Shape Shifter - Softcover

Pauline Melville

Softcover

ISBN 10: 074754994X ISBN 13: 9780747549949

Publisher: Bloomsbury, 2000

Synopsis

A collection of short stories which are all set in the Caribbean and London. Pauline Melville is the winner of "The Guardian" Fiction Prize and winner of the Macmillan Silver Pen Award. This book was also awarded the 1991 Commonwealth Writers Prize for best first book.

About this title

From Kirkus Reviews:

A first collection of 12 stories (winner of the Guardian Prize in England) that shifts intelligently between London, Guyana, and the Caribbean: very good on local patois and custom, as well as dramatizing a sense of dislocation and a yearning for home. ``Eat Labba and Drink Creek Water,'' a series of instances on ocean-hopping juxtaposed to variations on the myths of El Dorado, most explicitly voices this mood: ``We do return and leave and return again, criss-crossing the Atlantic, but whichever side of the Atlantic we are on, the dream is always on the other side.'' In ``A Disguised Land,'' a woman in England from Jamaica for an unhappy reunion with her mother kites checks and goes on the dole in order to feed her kids, then gets a jail term while pregnant and, after delivering the baby, escapes with it, only to return to the jail with a TV crew--having made an adjustment of sorts to her new home. In ``The Iron and the Radio Have Gone,'' the roles are reversed when a well-meaning Quaker woman goes to Guyana and fails to adapt when confronted by a break-in, street urchins, and various other manifestations of local color. Other stories are quirkier, but there's usually some sort of intercultural transaction at the center of every piece: ``the Conversion of Millicent Vernon,'' for instance, finds the title character trying to save her rotting teeth by pledging ``secret allegiance to the Congo pump tree,'' recommended by a local spirit-man. ``You Left the Door Open,'' about the transformations of a woman attacked while she's sleeping, has a paranoid film noir feel to it, along with a manic edge hovering between horror and black humor. Even the few pieces that are structurally flimsy have a strong sense of place and dialect. A promising debut: Melville's transatlantic stories, in particular, capture the conflict between the exotic and the ordinary. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly:

In this startling debut collection, which won England's prestigious Guardian Prize, hard-luck Londoners and Caribs find themselves and their environs in a state of metamorphosis. In "The Conversion of Millicent Vernon," a West Indian teenager abandons Christianity after an per web obeah man recommends tree worship to save her rotting teeth; the protagonist of "The Truth Is in the Clothes" discovers that the back wall of her London flat opens up on her native Jamaica; "The Girl with the Celestial Limb" concerns a shop girl whose leg turns into a black hole that threatens to swallow her. The prominence of the supernatural notwithstanding, these 12 stories are firmly rooted in reality. From an incarcerated Jamaican mother's dulled anguish to a poor woman's desperate efforts to befriend a doctor's wife, Melville depicts people marginalized by the color of their skin or by the emptiness of their pocketbooks in a way that transcends whimsy. The pained social consciousness behind these stories is leavened by a sharp wit, as in "Tuxedo," a tale about a would-be safecracker who talks to his maker "Jamaica-style" because "it makes God feel more like one of the boys." Shaman-like, Melville transforms the mundane yet never loses sight of social inequities or of the pleasures of laughter.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Bloomsbury
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 074754994X
• ISBN 13: 9780747549949
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 164