Ascent to Omai (Caribbean Modern Classics) - Softcover

Wilson Harris

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1845233549 ISBN 13: 9781845233549

Publisher: Peepal Tree Press Ltd, 2018

Synopsis

Wilson Harris's ninth novel, first published in 1970, is a work of the most revolutionary and far-reaching kind of science or speculative fiction. Victor is in search of his father, Adam, once a revolutionary worker who was sent to prison many years ago for burning down the factory he worked in. Since then Victor has lost touch with him, but suspects he is living as a pork-knocker (gold prospector) in the remote Cuyuni-Mazaruni district of Guyana. As he climbs in search of his father, Victor both revisits his past relationship with him and replays his father's trial, which also becomes his own. Victor's search is for spiritual grace, for the compensations of love and the glimmerings of a true understanding of the world he exists in, and the reader is invited to share in Victor's struggling ascent to consciousness, knowing that it can never be other than provisional.

About this title

About the Author:

Wilson Harris was born in New Amsterdam in British Guiana, with a background which embraces African, European and Amerindian ancestry. Between 1945-1961, Harris was a regular contributor of stories, poems and essays to Kyk-over-Al and part of a group of Guyanese intellectuals that included Martin Carter, Sidney Singh, Ivan Van Sertima and Milton Williams. His first publication was a chapbook of poems, Fetish, (1951) under the pseudonym Kona Waruk, followed by the more substantial Eternity to Season (1954) which announced Harris's commitment to a cross-cultural vision in the arts, linking the Homeric to the Guyanese. Harris's first published novel was Palace of the Peacock (1969), followed by a further 23 novels with The Ghost of Memory (2006) as the most recent. His novels comprise a singular, challenging and uniquely individual vision of the possibilities of spiritual and cultural transcendance out of the fixed empiricism and cultural boundedness that Harris argues has been the dominant Caribbean mode of thought.

About this edition

• Publisher: Peepal Tree Press Ltd
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 1845233549
• ISBN 13: 9781845233549
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 144