Bloodlines - Hardcover

D'Aguiar, Fred

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1585671568 ISBN 13: 9781585671564

Publisher: Overlook Books, 2001

Synopsis

Ranging from the Civil War to the present, this poetic historical novel chronicles the lives and fortunes of five characters--Tom and Stella, runaway slaves turned operatives for the Underground Railroad; Faith, a black slave; Christy, her white lover; and their son (the narrator). By the award-winning author of The Longest Memory.

About this title

About the Author

Fred D’Aguiar lives in Florida, where teaches English at the University of Miami. He was born in London in 1960 and raised in Guyana and southeast London. He is the author of three novels and four books of poetry. He has been awarded the University of Kent’s T.S. Eliot Prize for poetry, the Guyanese National Poetry Award, and the Malcolm X Prize for poetry. He also won the 1994 Whitbread First Novel Award and the David Higham Award for his novel, The Longest Memory. His essay, "The Son in Shadow," is included in the "Best American Essays 2000."

HAILS FROM: Fred D'Aguiar lives in Florida, where he teaches English at the University of Miami.

From Publishers Weekly

D'Aguiar (Feeding the Ghosts; The Longest Memory) uses the form of an epic poem to eloquently convey two generations of oppression and sacrifice. The 19th-century narrator, who remains nameless, employs modern language and metaphors to tell his story, beginning with his conception and continuing through the tragic separation of his parents: his mother, a slave, and his father, a plantation owner's son. But this is sophisticated material: what begins as a rape evolves into a romance ("This is the nature of sweet transgression:/ after the fact bodies become solicitous;/ black and white locked in illegal passion"), and the two flee the plantation together. They are captured and humiliated by white men she is raped repeatedly, sold and taken west; he is bound and defiled. Throughout the 10 sections of the poem, the narrator's voice intermingles with the mournful songs of his 17-year-old mother, Faith, who dies in childbirth, and his father, Christy, who becomes a traveling fighter after Faith's return to slavery. Traditional poetic structures frame the vibrant, contemporary language ("Her love did more damage to her body/ than all the lyrics in all the pop songs slammed/ together have done to a sentimental boy/ or girl in suburbia on a diet of MTV jams") and powerful images of loneliness ("I am stripped bare by the light, bare and/ lonely, my bones wrung clean, the clean/ bones ground to dust, scattered in the four winds"). This saga of a man shunned by society will long echo in readers' minds. Ages 14-up.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Overlook Books
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 1585671568
• ISBN 13: 9781585671564
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 160