City of Light - Softcover

Cyrus Colter

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1874509735 ISBN 13: 9781874509738

Publisher: The X Press, 1998

City of Light joins the recent reissues of four of Cyrus Colter's books by TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press. Colter concludes his grand literary project with a work that is foremost a novel of ideas. Though City of Light may appear realistic

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About the Author:

Cyrus Colter was a distinguished attorney and public servant when he took up writing in midlife. He is the author of five other works, among them The Beach Umbrella and Other Stories, The Hippodrome, Night Studies, and A Chocolate Soldier, all published by TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press

From Kirkus Reviews:

An overheated Shakespearian tragedy about a black man who leaves the US for France to pursue the radical dream of a black homeland--from the author of, most recently, The Amoralists and A Chocolate Soldier (both 1988). Paul Kessay, now 29, grew up in Chicago and went to Princeton before deciding to leave his dominatrix of a mother, Saturn Marie or ``Queen Saturn'' (``Sometimes [Paul writes] I feel you crippled me, my existence, without meaning to''), and head for Paris, where he starts up The Coterie--a radical fringe group that seeks a homeland for wandering and disaffected blacks. Amid lots of ideological chatter and a bevy of quaint characters--most notably Cecile, with whom Paul has an affair, and Quo Vadis, ``this incredible, huge, black humanist''--Paul tries ``to end the drift to which the organization had already fallen prey.'' Instead, he drinks himself sick, has hallucinations of Jeannette, his long-ago first love, and eventually finds everything falling apart. What had seemed to be paranoia about racism proves to have been reasonable fear: Quo Vadis is found dead; Cecile is ambushed and killed; and Paul, injured in the attack on Cecile, also finally dies, ``almost euphoric as he slept'' in his hospital bed. Much densely poetic prose, but Colter also has a gift for rendering a time and place, in this instance France, in vivid detail. The blood bath at the end feels a bit overdone, but the characters are so haunted and traumatized that perhaps only such violence is appropriate. This one reads like a cross between the haunted feverish prose of James Baldwin and the lyricism of a William Styron. -- Copyright �1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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