
The Ghost of Memory
Wilson Harris(Author)
Faber & Faber (Publisher)
Published on 2. November 2017
Book
Paperback/Softback
112 pages
978-0-571-34162-7 (ISBN)
Description
I had been shot. A bullet in my back. I fell. Where did I fall? I fell from a great height, it seemed, into a painting in a gallery in a great City. I found myself returning across centuries and generations to the end of my age. I had been caught by the Artist in what seemed the womb of unexpected being in which one becomes sensitive to the end one has reached and to a new beginning. It was an end, it was a new beginning one was called upon to probe and discover.
We may dream, while still alive, of dying. But the dream is soon forgotten as are the edges and corners of a re-lived life of which we dream. It is buried in the unconscious. We know that life fades into death but, in what degree, does life re-live itself as it dreams of dying?
The Ghost of Memory is a novel about life and death or rather - to put it somewhat differently - about the close, almost indefinable cross-culturalities between moments of life and death.
This is played out through a man who is mistakenly shot as a terrorist - he sees himself
We may dream, while still alive, of dying. But the dream is soon forgotten as are the edges and corners of a re-lived life of which we dream. It is buried in the unconscious. We know that life fades into death but, in what degree, does life re-live itself as it dreams of dying?
The Ghost of Memory is a novel about life and death or rather - to put it somewhat differently - about the close, almost indefinable cross-culturalities between moments of life and death.
This is played out through a man who is mistakenly shot as a terrorist - he sees himself
More details
Edition
Main
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Product notice
Paperback (UK-trade)
Dimensions
Height: 217 mm
Width: 137 mm
Thickness: 6 mm
Weight
130 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-571-34162-7 (9780571341627)
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Schweitzer Classification
Person
Sir Wilson Harris was a prize-winning novelist, poet, essayist, and lecturer. Born in 1921 in British Guiana, his father died when he was two and his stepfather disappeared into the rainforests in 1929. He began working as a government surveyor in 1942 and led expeditions into the Amazonian interior for almost 15 years. In 1959 he left for England to become a full-time writer. The following year, Faber published his debut novel, Palace of the Peacock, which became a landmark of Caribbean literature and the first of The Guyana Quartet. Over the course of his career, Faber published all 26 of Harris' novels, including The Carnival Trilogy, Jonestown, The Mask of the Beggar, and The Ghost of Memory. Harris was awarded numerous academic fellowships and honorary doctorates as well as being a Guggenheim Fellow. He twice won the Guyana Prize for Literature as well as a Lifetime Achievement Prize from the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards. Harris was knighted in 2010, and died in 2018 at the age of 96.