Westbooks - Title Details

A tale of love, alas and other episodes

Lytton, David more...
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Format: Paperback
Library Classification: Adult Fiction
BIC Subjects: General & literary fiction
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Imprint: Bloomsbury Reader
Publication Date: 14/08/2012
Place of Publication: United Kingdom

RRP: $32.99
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Synopsis

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Mr J, blind from birth, tells the story of his life and loves and peculiar friendships among the English colony at the Cape. His method is to imitate the random action of memory, choosing those episodes which reveal most clearly the strange elements of his society and his own eccentric response to them. He begins with a love affair that occupied a large part of his early manhood and distils from it a sad poetry of frustration. This calls to mind its opposite and he recounts his association with a rumbustious Coloured woman, epically large and loud, a reluctant abortionist, foster mother and, eventually, anarchist, dominating the slum in which she lives with her vivid personality. Against the life of the slums, he contrasts his own privileged upbringing, an only child in the care of his widowed mother and proconsular aunts attempting to impose an Edwardian order on the crude contours of their country life.