Wilson Harris was one of the twentieth century's most original novelists and critics. His writings, encompassing poetry, essays, and novels, passionately and uniquely champion the notion of cross-cultural coexistence. His visionary work explores the interdependence of history, landscape, and humanity. Harris's prose is characterized by its distinctive approach and deep engagement with the intricate connections between culture and identity.
Bone is a fictional survivor of the mass-suicide in the Guyana forest in 1978. In a dream-book he tries to heal the trauma he suffered, and is drawn into the Mayan concept of time which twins past and future. The author has received a Guggenheim Award and the Guyana National Prize for Fiction.
Belletristik : Guayana ; soziale Gerechtigkeit - Kolonialismus.
A novel about the complexities of memory, Wilson Harris's The Four Banks of the River of Space is a return to the writer's childhood haunts. Shunning what he calls sterile realism, Harris digs under the reality of perception and language to find the hidden music or pattern which gives significance to apparently desperate situations. Memory thus becomes a form of creation which follows the Odyssean metaphor of the quest naturalized here in the author's original Guyana heartland. This journey into the past does not limit itself to the reassertion of the protagonist's multiculturalism. It states that poetic language can only progress through erasure leading to the opening out of new doors or windows into essential reality, where polarities melt away.The Four Banks of the River of Space fragments the epic figure of Ulysses into several personalities who conduct self-analyses to redefine the nature and function of myth.
In a richly metaphorical style, the book sets out the themes Wilson continues to develop in his writing to this day: the ability of the imaginative consciousness to create worlds where disparate cultures and traditions are fused.Donne, an ambitious skipper, leads a multiracial crew up an unnamed river in the rainforest.
The Guyana Quartet is Wilson Harris's collection of novels comprising Palace of the Peacock, The Far Journey of Oudin, The Whole Armour and The Secret Ladder. In Palace of the Peacock, a tale of a doomed crew beating their way up-river through the jungles of Guyana, can be traced the poetic vision, themes and designs of Harris's subsequent work. It was described in "The Times" as displaying 'that staggering ebullience of language we have begun to recognize in West Indian writers'.