Items related to Crown Jewel
Synopsis
When it was published in Britain after Salman Rushdie praised it. De Boissiere's best-known novel, Crown Jewel, is a story of the economic struggle of Trinidad workers in the 1930s and is regarded as one of the major political novels of the Caribbean. It is set in the 1930s at the time of the Butler riots in the oilfields of south Trinidad part of the general disturbances in the British Caribbean during the 1930s. Set in his native Trinidad in the 1930s, Crown Jewel describes intricate social and racial gradations. At the bottom of the society are the blacks at the top are the colonial elite, the English. Crown Jewel climaxes with the 1937 workers' revolt in Trinidad in which workers were shot by police. One of the characters in Crown Jewel, Andre de Courdnay, a young musician who works as a yeast salesman, is torn between an Englishwoman, the daughter of a judge, and the woman he actually loves, the teenage daughter of a Venezuelan seamstress. This young coloured girl has a fierce belief in de Courdnay as an artist capable of creating social change. What distinguishes de Boissiere's characters from so much political art is that they aren't two-dimensional. He understands the complexity of the human heart. When Crown Jewel was first published in the UK (1981) Allison and Busby announced Crown Jewel as "one of the lost masterpieces of not only for the West Indies but for all oppressed humanity," and "one of the lost masterpieces of world literature. Crown Jewel was republished in 2006 by Lux-Verbi Books. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data: De Boissiere, Ralph Crown Jewel 1. Strikes and lockouts - Oil industry - Trinidad and Tobago - Fiction 2. Riots - Trinidad and Tobago - Fiction 3. Social stratification - Trinidad and Tobago - Fiction I. Title 813.5'4[F] ISBN-10: 0954359623 Also reviewed in: 1. Encyclopedia of Latin American and Caribbean Literature, 1900-2003 - Page 173 by Daniel Balderston, Mike Gonzalez - Reference - 2004 - 560 pages 2
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