Three young college graduates are looking for Eden in the 1990s, someplace the rest of the world has not discovered, where they can live apart from corrupt “civilization” and enjoy the more “meaningful” aspects of a simple life, independent of the rest of the world. Surviving a long sea swim, conquering the cliffs on an uncharted island, and, more importantly, recognizing a dope farm and avoiding the bloodthirsty gunmen who patrol it, the three eventually make their way onto “The Beach,” the utopian society Daffy has told Richard about, and in which he was a founding member. As they settle in and learn the ropes, the three newcomers experience the mystical, sometimes drug-induced peacefulness they’ve always dreamed of. As in Lord of the Flies and other utopian dreams, the magic lasts only until the first big crisis, and on the beach, several crises occur simultaneously.
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The author raises more questions than he answers. James Stephenson’s memoir about the Hadzabe in Tanzania, one of the last tribes of hunter-gatherers, is fascinating, though not always in ways the author probably intended. As much about the 27-year-old author and the casual romanticism with which he plunges into life in another culture as it […]
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What began as a mentoring relationship between established novelist V. S. Naipaul and Paul Theroux, a young writer working on his first novel, went on to endure as a “friendship” for thirty years as both writers traveled the world but remained in touch. They met when Theroux was a young ex-Peace Corp worker teaching in Uganda at the university in Makerere in 1966, and Naipaul, nine years his senior, became “writer-in-residence” there, though Naipaul hated teaching and mocked the writing of his students and the Makerere faculty. He did, however, recognize Theroux’s talent, and he did help and encourage him to get his novel published. Theroux, in turn, was an astute reader of Naipaul’s work, and both benefited from the relationship, at least at first. A crusty, critical, and often cruel man, full of contradictions, Naipaul was a difficult “friend,” and when he decided that he did not like someone, there was no turning back, no forgiveness for human failings. Theroux managed to navigate that minefield of hostility for thirty years. Despite the pettiness and frequent mean-spiritedness of Naipaul, it is also a portrait of Theroux, who published this book as his own enduring form of payback.
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Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison continues her powerful examination of slavery’s evil legacy, a focus of her long career, by creating an intense and involving novel set in the Atlantic colonies between 1682 and 1690, when the slave trade from the Portuguese colonies in Africa was a lucrative business for many colonists. Here Morrison examines slavery from its earliest days, concentrating on its short term and long-term effects on society as a whole and the people, especially the women, who were it greatest victims. Even in New York, where most of this action takes place, slaves were owned, and property laws governing their ownership were respected. The primary speaker is Florens, a young black girl, aged sixteen at the outset of the novel, who tells the reader that her narrative is a confession, “full of curiosities,” and that she has committed a violent, bloody, once-in-a-lifetime crime which she will never repeat. This is a novel of epic scope, filled with complex philosophical, Biblical, and feminist issues and symbols.
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Jeanette Winterson’s beautiful and magnificently descriptive, impressionistic novel tells two interconnected stories from two different periods over a hundred years apart, each of them asking who we are as humans, what is our connection to the past, and what makes our lives worth living. On its most modern level, it is the story of Silver, born in 1959, “part precious metal, part pirate.” An orphan, Silver now lives with Pew, an old, blind lighthousekeeper, on an island in northwest Scotland. The lighthouse, we learn through Pew’s stories, was built by Robert Stevenson, father of Robert Louis Stevenson, who “escaped” the family business. In 1878, however, Robert Louis Stevenson visited the light and was fascinated by the story of Babel Dark, a local preacher, who became the inspiration for Mr. Hyde in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and whose story represents the second of the story lines. A rich novel which the reader will want to read slowly to savor, Lighthousekeeping marks a welcome return of Winterson to the compressed, poetic style of her earlier novels. (One of my Favorites for 2005)
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