From Publishers Weekly
De Kretser's accomplished second novel (after 2000's
The Rose Grower), set in the author's native Sri Lanka in the years before its independence in 1948, is as much a haunting character study as it is an elusive murder mystery and a deep exploration of colonialism. At the heart of the story is Sam Obeysekere, a brilliant Ceylonese prosecutor and perfect English gentleman—who isn't, of course, English. Born into a privileged but unstable family—his "Pater" intentionally squanders their wealth; his "Mater" sleeps around, smashes expensive crystal and feels a "massive indifference" to her son; and his beloved sister seems bent on self-destruction—Sam, as an adult, focuses on his young son and his career. By all accounts, he's prospering, able to take his place beside the island's ruling class of Brits, Dutch burghers and Portuguese. But when he offers to help solve the murder of an English tea grower shot dead in the jungle, Sam makes a "central mistake" that destabilizes his life—and, in a way, the English-dominated life of his whole "mongrel" nation. De Kretser's self-deluding protagonist will no doubt remind readers of the butler in
The Remains of the Day: it's a sharp portrayal of assimilation that she manages to make complex and even poignant ("Are we to become a nation capable of talking only to itself, a lunatic on the world stage?"). But Sam is his own unique and problematic self, and like everything else in this lush, uneasy world, from the secondary characters to the ghost-haunted jungle, he is capable of shocking. De Kretser's fine, brooding, mischievous style is sure to captivate fans of serious literary fiction.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
--Ce texte provient d'une édition qui n'est plus publiée ou qui est non diponible.
From Booklist
*Starred Review* "Life is bearable only if it can be understood as a set of narrative strategies." Yes, but the narrative we construct for our lives often bears little relation to the book others read. So it is with Sam Obeysekere, a lawyer from Ceylon in the middle of the last century who "strove to perfect a performance that never deceived its audience." Obeysekere's narrative starred himself as a British gentleman, a latter-day Sherlock Holmes, in fact, but it was all too elementary, both to his fellow Ceylonese and to the British colonists on the island, that the brown-skinned, stiff-collared "native" was not the right kind of gentleman. These dueling narratives come together in the infamous Hamilton case. Would Obeysekere's role in this murder investigation ensure his favored position among the British elite, or would it expose the folly of his dreams? De Kretser's elegant novel answers this question gradually, weaving its way through the often-tragic lives of Obeysekere and those closest to him and luxuriating in detailed descriptions of Ceylon near the end of the colonial era. It is difficult to write about so ultimately pathetic a character, but de Kretser, like Ishiguro in
Remains of the Day, finds a heartbreaking dignity in her hero's pathos. This is far too subtle a character study to hold those expecting a literary thriller, but the novel has a way of insinuating itself into the reader's mind--first for its razor-sharp evocation of a place and time, and then, more deviously, for its crushingly sad vision of a man's self-imposed imprisonment in the wrong story.
Bill OttCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
--Ce texte provient d'une édition qui n'est plus publiée ou qui est non diponible.
