RaveThe Irish Times (IRE)... offers unalloyed insights into the making of a writer, illuminating the artistic journey of the author in an important and refreshing perspective on publishing and creativity in Britain in the last 40 years ... exhilarating ... With remarkable candour and humour, she charts her family’s history, her artistic trajectory from youth theatre to poetry and beyond, and a movable feast of lovers of both sexes in a romantic life whose ambition veers towards the epic. At every point, she ties it all back to how these experiences have made her the writer she is today ... a moving and highly readable account of a creative life, atomizing the hard graft of writing as experienced by an author who was growing up at a time when the term, \'Black British\' was seen as an oxymoron ... While there is much more to be done to open up the space for a more diverse publishing industry, Manifesto is a timely reminder of just how far we have come.
Maryse Condé, Trans. by Richard Philcox
RaveThe Irish Times (IRE)The narrative voice is a collective and elegiac \'we\' that sweeps across epochs, taking in slavery, colonialism, fundamentalism, islander psychology, migration and the pitfalls of ideology. Always, a deep insight into contradictions of race, class, religion and nation ... The self-reflexivity of the novel has the narrator pausing regularly to qualify or clarify a point or other for the benefit of the reader. A wise storyteller with an expansive eye on the characters and the situations in which they find themselves, and yet demurring, rejecting omniscience, admitting to knowing only what the communal \'we\' knows ... Beating in the novel’s heart is orality, carrying with it the breath of histories, literatures and languages of Africa and the Caribbean ... In constantly drawing attention to its form as narrative constructed through a process of selection shaped by the communal voice, The Wondrous and Tragic Life of Ivan and Ivana is clear as to its loyalties ... Condé makes clear, at every point: this is the story we are telling, the perspective in focus, the world we are centring – it is the subaltern that speaks.
