BOOKPATHS

Jamaica

Ian Thomson, author of The Dead Yard, "which investigates Jamaica's gritty underbelly," describes "a strangely moving visit to a sugar plantation and its elderly owner."

The world have been reduced to this:  an old man in an abandoned house on a hill.  Cooke was born here almost a century earlier, the last of his kind in Jamaica.  And Chester Castle, like Cooke, was at the end of its existence.  I left him in the home of his slave-owning forebears, oddly moved by the encounter, and returned to the forest path as the sun sank over Jamaica. -- from "My Travels:  Ian Thomson in Jamaica," The Guardian

Jamaica; England

Gary Younge talks with Andrea Levy, whose new novel, The Long Song, “is set on a Jamaican slave plantation.”

…I know my ancestors were slaves, but what did they do? How did they live? How did they manage to survive it? We know so little and very little of what we do know comes from them. The only way you can go any further is through fiction."

This was the curiosity that produced The Long Song, in which July tells her story, urged on by her son. Levy says she was inspired to write the book after a young black woman at a conference on the legacy of slavery rose to ask how she could have pride in her ancestry when all her ancestors had been slaves. I thought, 'Wow, how could anyone have any shame or ambivalence at having slave ancestry?’ She wanted to see if she could change this woman's mind and make her proud of her ancestry. – from “I Started to Realise What Fiction Could Be.  And I Thought, Wow! You Can Take on the World,” by Gary Younge, The Guardian

Jamaica

Caroline Alexander, “the biographer of William Bligh…of the infamous mutiny on the Bounty, tracks him to Jamaica and the completion of his star-crossed mission.”

All of Jamaica, it has been said, is a botanical garden.  Inland, the mountain clefs and gullies, often coursed by streams, are tangled with greenery, the trees woolly and blurred with epiphytes, ferns, orchids and the night-scented, night-blooming cereus.  An island with a total area of less than 4,000 square miles, Jamaica has 579 species of ferns alone, a higher density, it is believed, than anywhere else in the world.  Epiphytes dangle from telephone wires; the forests are hung with flowering vines; often on this trip I thought of how Bligh and the men of the Providence must have been reminded here of the lush blue-green landscape of Tahiti. – from “Captain Bligh’s Cursed Breadfruit,” by Caroline Alexander, Smithsonian (September 2009)

Jamaica, and beyond….

Novelist Andrew Sean Greer tells us why we “must read” A High Wind in Jamaica, by Richard Hughes.

The story begins almost whimsically in Jamaica, with five English children surviving a hurricane. Later on, as the ship is returning to Europe, we enter Treasure Island territory when the vessel is boarded by pirates. – from “You Must Read This,” by Andrew Sean Greer, NPR Website

Jamaica

David G. Allan travels to “Ian Fleming’s Jamaica.”

““The first law for a secret agent is to get his geography right,” Ian Fleming wrote in The Man With the Golden Gun. And so it is for anyone following the trail of the man who created the world’s most famous secret agent through his adopted island of Jamaica, a journey that starts near Kingston on the tiny spit of beach called the Palisadoes that connects the city to Norman Manley International Airport.” – from “Ian Fleming’s Jamaica,” by David G. Allan, The New York Times

Japan

Seamus Heaney considers Japanese poetry.

“What the haiku/imagist form can do is to reach down into that noiseless, strong, obscure, deep central stream and give both poet and reader a sense of epiphany.” – from “The Pathos of Things,” by Seamus Heaney, The Guardian

Jamaica

Boyd Tonkin is “blown away by” Jamaican writer Anthony C. Winkler.

“He never glosses over Jamaican deprivation, prejudice and violence, yet the love of language - and the language of love - somehow conquers all. It's almost as if PG Wodehouse had strolled into the world of Bob Marley. (Winkler, in fact, ghosted the autobiography of Marley's mother Cedella Booker, and joined her on a London tour where 'everywhere we went the acclaim for Mother Booker was ecstatic, and bordering on worship'.) Or as if a more salacious Alexander McCall Smith tangled with the younger, funnier VS Naipaul. But, truth be told, Winkler sounds like no one but himself.” – from “Anthony C. Winkler: a Playful Pirate of the Caribbean,” by Boyd Tonkin, The Independent