen — a distinguished biographer whose previous subjects include Al Capone and Louis Armstrong — tells his tale without histrionics. Relying on abundant sources, especially Magellan's official scribe, Bergreen just lets the events unfold.
Ferdinand Magellan, born 1480, was a Portuguese naval officer obsessed with finding a westward route to the Spice Islands. These were the fabled home of cloves; to Europeans starved for flavor, cloves were more valuable, ounce per ounce, than gold.
Rebuffed by his king, Magellan promptly switched allegiance to Portugal's bitter rival, Spain. (Bergreen calls Spain's victory in this rivalry over new trade routes "the Renaissance equivalent of winning the space race.")
In 1519, Magellan left Seville with five ships and 260 men, predicting a two-year trip. Three years later, a single vessel limped home with 18 men.
Though the ships hadn't fallen off the edge of the world, things had been pretty hair-raising. There was a mutiny quelled by the iron-fisted Magellan, with one ship returning to Spain before the expedition even reached the Pacific. There were storms, confusion and freezing cold before the ships found the strait now bearing Magellan's name. There was the crushingly long Pacific crossing. Not to mention the scurvy, the stink of the bilge, and the diet of rotten hardtack and watery wine.
The explorers also found indigenous people — sometimes friendly, sometimes not — and disaster: Magellan, a stiff-necked Christian with a thirst for glory and a fever to convert natives, foolishly interposed himself in a Filipino tribal war, in which he and many of his men died.
The remaining crew somehow continued. (Their single shipload of cloves was enough to clear a profit for the expedition.) Although today we remember Magellan, it is these anonymous men who were the first to circle the world and so demonstrate its roundness.
— Adam Woog
"This book is a map of my memories, of all the places I remember most for having liked the best," Lisa St. Aubin de Terán begins her intimate, unpretentious autobiography.
As the young bride of Jaime de Terán, she left London to live in a Venezuelan hacienda on the Momboy River, running a sugar plantation and avocado orchard with a pet turkey vulture and a violent schizophrenic husband.
Since leaving, she has come to know enough places to judge, "Some cities, like Hamburg and the Hague, Zurich and Buenos Aires, are melancholic. ... Others, like Caracas and Milan, are chaotic. And some others, like Rome and New York and Salvador do Bahia are intrinsically exciting."
In the latter city, as one of the few multi-lingual attendees of an international conference that is rapidly deteriorating into a riot, she maintains peace by mistranslating the mutual insults of the Brazilians and their foreign visitors as gallant compliments.
"England is the only country I have ever come across where, regardless of politics, the term intellectual is pejorative," she writes. "I am not English, but I grew up as though I was and had to fight my way out of the insular mentality it nurtures."
She seems to have a peculiar talent for taking on the management of spectacular, decomposing structures, beginning with the hacienda, and continuing with a decaying Umbrian villa and a dwelling consisting of four West Indian pavilions on the Caribbean island of Nevis, where she and her husband spend a winter beset by wild donkeys.
Although she devotes a mere five pages to it, she says, "If someone were to ask me what is the most beautiful place on earth, I would tell them it is in north central Sulawesi, in Torajaland."
— Deloris Tarzan Ament
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