Caryl PhillipsBesprekingen

I read this for a Postcolonial literature class at CU Boulder.

I love the way Phillips has woven history and fiction to give us such an accessible perspective on the African diaspora.

A bit heart-wrenching, but absolutely beautiful.

A group of interwoven stories about the lives of “others”—in this case meaning a German Jewish girl in a DP (displaced person) camp at the end of World War II, Othello in Venice, and Jews in a 15th-century Italian ghetto (as well as briefly, a resettled Ethiopian Jewish woman newly resettled in Israel). All of the protagonists are outsiders. The voices are, for the most part, extremely well-rendered and the imaginings wonderfully vivid. My criticism has to do with how it all hangs together—or not. I understand, I think, the motivation for telling these stories together but they are unevenly weighted and on occasion, tedious. Nevertheless, he's a very good writer whose other books I will definitely look into. I understand that interwoven stories is his method and the subjects he chooses vary enormously. I have to admit to great curiosity.

Gwendolen watches her husband open a letter and frown slightly at it. When he breaks the news to her she finds out that he has received an unexpected inheritance. He offers to pay for them both to head back to her home of Dominica that she left as a small girl. Her brief childhood there still inhabits her memories, but it was a place of beauty and freedom. It is a place far removed from the grey days and lonely nights of living in England.

This trip home causes her to look back on her life spent far away from home, the steep learning curve of being in an English school, how her background closed so many doors and the moments spent with those looking to take advantage of her. Her visit to the home she left stirs memories that have long been suppressed and makes her consider where her future may lead.

This is a fictionalised account of Gwen Williams, who is better known as Jean Rhys, author of Wide Sargasso Sea. I have not read that book yet so knew nothing of her story. There were parts of Phillips' story that I liked, in particular, the time she spent in Dominica as a child and when she returned at the end of the book. However, there were parts in the middle that really struggled to catch my interest. Not bad overall, but didn't feel it excelled, I would give another of his books a go at some point.

A play based on Simon Schama's nonfiction Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution. It's a fascinating story of former slaves promised freedom if they fought for the British and how they were lied to and generally screwed over. Unfortunately, Phillip's play is really boring, with terrible dialogue and horribly wooden characters.½

The tale begins with inviting insights into the life of a fellow retired teacher.

After the two main characters meet and connect on different small levels,
the plot roils into shock,
redemption - at least externally - for Gabriel/Solomon,
then gradually eases into the boredom of Dorothy's
mental decline and institutional convalescence.

Why Mike had to die is pretty odd since his death only serves to give Solomon the car
which links him to Dorothy. With Dorothy's Mum and Dad, Gabriel's Family and Friend,
Sheila, and Dorothy fading, this is simply too many deaths.

"...I'm glad that I live in a cul-de-sac.
There's something safe about a cul-de-sac.
You can see everything when you live near the far end..."

I thought the plot was going to evolve more deeply from lines like this.½

This book describes episodes in the life of Jean Rhys (born Ella Gwendolyn Rees Williams) while keeping at an emotional arm's length. I forced myself to finish the book because I was curious about how it would end, but it was not an enjoyable read. It did, however, inspire me to seek out some of Rhys' books, in the hope of discovering why she is considered a great writer.½

3.5
I read The Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys some years ago and found the novel an unforgettable prequel to Jane Eyre from the viewpoint of Rochester's 'mad' wife.

Rhys vividly described the Caribbean childhood of Antoinette Cosway Rochester, a beautiful Creole whose family entraps Mr. Rochester into marriage. Rhys interprets Antoinette as the victim of a man repulsed by the sensuality of the Caribbean culture and horrified by female sexuality.

When I saw that Caryl Phillips' novel A View of the Empire at Sunset was based on the life of Gwendolyn Rees Williams, who wrote as Jean Rhys, I was eager to read it. I expected passion and glamour and agony.

Gwen was the child of a British man and a Creole woman, unhappily paired. Dominica is beautifully described, the "raucous cacophony of cicadas and frogs," the bats around the mango trees, the mosquitos and the "sickly sweet aroma of the night lilies.'

At sixteen, Gwen was forced from her beloved homeland to be educated in England under her aunt's care. She never really adjusts. She leaves school for the theater and music halls, is taken as a mistress then discarded, becomes a prostitute, has an abortion, is married several times. She drinks too much. Her older brother suffers from "delusions and bouts of agitated mania."

The novel opens in 1936 when Gwen and her husband return to her homeland. They are unhappily paired, but Gwen thinks that if he could see her roots perhaps he would understand she is not of his world. When he sees the view of the empire at sunset, there would be understanding that she could never really be English. Gwen learns that she can't go home again.

Gwen's literary life is outside of the novel, concentrating on her personal life. The "Empire at sunset," the Edwardian Age and colonization in Dominica, is vital to the story.

The novel offered me an understanding of Gwen's darkness and disorientation, her lack of options, the sad feeling of being the temporary object of men's desire. And I saw how young Gwen was devalued in her homeland, not British enough to be respectable, too hoyden and uncivilized, too close to the Negro servants.

And unforgettable was the ending, Gwen and her husband at the burned ruins of her family home, unable to grasp why the Negros would have destroyed such a beautiful place, the sins of colonization beyond their understanding. But I was disappointed in the emotional distance I felt, especially when I expected some of the pathos and passion of Rhys's writing.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

I would have to echo the recommendation of an earlier reviewer, who pointed out that each story is really it's own novella. Considering the three pieces to be part of a single narrative arc might leave one feeling unsatisfied; on their own, each novella is startling, brisk, and eye-opening.

who belongs and who's a stranger', 11 Mar. 2012
By
sally tarbox

This review is from: A Distant Shore (Paperback)
Brilliant novel that seems to start out quite tamely, but through switching to and fro in time, Phillips gradually lets us into more and more of the characters' lives. Dorothy, the retired schoolmistress, is our first narrator, and she seems a prim and proper type (although surprisingly likes going to the pub for a Guinness). Her neighbour, handyman Solomon, is polite and friendly, an African in an otherwise all-white (hostile) village. Two isolated individuals, they form a tentative friendship...
Part one, narrated by Dorothy, tells of their acquaintance to its conclusion. But then in parts 2 and 3, the lives of each, and how they got to that place in time (and got to be the people that they were) are explained.
Controlled prose (bit like the writing of Kazuo Ishiguro), will definitely read more of Phillips' work.

Bertram Francis returns to St. Kitts after living in England twenty years. He left the island after winning a scholarship to study abroad, expecting to be gone only three years. St. Kitts is gaining its independence in a few short days. Bertram expects his mother to welcome him, but she tells him to get out of her house. He discovers his brother died, and no one bothered to tell him. He expects his childhood best friend who is now an important official to welcome him, but he tells him to return to England. We find Bertram remembering the way things were and discover how things are now. It's a short read, but one that reminds the reader "You can't go home again."

Three 'long' stories.

Although this book should fall within my chosen genres it totally failed to grab me.
It narrated a series of three fictionalised tales of coloured men who had lived in the UK, two during the last century and one in the eighteenth century.
I found it unnecessarily drawn out and wordy and I only finished it because it was an audiobook. Even this was not a great selling point, as the last story, about David Oluwale, a Nigerian stowaway who arrived in Leeds in 1949 and who triggered an awareness of the treatment of immigrants, seems hypocritical, as the main narrator was American, criticising the British police force when his country's history of treatment of couloureds included the Klu Klux Clan.

The opening story was about a servant who worked for the writer Samuel Johnson and was treated well, but who couldn't cope once Johnson died.
The second was the tale of Randolph Turpin, Britain’s first black world-champion boxer, who ended his life with debts and disillusionment.

There was far too much detail, which can be skipped when reading but which is laboriously narrated in an audiobook. An example is the list of 14 prison terms served by David Oluwale, dates, offenses and duration.
From reading other reviews, I sense that this is not Caryl Phillip's best work, so I may give another of his books a try in the future.

A very touching story of a young man who, after leaving his native home of St. Kitts in the Caribbean to be educated in England, found very little welcome when he returned twenty years later. The reader can sympathize with the character, who had difficulty expressing his thoughts, which was part of his problem. But the main point is the change in attitude to someone who returns after an absence - particularly from a country that is more prosperous. It is often assumed that the person has changed somehow, got above himself. It was a sad little story but had a positive lift at the end, a reflection of the country's independence that was being celebrated at the time. Very enjoyable.

After a 20-year absence, Bertram Francis returns to his home in Saint Kitts on the eve of its independence. As he visits his old haunts, Bertram begins to feel like the 19-year-old he was when he left with a scholarship to study in England. He had expected the island to look different upon his return, but he wasn't prepared for the change in the attitudes of his family and friends. Bertram didn't realize he had burned so many bridges when he left. He was an outsider in England, and now he is an outsider in his childhood home.

There is a sense in which Saint Kitts is like the 19-year-old Bertram of twenty years ago, with hope in vague opportunities that will surely come its way with its new independent status. What will the nation look like twenty years from now? Will the tiny nation achieve any more than Bertram did with his independence? Phillips raises many questions and gives hints about his opinions, but he leaves the resolution up to his readers.½

Events set in the 16th- and the 20th-century are interwoven, narrated by multiple voices. The two main ones: Eva, the young Jewish woman, fugitive from the Nazis; we meet her first the moment the concentration camp is liberated by the British Army. Then the black general hired by the Doge to lead the Venetians against the Turks. The structure is that of a film: frequent cuts and flashbacks. Not easy this task: Phillips succeeds.
Reading demands close attention, not difficult this, the book captivates without one having to give up ones critical distance - it fulfills Brecht’s demands.
What humans can do to each other, the pain, can be overwhelming. Afterwards I wondered how Phillips could bear living with writing over weeks and months. A difficult book. A deeply human book. Brilliant! (VII-13)

Eminently teachable. I'm using it to conclude my MA graduate intro to literary theory course to serve as a kind of laboratory for postcolonial, feminist, trauma, new historicism, etc. criticism. Phillips has been well-reviewed probably hundreds of times, and this book in particular is a huge hit in academia (nearly 20 articles on it in scholarly journals since publication), so there's no much more for *me* to say here. I can point out, though, the opening pages, which, while they take place in Cyprus, seem to take place nowhere and at no time in particular. We could be in prehistoric times. My question for the students was, "when do we learn when and where we are? what are some effects of Phillips delaying this information?" A useful place to open discussion, once one ensures that the students have the plot clearly in their minds.

Caryl Phillips’ collection of essays is a broad-ranging and thought-provoking examination of the migrant experience and attitudes towards immigrants, both before and after the 9/11 attacks. Born in the Caribbean, raised in the UK and now a citizen of the United States, Phillips’ perspective is informed by his personal experience as an immigrant and black man, a well-traveled author, and a scholar of literature.

Phillips begins by putting a personal face on his childhood perceptions of race as a defining factor in life, sharing anecdotes of his own experience as a black immigrant child in a predominantly white neighborhood, and the bullying and rejection imposed by his peers on a young Muslim boy. In considering the changes that recent immigration has brought to Europe, he asserts that what is new is not the prejudice traditionally encountered by each successive wave of peoples, but rather the forcefulness of response from new arrivals who feel under attack, their cultures disrespected.

Phillips was living in lower Manhattan at the time of the 9/11 attacks and laments the changes in national mood that occurred in their wake. As many others have, he came to America believing in the ideal of E Pluribis Unum – One Out of Many- only to suffer the disillusionment of discovering it to be a myth. Phillips is harsh in his judgments of the United States, noting its divisions along racial, cultural and religious lines, unequal distribution of wealth and persistent inequality of minorities. He raises many valid points, but lapses into exaggeration when he goes on to describe an America where “Gated communities, in which homogeneous groups with siege mentalities cluster behind guarded and patrolled walls, are the norm from the Atlantic to the Pacific.” And even though writing in the context of Bush-era politics, his labeling of the United States’ military, economic and cultural power as imperial, empire building seems still to greatly oversimplify complex matters of international relations.

But fortunately, the main thrust of this collection is not political, but cultural. Phillips dreams of a multicultural world where successful assimilation is based on mutual adaptation by the migrant and the host country. His primary theme is the importance of the writer as a positive force for the change necessary to achieve this state.

I believe passionately in the moral capacity of fiction to wrench us out of our ideological burrows and force us to engage with a world that is clumsily transforming itself, a world that is peopled with individuals we might otherwise never meet in our daily lives. As long as we have literature as a bulwark against intolerance, and as a force for change, then we have a chance.

In this context, he discusses a broad diversity of writers and performers who have dealt with issues of race and migration through literature, music and theatre, ranging widely in both time and nationality, and including Henry Louis Gates, Luther Vandross, E.R. Braithwaite, Chinua Achebe, Shusaku Endo, Ha Jin, Hillel Halkin, Colin MacInnes, Angela Carter, James Baldwin and many others. In the process, he touches also upon aspects of history, such as in his discussion of W. Jeffrey Bolster’s research on African-Americans, both free men and slaves, who found liberty and prosperity as seamen during the period between the Revolutionary and Civil Wars.

Phillips has much to say on the importance of immigration to continual societal renewal, but he also provides some respite to the reader through pieces that share the background of his development as a writer of fiction, providing fascinating glimpses into his writing and personal lives. This is an author who when ready to settle into concentrated writing, travels to a different city or even country, checking into a hotel for weeks at a time in order to avoid all distractions, and repeating this cycle until the book is finished. He reads Shusaku Endo’s work, usually Silence, before writing any book, was James Baldwin’s friend, and has climbed Mount Kilimanjaro with the author, Russell Banks.

Phillips has clearly thought deeply about the issues he addresses and these are intelligent, probing essays that I want to return to as companion narratives to the many authors and works he discusses. But what sets this collection apart from others that I have read is the sense of personal connection to his subjects that is present on every page.½

Readable novel describing what it's like to be a man, an ex-husband, an adult son, a father of an adolescent, and a West Indian in London. Clunky prose, and clunky shifts back and forth from a present story told in present tense to flashbacks, and lots of passages where a character is speaking in the kind of smooth detailed narration that has never come out of a person's mouth. But while these infelicities did get in a way for me a bit, I was engaged all the way through in the main character's struggles -- often ineffectual and counter-productive as they were -- to stay upright while big parts of his life fall away. Keith is a man who makes a lot of mistakes and miscalculations -- they cost him his marriage and his job -- but as a tour of his inner life, and how it connects up to his immigrant parents' past and his bi-racial son's future, the novel succeeds.

I could not follow this story. The story is composed of a number of loosely connected parts, spanning several centuries, with more than 130 pages consisting of fragmented diary entries, of which, on the final 100 pages, mostly half page entries listed in unchronological order, jumping to and fro.

Foreigners is a novel constructed of three stories, each about a Black man who migrated to England, each of them in different circumstances and in different times. First is Francis Barber, a slave given to the writer Samuel Johnson in the 18th century. This story is narrated by a caring colleague of Johnson's who compassionately observes Barber at his master's funeral but rationalizes his failure to reach out to the now freed but unrooted "immigrant." He seeks out Barber many years later and describes the man's attempt to build an honorable life in the face of social isolation, marginalization, and neglect.

The second story is that of Randolph Turpin, the son of an immigrant from British Guiana who defeats middleweight champion Sugar ray Reynolds in the boxing ring in 1951. Turpin's own status as champion is short-lived and this story, which especially reads like non-fiction (they all do, but in differing voices), again illustrates the challenge of a Black man making it in England. Social isolation, marginalization, neglect ---- yep, they collude to undermine his ability to break out of the one-dimensional mold established for the boxer by privileged society.

Finally, the third story is of a young immigrant (stowaway) from Nigeria and his too-short life in Leeds in the 1950s. A target of abusive and degrading "entertainment" by local police officers, David Oluwale is found dead in a river and "Northern Lights" reads like a series of reports or interviews by anonymous citizens who knew him while he was living rough in the streets of Leeds. We are also provided excerpts from the trial of the two police officers charged with manslaughter in David's death.

I think this is an excellent novel with its dispassionate and paradoxically emotional exploration of being "other," of being a "foreigner" living on the margins of society. Phillips considers the different manner in which each of these men tries to cope with their situation, which can be and is considered by some to amount to their own contributions to their tragic endings. Whether they try to assimilate and adapt, or fight, or passively allow their detractors to abuse and torment them, the ending is basically the same. White society sees the men in unidimensional, stereotyped say; no behavioral route on their part will change the story.

It sounds depressing and, in fact, it is. It's also a beautifully narrated story with tremendous depth for a reader who's willing to go there.

Caryl Phillips writes with great power and beauty. Many of his books create a world in which the familiar becomes unfamiliar, as Phillips often writes from the point of view of new immigrants. Caryl Phillips latest work, "Foreigners: Three English Lives", combines three separate tales of black men in Great Britain. All three characters are based on actual individuals whose biographies are mixed by Philips with invented narration and moment.

The first novella concerns Francis Barber who found himself in an awkward place as both servant and friend to the 18th century English intellectual Dr. Johnson - who is best remembered as the originator of the dictionary. The second novella brings us up to the 1950's as we consider boxer Randy Turpin and his surprising defeat of the champion Sugar Ray Robinson for boxing's middleweight title in a fierce match in 1951. The third novella tracks, through multiple viewpoints and voices, the death of David Oluwale at the hands of the British police in 1968.

Caryl Phillips, by combining three disparate experiences of black men in Britain, forces us to break free from our stereotypes and look at Barber, Turpin and Oluwale as individuals. The three men are united by the color of their skin and the prejudices they experienced, but their separate and precious lives stand out as jewels on velvet. Highly recommended.

Phillips has crafted a complex and deceptively straightforward piece of creative nonfiction with Atlantic Sound. An intricate weave of travel writing, history, and fiction, this book explores postcolonial concepts of home and identity as an evolution of ideas and violences occurring over time, from the 1800s on through the present day. His clear writing and careful characterizations make the book a fast read worth pursuing both for pleasure and knowledge. Whether you call it a long essay or a history, creative nonfiction or fiction, this is a book worth exploring.

Caryl Phillips explores, both literally and figuratively, the transatlantic slave-trade route between Europe, Africa, and America, in The Atlantic Sound. In each of the 3 parts of the book he visits a part of 'the triangle,' Liverpool, Ghana, and Charleston, and tells the histories of these places and how they were affected by the slave trade. And he does it wonderfully!

The Atlantic Sound just sucked me in. It's one of those books you read and lose track of time, then look up an hour later without realizing you've been reading for more than 5 or 10 minutes. Despite the emotional subject, Caryl delivered it in a way as to make it readable, yet no less alarming, due in large part to his storytelling ability. His 'characters' jump out of the page at you, he really brought these historical figures to life.

Most important, in my opinion, is how the author's personality seeps through the pages. Witty, a bit snarky, and hopelessy pessimistic most of the time. Loved it.

The books is a riveting read, I came upon it 'randomly' and am so happy I did. 4 stars!

Foreigners by Caryl Phillips is a collection of 3 long short stories which are fictionalized accounts of real people. All three deal with black men displaced in England. In the first story, the language is over-the-top stuffy, but even though it was almost ridiculous, it did work for the story. The second story couldn't end fast enough for me - boooring! But I loved the last one. David Oluwale, a 15-year-old Nigerian who stowed away on a ship to get to England for a better education, is mistreated by the police his whole life. He turns up drowned sometime in his mid-30s (I think). The story is told in pieces by various people who knew him, however slightly. Very sad.½

What a powerful novel! I’d never even heard of this one till it was picked for an online bookgroup I belong to. I couldn't put it down. Really a well conceived and imagined novel.The novel begins with a father explaining how the crops failed and in desperation he sold his three children—Nash, Martha, and Travis—to a slave trader. The four sections that make up the center of the novel focus on each of the children as well as one a young ship’s captain on his first trip to bring slaves from Africa to America—the one who picks up the “2 strong man-boys and a proud girl” from their father. The focus of each section and its language is completely different and appropriate to the content. There is tragedy but also triumph in each life. Nash is conceived as an educated American Negro whose master sent him back to Africa in the 1820s—to the new nation of Liberia—to educate his people and to teach them Christianity. We read his letters to the master, increasingly despairing because he doesn’t hear back (his master’s wife has intercepted and destroyed the letters). Martha is a slave, sold away from her husband and daughter when the master of a Virginia plantation dies, who goes first to pre-Civil War Kansas which is not a slave state and then, when her owner intends selling her across the river (into Missouri which is a slave state) she runs away and joins a wagon train of free blacks going to California, but dies on the way, in Colorado. Travis is an American GI in WWII, stationed in England who carries on a delicate courtship with an Englishwoman, fathers a child, comes back to marry her, and then is killed on the beach in Italy. Nash’s and Martha’s voices are appropriate to their time and place; their thoughts are on freedom and on love. Travis is seen through the eyes of June who loves him though she’s never really known love before. There’s also a section focused on the captain of the American slave ship—consisting of excerpts from a ship’s log and letters to his wife.Phillips doesn't handle each section the same way, nor are the voices exclusively those of the African disapora. Captain Hamilton's view point is important because he's not a hardened slave trader, though possibly his father, who captained the ship before him, was. But making the last section from Joyce's point of view was brilliant. Had he made it from Travis's, we might have gone over territory that had already been covered, but that of the woman who loved him brought something new. I loved how Phillips tied it up at the end, in the voice of the distraught father who sold his children, quoting from each of the voices and relating their stories to black soldiers in Vietnam who "had no quarrel with the VietCong”, to Toussaint L'Overature, to those struggling with Papa Doc and other dictators, to Jazz and dance and James Baldwin (who in Paris wrote Nobody Knows My Name) and Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech.