Kirjahaku

Expatriation, the sense of being "outside" or exposed, is a central theme in the life and work of Paul Bowles. Beginning with Bowles' account of a frightening childhood memory, A World Outside explores how the dichotomies of inside and outside, safety and danger, enclosure and exposure-fundamental dualities in Bowles' fiction-have their deepest origin in the fabric of Bowles' own life and also mark his kinship with other twentieth-century writers. Like V. S. Naipaul, Paul Bowles is one of those writers who have an uncanny grasp of what it is like never to feel "at home."In this much-needed study, Richard Patteson explores how this sense of "outsidedness" characterizes one's experience in a world in which many of the traditional shelters-social, familial, religious-seem to have lost their ability to protect. He discovers that storytelling is the vehicle by which both Bowles and his characters attempt to domesticate inchoate experience, bringing it into the familiar interior of human comprehension.The music world has for decades recognized Paul Bowles' stature as a composer, but his fiction is only recently receiving the close attention it has long deserved from students of American and contemporary literature. Bowles is an author who neither sought nor received the kind of publicity often lavished on his contemporaries but one whom an ever-growing audience regards as a commanding figure of twentieth-century American literature.

"The Fiction of Robert Antoni: Writing in the Estuary" is the first full-length study of the work of this important Trinidadian/ Bahamian Caribbean writer. When his first novel, "Divina Trace", appeared in 1992, one critic compared it to a collaboration between James Joyce and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. But Antoni's fiction is startlingly original. Each of his subsequent books is quite different from the one before, but all have their common origin in generations of experience in the West Indies, much of which was passed down to Antoni through a rich family tradition of storytelling. The novels are marked as well by Antoni's almost unique ability to navigate both the headwaters and tributaries of Caribbean folk tale and the limitless oceans of modernist and postmodernist texts. Taken together, Antoni's work postulates and embodies a Caribbean sensibility that is estuarial: almost every paragraph displays the multiple tributaries that form Caribbean culture, as well as the impulse to mix, mingle, and reach out to the wider world, like a river flowing into the sea. Patteson places Antoni's work in the multiple contexts of Caribbean storytelling, twentieth-century literature and contemporary Caribbean fiction, then explores each of his innovative and complex texts. In these diverse narratives Patteson finds reflections on the nature of human consciousness and its relationship to language, culture and storytelling itself, as well as sharp insight into the region and its tormented history. This book confirms Antoni's relevance to the literature of the Caribbean and the world.