Da Silva Da Silva's Cultivated Wilderness and Genesis of the Clowns - Softcover

Harris, Wilson

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0571276792 ISBN 13: 9780571276790

Publisher: Faber and Faber, 2011

Synopsis

The first of these two novels is about a painter, Brazilian by birth and British by adoption, living and working in London with his wife, whose equally varied spiritual and cultural inheritance complements his. Wilson Harris evokes with vividness and characteristic imaginative power the daily life and landscape of the city. The setting of Genesis of the Clowns returns to the jungle hinterland of its author's native Guyana. A government surveyor and his gang, for whose work and well-being he is responsible, are exploring and recording the course and currents of the remote upper reaches of the ancient rivers. Unexpected incidents and tensions in the formal and personal relationships between the surveyor and his men have mysterious consequences with effects and implications far beyond the immediate time and place.

About this title

About the Author

Wilson Harris was born in 1921 in the former colony of British Guiana. He was a land surveyor before leaving for England in 1959 to become a full-time writer. His exploration of the dense forests, rivers and vast savannahs of the Guyanese hinterland features prominently in the settings of his fiction. Harris's novels are complex, alluding to diverse mythologies from different cultures, and eschew conventional narration in favour of shifting interwoven voices. His first novel Palace of the Peacock (1960) became the first of The Guyana Quartet, which includes The Far Journey of Oudin (1961), The Whole Armour (1962) and The Secret Ladder (1963). He later wrote The Carnival Trilogy (Carnival (1985), The Infinite Rehearsal (1987) and The Four Banks of the River of Space (1990)). His most recent novels are Jonestown (1996), which tells of the mass-suicide of a thousand followers of cult leader Jim Jones; The Dark Jester (2001), his latest semi-autobiographical novel, The Mask of the Beggar (2003), and one of his most accessible novels in decades, The Ghost of Memory (2006). Wilson Harris also writes non-fiction and critical essays and has been awarded honorary doctorates by several universities, including the University of the West Indies (1984) and the University of Liege (2001). He has twice been winner of the Guyana Prize for Literature.

About this edition

• Publisher: Faber and Faber
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0571276792
• ISBN 13: 9780571276790
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 152