Items related to The ventriloquist's tale
Synopsis
Book by Melville, Pauline
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Review
"Where I come from, disguise is the only truth and desire the only true measure of time," the riddling, feisty narrator of The Ventriloquist's Tale asserts. Pauline Melville explores the effects of both of these in her dark--and often deeply funny--narrative of forbidden love and the clash of cultures. Set in the Guyanese capitol of Georgetown and on its distant savannahs, Melville's first novel turns on the tragic absurdities of colonialism, capitalism, and fanaticism, not to mention a pair of very illicit relationships. In the 1920s, two mixed-race siblings find it surprisingly easy to be together and unsuspected:
Just like the brown and black patterns in the artwork on the woven baskets and sifters and matapees, where it is not always possible to tell foreground from background and the animal symbols are disguised by being embedded in a geometrical whole, Beatrice and Danny were miraculously concealed by their home setting.In the present-day strand, Chofy McKinnon, Danny's nephew, has an intense and tragic affair with Rosa Mendelson, an English academic looking into Evelyn Waugh's journey to Guyana in the 1930s. Waugh, possessed of "a pushed-up face and little pebble eyes," had stayed with the McKinnons, and forced Danny in particular to listen to hour after hour of Dombey and Son--a brilliant spin on Waugh's reportage from the Amazonias, not to mention his novel A Handful of Dust. Melville offers up an acute vision on Guyana's colonial past and present, and on the pull between nature and culture, superstition versus rationalism, blindness and sight. She knows that there is no easy middle ground, perhaps no middle ground at all. "You say we have to mix," Chofy's cousin cries. "What to do? We're destroyed if we mix. And we're destroyed if we don't." Readers will be hard-pressed to descry any moral in the astonishing Ventriloquist's Tale (though order and institutions aren't held in high esteem). As for forbidden love--it definitely doesn't conquer all, but its memory is bliss in Beatrice's later, respectable years: "She barely had time to remember that other love which had flowed always under the grind of daily life; a sweet underground river that sometimes broke through to the surface and made its own music, but mainly stayed hidden, so that she only carried the echoes of its song." --Kerry Fried
About the Author
Pauline Melville's first book, Shape-shifter, a collection of short stories, won the Guardian Fiction Prize, the Macmillan Silver Pen Award and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for best first book. The Ventriloquist's Tale is her first novel.
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- PublisherBloomsbury
- Publication date1997
- ISBN 10 0747531501
- ISBN 13 9780747531500
- BindingHardcover
- Edition number1
- Number of pages357
- Rating
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The Ventriloquist's Tale
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The Ventriloquist's Tale
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ISBN 10: 0747531501
ISBN 13: 9780747531500
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The Ventriloquist's Tale
Published by
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ISBN 10: 0747531501
ISBN 13: 9780747531500
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Hardcover. Condition: Near Fine. Dust Jacket Condition: Near Fine. First Edition. Bloomsbury, April 1997. Hardcover. First Edition / full number line. Black cloth over boards with gilt lettering to spine and bound-in black ribbon bookmark. Near Fine book in a Near Fine jacket. Interior pristine. Spine straight and tight, ends lightly bumped. Jacket clean and bright with slight reading wear to edges and corners. No tears. Not from a library. No remainder mark. Not clipped. 357 pages. "The whole purpose of magic is the fulfillment and intensification of desire," claims the ventriloquist-narrator as he tells his stories of love and catastrophe. The novel is a parable of miscegenation and racial exclusiveness, of nature defying culture and of the rebellious nature of love. Winner of the Whitbread Award for best first novel. In Melville's ambitious and richly realized debut set in modern-day Guyana, religious, social and philosophical tensions beset all the characters. Two illicit love affairs are the vertebrae of an absorbing story set against the background of colonial life in exotic surroundings. One doomed romance is the adulterous liaison between Chofy McKinnon, a half-Scot, half-Indian, cattle rancher, and Rosa Mendelson, a British scholar researching Evelyn Waugh's visit to the country in the 1930s. Chofy meets Rosa on a trip to Guyana's capital, Georgetown, to see his aunt Wifreda, a hospitalized old woman on the verge of going blind. As Wifreda reminisces about her childhood, the narrative plunges into the story of the previous generation, telling of an incestuous affair between Chofy's uncle Danny and Beatrice, Danny's sister. Wifreda deliberately betrays Beatrice, who, humiliated, exiles herself to Canada. Beatrice also blames the British missionary Father Napier, an authoritarian clergyman who clashes with Danny's father and tries to counter the superstitious characters' belief in witchcraft (Beatrice curses Wifreda, who believes that is the reason she is losing her eyesight years later) with church doctrine. By the time Melville returns to the parallel tale of forbidden love between Chofy and Rosa, she's not just unfolding two compelling love stories but is also continuing to explore the discord between the foreign and the indigenous, the fear of the primitive colliding with the arrogance of the enlightened. Melville's nuanced characterizations, fluid prose, apt imagery and beautifully understated dialogue augment her skill as a raconteur. An unsentimental but moving narrative about the pain of longing, the book is mystical yet fiercely rationalist, ideological while coolly above politics and, despite a somewhat contrived ending, brilliant, witty and complicated. Seller Inventory # RWARE0000000635
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The Ventriloquist's Tale
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ISBN 10: 0747531501
ISBN 13: 9780747531500
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The ventriloquist's tale
Published by
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ISBN 10: 0747531501
ISBN 13: 9780747531500
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