The Radiance of the King
Will be published approx. on 16. August 2011
Book
Paperback/Softback
312 pages
978-1-59017-455-5 (ISBN)
Description
At the beginning of this masterpiece of African literature, Clarence, a white man, has been shipwrecked on the coast of Africa. Flush with self-importance, he demands to see the king, but the king has just left for the south of his realm. Traveling through an increasingly phantasmagoric landscape in the company of a beggar and two roguish boys, Clarence is gradually stripped of his pretensions, until he is sold to the royal harem as a slave. But in the end Clarence’s bewildering journey is the occasion of a revelation, as he discovers the image, both shameful and beautiful, of his own humanity in the alien splendor of the king.
More details
Edition
Main
Language
English
Place of publication
New York
United States
Publishing group
New York Review Books
Dimensions
Height: 203 mm
Width: 126 mm
Thickness: 20 mm
Weight
322 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-59017-455-5 (9781590174555)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Previous edition
Camara Laye
The Radiance Of The King
Book
05/2001
NYRB Classics
€32.37
Article exhausted; check for reprint
Persons
CAMARA LAYE (1928–1980) was born in Kouroussa, a large village on the river Niger in the French West African colony of Upper Guinea. The Camaras are one of the oldest clans of the Malinke people, and Camara Laye’s father, a goldsmith, was a man of considerable local authority. The eldest of seven children, Camara spent his formative years in Koranic and French elementary schools before winning a scholarship to study automobile engineering in Argenteuil, outside Paris. His precocious first book, the autobiographical novel The Dark Child, was published in France in 1953 to great acclaim; it was followed a year later by his masterpiece, The Radiance
of the King. In the late 1950s Camara Laye returned to Africa, where he worked in a variety of official capacities for the government of newly independent Guinea, only to be driven into exile because of his political outspokenness. Though his final years were overshadowed by illness and poverty, Camara Laye completed two additional major works: Dramouss, a continuation of The Dark Child, and The Guardian of the Word, a rendering into French of the great Malian epic Soundiata.
TONI MORRISON is the author of nine novels, among them The Bluest Eye, Beloved, Jazz, and Paradise. Born in Ohio and a graduate of Howard and Cornell, she was the Robert F. Goheen Professor at Princeton from 1989 to 2006. In 1993 she won the Nobel Prize in Literature.
JAMES KIRKUP (1918-2009) was a prolific English poet, translator and travel writer. He became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1962.
of the King. In the late 1950s Camara Laye returned to Africa, where he worked in a variety of official capacities for the government of newly independent Guinea, only to be driven into exile because of his political outspokenness. Though his final years were overshadowed by illness and poverty, Camara Laye completed two additional major works: Dramouss, a continuation of The Dark Child, and The Guardian of the Word, a rendering into French of the great Malian epic Soundiata.
TONI MORRISON is the author of nine novels, among them The Bluest Eye, Beloved, Jazz, and Paradise. Born in Ohio and a graduate of Howard and Cornell, she was the Robert F. Goheen Professor at Princeton from 1989 to 2006. In 1993 she won the Nobel Prize in Literature.
JAMES KIRKUP (1918-2009) was a prolific English poet, translator and travel writer. He became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1962.