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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
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Book Description Paperback. Condition: new. Paperback. The whole purpose of magic is the fulfilment 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. Pauline Melville conjures pictures of the savannah, forest and city life in South America where love is often trumped by disaster. This novel embraces nearly a century, when laughter is never far from tragedy. It is a parable of miscegenation and racial exclusiveness, of nature defying culture. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability. Seller Inventory # 9780747535140
Book Description paperback. Condition: New. Seller Inventory # 9780747535140
Book Description Condition: New. pp. 368. Seller Inventory # 3296218
Book Description Paperback. Condition: New. BRAND NEW ** SUPER FAST SHIPPING FROM UK WAREHOUSE ** 30 DAY MONEY BACK GUARANTEE. Seller Inventory # 9780747535140-GDR
Book Description Paperback. Condition: Brand New. 368 pages. 7.76x5.08x1.46 inches. In Stock. Seller Inventory # __0747535140
Book Description Paperback / softback. Condition: New. New copy - Usually dispatched within 4 working days. Pauline Melville conjures pictures of the savannah, forest and city life in South America where love is often trumped by disaster. This novel embraces nearly a century, when laughter is never far from tragedy. It is a parable of miscegenation and racial exclusiveness, of nature defying culture. Seller Inventory # B9780747535140
Book Description Condition: New. In. Seller Inventory # ria9780747535140_new
Book Description Taschenbuch. Condition: Neu. Neuware - Pauline Melville conjures pictures of the savannah, forest and city life in South America where love is often trumped by disaster. This novel embraces nearly a century, when laughter is never far from tragedy. It is a parable of miscegenation and racial exclusiveness, of nature defying culture. 368 pp. Deutsch. Seller Inventory # 9780747535140
Book Description Paperback. Condition: New. Seller Inventory # Abebooks182736