Our Lady of Demerara

Fülszöveg

Thirty found me single. I lay in bed for most of thé day, thining of all the money I had spent on Corinne. There were countless -, others bef^ her, but none during my ^^marriage to Beth.,. A thousand journeys ' through the same back streets of Coventry, ^ searching for one whose breath was not a , chowder of cheap food and alcohol, whose ^ garnis were not pockmarked, whose thighs^ _tf- did not bear the tell-tale signs of blisters. f _ Always the fantasy of coming upon a first---' 'Qmer, shy to the point of deliquescence. But i^hardened women lean forward as you ^ ^approach, offering themselves up for a cull,' jfc you drive past, turn this corner and that, * wishing you had true talent, the ability;^-^ Whilst on the move, to make a split-second jâ decision to stop for ^particular onei^ girlish figure partially glimpsed fin a doorway or darkened mouth of an alley You voyage through your featureless life awaiting a moment of vision in which you penetrate the shadows not with your... Tovább

Fülszöveg

Thirty found me single. I lay in bed for most of thé day, thining of all the money I had spent on Corinne. There were countless -, others bef^ her, but none during my ^^marriage to Beth.,. A thousand journeys ' through the same back streets of Coventry, ^ searching for one whose breath was not a , chowder of cheap food and alcohol, whose ^ garnis were not pockmarked, whose thighs^ _tf- did not bear the tell-tale signs of blisters. f _ Always the fantasy of coming upon a first---' 'Qmer, shy to the point of deliquescence. But i^hardened women lean forward as you ^ ^approach, offering themselves up for a cull,' jfc you drive past, turn this corner and that, * wishing you had true talent, the ability;^-^ Whilst on the move, to make a split-second jâ decision to stop for ^particular onei^ girlish figure partially glimpsed fin a doorway or darkened mouth of an alley You voyage through your featureless life awaiting a moment of vision in which you penetrate the shadows not with your eyes but with the Intuition of a saint.

Set in Ireland, Coventry and Demerara (Guiana), the novel is populated by two . eccentric Irish priests arguing about science, theology and the nature of women; a Hindu shopkeeper; a serial philanderer; a Jew/ish survivor of nnassacre;
English and an Arawak prostitute; a murdered Indian girl; orphans arid ?bsent mothers; a mysterious w/oman who washes up on an English beach It ranges over the subjects of love and despair, thwarted ambitions, the thrill of illicit sex and the medieval quest for divine forgiveness of human sin. In this, Dabydeen's fifth novel, his most accomplished and imaginative work to date, characters appear, disappear and reappear in different guises, leaving theireader with a delirious sense of the teeming confusion and compulsion of human life. It Is a novel that explores the human struggle to transcend the squalor of sexual cruelty, and to arrive at a sense of -the "miracle of grace". Vissza