Another Man in the Street
A Novel
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- 10,99 €
Descrizione dell’editore
Caryl Phillips, who “pits himself against any kind of received wisdom” (London Review of Books), gives us a hypnotic, heartbreaking novel lit by the bright and changing lights of 1960s London.
At the height of the Swinging Sixties, Victor Johnson, a young immigrant from the Caribbean, arrives in London with dreams of becoming a journalist in the “mother country.” Instead, he finds work collecting rent for Peter Feldman, a landlord equally kind and unscrupulous, and then falls into a relationship with Peter’s lonely secretary, Ruth, herself a migrant from the north of England.
Spanning nearly half a century, and set against the backdrop of a nation that is slowly, reluctantly evolving into a modern, multiracial society, the story unfolds to reveal the truth of both Peter’s tragic background and Ruth’s agonizing secret, and we witness Victor, out of his depth, adjusting to the painful realities of life in his new country.
Both epic in its sweep and devastatingly intimate in its portrayal of damaged lives caught between two worlds, Caryl Phillips’s Another Man in the Street lays bare the traumas that often overtake personal relationships in the wake of societal transformation, and the high price of attempting to reinvent oneself.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A West Indian immigrant tries to make a name for himself as a London journalist in this flat offering from Phillips (The Lost Child). Victor, the son of a St. Kitts cane cutter, leaves his native Caribbean island in the 1960s for England, where "young girls seemed brassier, and their hemlines were going up." Attempting to establish himself before bringing over his wife, Lorna, and their young child from St. Kitts, Victor finds employment first in a shoddy Notting Hill pub, then as a rent collector for Peter, a prosperous Jewish immigrant whose girlfriend, Ruth, he steals. He eventually starts writing for a broadsheet called the West Indian News, and after race riots shake England in the early 1980s, Victor seeks to capture what life is like for immigrants of color under the reign of Margaret Thatcher. The narrative alternates between Victor's early years and late-career disappointments and also follows the fortunes of Lorna, Peter, and Ruth. Unfortunately, none of the characters are magnetic or fully drawn enough to hold the reader's attention. This doesn't reach the heights of this Phillips's best work.
