Palace of the Peacock (Faber Editions): 'Magnificent' - Tsitsi Dangarembga

Description

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. 'The Guyanese William Blake . [Such] poetic intensity.' - Angela Carter 'One of the great originals ... Visionary ... Dazzlingly illuminating.' - Guardian 'Staggering ... Both brilliant and terrifying.' - The Times

Sir Wilson Harris was a prize-winning novelist, poet, essayist, and lecturer. Born in 1921 in British Guiana, his father died when he was two and his stepfather disappeared into the rainforests in 1929. He began working as a government surveyor in 1942 and led expeditions into the Amazonian interior for almost 15 years. In 1959 he left for England to become a full-time writer. The following year, T.S. Eliot published his debut novel, Palace of the Peacock, which became a landmark of Caribbean literature and the first of The Guyana Quartet. Over the course of his career, Faber published all 26 of Harris' novels, including The Carnival Trilogy, Jonestown, The Mask of the Beggar, and The Ghost of Memory. Harris was awarded numerous academic fellowships and honorary doctorates as well as being a Guggenheim Fellow. He twice won the Guyana Prize for Literature as well as a Lifetime Achievement Prize from the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards. Harris was knighted in 2010, and died in 2018 at the age of 96. 'A towering figure ... What power sprang from Harris's newly forged language ... Breathtaking.' Guardian Jamaica Kincaid was born in Antigua in 1949. In 1965 she left for America to work as an au pair before studying photography and launching her career as a legendary author, working as a staff writer at the New Yorker from 1974 to 1996. Her first book in 1983 was the story collection At The Bottom of the River, and her acclaimed novels include Annie John, Lucy, The Autobiography of My Mother, and Mr Potter. She has also written non-fiction, such as her chronicle of her brother's battle with AIDS, My Brother, as well as My Garden and Among Flowers. She is currently Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University.

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 One of the great originals ...Visionary ... Dazzlingly illuminating. -- Guardian Revel in the inviolate, ever-deepening mystery of Wilson Harris's work. -- Jeet Thayil