Word: selvon
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...BRIGHTER SUN (215 pp.)-Samuel Selvon-Viking...
...Brighter Sun is the first novel of young (28) Trinidadian Samuel Selvon, who left his island to work for a British publisher. Its pages are flecked with Caribbean color and sunshine, but Tiger's personal story is neither colorful nor sunny. He and Urmilla were desperately poor and abysmally ignorant. In Barataria they slept on sacking on the floor of their leaky hut, sold their milk and vegetables in the slum neighborhood where they lived, and tried to behave like grownups. For Tiger, that meant working his tiny patch of land, getting drunk now & then on rum bought...
...about? Could he ever break away from his dreary existence? Could a colored ma~n ever get a break in a white man's world? He daydreamed about getting an education and becoming a great lawyer. He would go to England or the U.S. But unlike Author Selvon, Tiger doesn't get away. At story's end, with the G.I.s and the big pay envelope gone, he is getting ready to plant corn...
What makes A Brighter Sun shine more steadily than most current fiction is a freshness of speech and locale that is as welcome as its direct, unsurprised look at life. Author Selvon still has a way to go as a craftsman in fiction, but his native lingo rings true, and the native squalor and insular ignorance have been triple-distilled and mixed with his ink. At the very least, he knows what poor Tiger learned the hard way: "You don't start over things in life; you just have to go on from where you stop...