Still Life
A Novel
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- 13,99 €
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- 13,99 €
Publisher Description
A New York Times Top Historical Fiction Pick of 2020
A stunningly original new novel exploring race, truth in authorship, and the legacy of past exploitation, from the Windham-Campbell lifetime achievement award winner
When Zoëml; Wicomb burst onto the literary scene in 1987 with You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town, she was hailed by her literary contemporaries and reviewers alike. Since then, her carefully textured writing has cemented her reputation as being among the most distinguished writers working today and earned her one of the inaugural Windham Campbell Prizes for Lifetime Achievement in Fiction Writing.
Wicomb's majestic new novel Still Life juggles with our perception of time and reality as Wicomb tells the story of an author struggling to write a biography of long-forgotten Scottish poet Thomas Pringle, whose only legacy is in South Africa where he is dubbed the "Father of South African Poetry." In her efforts to resurrect Pringle, the writer summons the specter of Mary Prince, the West Indian slave whose History Pringle had once published, along with Hinza, his adopted black South African son.
At their side is Sir Nicholas Green, a seasoned time traveler (and a character from Virginia Woolf's Orlando). Their adventures, as they travel across space and time to unlock the mysteries of Pringle's life, offer a poignant exploration of colonial history and racial oppression.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Wicomb (You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town) undertakes a virtuosic metafictional biography of the obscure 19th-century Scottish poet Thomas Pringle, a contemporary of Sir Walter Scott cited here as the "Father of South African poetry." At the center is an unnamed writer, struggling to meet her deadlines for her Pringle bio and to appease her publisher and agent. Eventually, she locates Pringle by going back in time while sitting at her desk, where "shafts of light snap at the spectral figures flailing, writhing in their am-dram poses." While traveling through space and time, the writer attempts to render a full narrative of the poet, who was an outspoken abolitionist. Along for the journey are Mary Prince, a slave from the West Indies who becomes Pringle's subject in the first female slave narrative to be published in England; the ghost of Hinza Marossi, the native child Pringle adopts as a son; the gregarious Elizabethan poet Nicholas Greene; a character from Virginia Woolf's Orlando; and Vytje, a servant girl who may have been Pringle's lover. Together, they navigate a story Pringle calls "neither fish nor fowl, neither fact nor fiction." The adventurous if scrambled approach doesn't quite justify itself as an alternative to straight fictional biography, but the author impresses with her deep dive into the minutiae of world literature. Wicomb's experiment succeeds by exploring the question of who gets to write history.
