Pieces of Light: A Novel - Hardcover

Thorpe, Adam

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0786706619 ISBN 13: 9780786706617

Publisher: Carroll & Graf Pub, 2000

Synopsis

Seven when he is sent from Africa back to England to live with his eccentric uncle, Hugh Arkwright is long troubled by his mother's disappearance, and returns to his childhood home as an adult to try to find clues to the past

About this title

Review:

Hugh Arkwright was born in colonial Africa, into a lush and beautiful place where it was possible at times to "feel the earth's heartbeat in your feet." Adam Thorpe's third novel, Pieces of Light, begins in the form of a memoir, with Hugh looking back to this hot paradise, to a state of grace in which "all around the forest spoke." Of course he was destined to fall, and to have the forest taken from him, replaced by cold silence, a mother who disappeared, an adolescence in England on the brink of war.

The author of this daunting, often dazzling novel has published two other fictions--Ulverton and Still--and two volumes of verse, and his poetic gifts are in full force in the Africa sections. But when Pieces of Light shifts from dreamlike memoir into journal fragments, letters, and various other "real" documents, it loses momentum. As Hugh grows up and confronts the West's postlapsarian reality (he becomes a well-known theater director and watches the world shatter into war), it can be difficult to stick with his ponderous journey. Epic in length, the novel begs to be cut back, to be allowed its true solitary intimacy like the charms carved in the African wilderness. Thorpe is clearly a writer of wild gifts, yet Pieces of Light often feels like the work of a composer who wanted to write a love song but whose ego compelled him to write a symphony instead. --Emily White

About the Author:

Adam Thorpe was born in Paris in 1956 and brought up in India, Cameroon and England. He has published two books of poetry, Mornings in the Baltic (1988) and Meeting Montaigne (1990) and two novels, Ulverton (1992) and Still (1995).

About this edition

• Publisher: Carroll & Graf Pub
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0786706619
• ISBN 13: 9780786706617
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 478