Customer Reviews

In the Castle of My Skin (Ann Arbor Paperbacks)

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"In the Castle of my Skin" is a highly poetic account of growing up in the black community of Barbadoes. Lamming gives us a vivid picture of G's family, his friends, his school and village life. Interwoven with G's everyday experience is his awareness of what it means being black and being poor in a somehow secluded island community. Lamming's teatment of racism is sober and sensitive. It's the more effective because it shows how inseparable its perception is from the growing awareness a young black boy has of himself. There is much more violence in this as in many a bloody battle. In it's poetic language,the vividness of its characters and scenery,the deep psychological insight and the sober and just treatment of the growing awareness of differences in the context of Carribean history this novel is a masterpiece of universal literature.It certainly can be read as "the portrait of a young artist"; The reference of the main character's initial to Lamming's first name George seems pretty obvious. But if a portrait, its an excellent one!

George Lamming's "In the Castle of My Skin" skilfully depicts the Barbadian psyche. Set against the backdrop of the 1930s riots which helped to pave the way for Independence and the modern Barbados, through the eyes of a young boy, Lamming portrays the social, racial, political and urban struggles with which Barbados continues to grapple even with some thirty-three years of Political Independence from Britain. Required reading for all Caribbean people. The novel also offers non-Barbadians and non-Caribbean people insight into the modern social history of Barbados and the Caribbean.

The more I attempt to say about Mr Lamming's beautifully descriptive and uniquely refreshing style the more disservice I do to this marvelous work. If you have a Carribean, colonial or post colonial experience as I do, this novel is what they call "a must read". It evoked memories and thoughts in me long forgotten. You will find yourself laughing out aloud - which I did continuously on the E train to the point where I am sure my fellow riders thought me a lunatic. Above all this novel conveys a truth about the way we lived and live. It examines the march of time and the complexities and consequences of change and transition from the perspective of a Caribbean village. I am writing this as I search ... for more of Lamming's works.

Mr Cameroon clearly has as little sense of historical context as he has literary judgement. When this novel was written in the early 1950s there was scarcely anything which could be called Caribbean (let alone African) literature. This masterpiece (which has generated almost 40 theses, essays, books, and other critical works) opened the way for later writers. Ngugi wa Thiongo of Kenya, for example, pointed to CASTLE as the origin of his own ambition to describe the world he knew. Lamming's description of the fabric of life in the urban villages of Barbados, of the shadows of the plantation, the school, slavery and the colonial experience, the island feeling of separateness and boundedness, has never been equalled in Caribbean literature. This is a masterpiece which will still be read a hundred years from now

Lamming's "coming of age" novel depicts the life of a precocious adolescent, G, who is trying to understand the colonial, grown-up world. The innocence of G is balanced against the decadence of his environment. Read also, Michael Anthony's The Year in San Fernando and Austin Calrke's, Growing Up Stupid Under Union Jack to fully understand Lamming's achievement.

George Lamming, along with other Caribbean writers such as V.S. Naipaul and V.S. Reid, broke through the Victorian box of post-World War II, pre-independence British colonial writing. Their styles are all different but their message is generally the same: trying to grapple with the major issues of politics, race, and self-worth. Lamming's description of G's life (which can be paralleled to James Joyce's "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man") draws the reader into the decadent colonial world of the pre-World War II Barbados. Lamming's style haunts and amuses but ultimately almost confuses; read this carefully to understand the true meaning of the book.

Obviously, the reader from Cameroon knows little about Caribbean literature and nothing about art, which is always about re-appropiation. George Lamming writes a good bildungsroman using textual and formal references from Europe to characterize the colonized subject. The awkwardness of forming one's self during childhood and adolescence is complicated by and reflected on the political situation of G's country, making choices about identity more complex than usual

A classic bildungsroman! A great story of a young boy growing up in Barbados under British rule. The boy's innocence is both heart warming and real. I loved it!

A poor "Euro-mimicry". An inferior recreation of the Joycean creek(witness the parallel he draws conciously or unconciously between "G" and Stephen Dedalus).He has simply rebaptised Stephen in Black waters.Needs to be reconceived not through the kaleidoscope of racial baises, but through the very essence of art.

This is a bannering of existentialist canvas that can hardly feed upon life. No doubt such is the dream of the caliban:The coward's paradise.