The Migration of Ghosts [Bargain Price] [Paperback]

Pauline Melville (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 16, 2000

Souls are on the move in this collection of short stories. One South American president takes a sentimental astral journey round the scenes of his ruthless rise to power before being buried by an ungrateful nation; while a discerning parrot tours world cultures and learns about Christianity.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Pauline Melville is the most exuberant of fatalists. In her second collection, The Migration of Ghosts, she moves between the civilized and the visceral, her tales phantasmagoric and hyperreal. In the first story, "The President's Exile," a brutal, petty, and very dead South American politician is assailed by his own sense of fraudulence as he relives scenes from his rise to power. President Hercules had always prided himself on his grasp of reality, "and it was this that made his present position so disturbing. He was not sure exactly what the reality was." Another more rambunctious tale is set in London, on the day of the Notting Hill Carnival. Six months earlier, Mrs. da Silva's husband-to-be went off for some rice but decamped to Marion, Ohio, instead. Now our sizable heroine, who has never missed a carnival--and whose "shimmying is like an earthquake in motion"--is on the road to renewal and, with luck, romance. Moving among several participants, Melville paints the day's explosive, jolly mayhem, creating nothing less than life's rich--and hilarious--pageant. Mrs. da Silva's son, for instance, suddenly has to head for the hospital, still dressed as "a muscular devil with stubby horns, fork, a black-and-red torso and painted legs stuck with tufts of goat hair." Needless to say, his getup is to have a lasting effect: "Two hours later, a tiny infant, fifteen minutes old, opens his eyes briefly in the delivery room, looks up from his father's arms and knows that life is going to be a nightmare."

Elsewhere, Melville's vision is less comic, though she rarely offers anything approximating a moral. In "Provenance of a Face," a reporter isn't too thrilled by her latest assignment, an interview with a celebrated mime who turns out to be far from the silent type. But what seems a satire about a monstrous ego turns into another thing entirely, thanks to one of the author's many reversals. Finally, no discussion of this book would be complete without some reference to "The Parrot and Descartes," an intellectual history with an avian difference. In 1611 an easily ruffled South American bird is captured and brought to England as a wedding gift for James I's daughter. Our feathered friend seems to possess eternal life--which in his case is far from a gift--and now he's condemned to witness mankind's every doltish move, including "one of the worst productions of The Tempest the world has ever seen." Books are just one of Monsignor Parrot's pet peeves, since he represents the oral tradition. Happily for us, Pauline Melville disagrees, and has written it all down. --Kerry Fried --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

A magnificent sense of pacing is the first of Melville's skills that impresses the reader of this mesmerizing collection. The second is her gift for voices: like the brightly plumaged title character in "The Parrot and Descartes," she has an amazing range, from West Indians in London celebrating carnival, to the self-conscious, resentful Macusi Indian brought by her literal-minded British husband to a wedding in London, to the irritable Canadian wife whose husband has been sent to Guyana for two years to serve as unofficial liar for a mining corporation. Magic realism is the label most readers and critics will paste on Melville's work (she won the Whitbread award for first novel for Ventriloquist's Tale and the Guardian Fiction Prize for her first collection of short stories, Shape Shifter); it is an appropriate but incomplete description. The dozen stories spill over with musical chaos and sly humor. The parrot's genetics insure that every word he hears will sink "ineradicably into his memory." In 1611 when he is brought from the shores of the Orinoco to Europe for a royal wedding, he hears one of the worst productions ever of Shakespeare's The Tempest. Like the characters in the play, like the parrot itself, Melville's people are dislocated both in time and place. In the carnival, a devil with red horns talks on a mobile phone to his wife, who is in labor at a nearby hospital, and a retired postal officer dressed in his dead wife's pink sweater and hairnet works up the courage to make a date with a career widow. In "Lucifer's Shank" a woman dying slowly of bone cancer selects Dante's Inferno as her guidebook. In "The Sparkling Bitch" the unsympathetic Charles Hay notes that the more transparent the buildings in London, the shadier the dealings inside "this new phantasmagoria of commerce." Meanwhile, Hays's trophy wife is dying, unnoticed, from sympathy with a skeletal beggar she met on the way to Lagos. The magic in Melville's eccentric tales is neither good nor bad, white nor black, but the magic of the teeming pluralness and the many possibilities of life.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• ISBN-10: 1582340749
• ASIN: B000HWYTIU
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.6 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #873,817 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4.0 out of 5 stars very good, February 3, 2011

By 

Malaika Baksh (New York, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Migration of Ghosts (Paperback)

This is a collection of short stories; recommended reading for those interested in Guyanese literature. Professionally put together and well written; one of the best fictional books available concerning Guyana.

5.0 out of 5 stars Great, September 28, 2008

By 

quana543 "striving for excellence" (tallahassee, fl USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Migration of Ghosts (Paperback)

Everything was great . the book was like new when i recieved it! very satisified with my order!