Pictures of a Dying Man: A Novel [Hardcover]

Agymah Kamau (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1, 1999

When Gladstone Belle is found hanging from a beam in his own house, everyone in the village tries to understand who he really was, and why he killed himself. In this Caribbean Citizen Kane, the voices of Gladstone's past accumulate, complementing and contradicting each other, to arrive at an understanding of Gladstone's true identity and the circumstances that complicated his life. And his death.
Is a human life merely the sum of other people's perceptions of it, a compilation of rumors and hearsay? What happens if those views are erroneous? Continuing in the vein of his critically acclaimed novel, Flickering Shadows, Agymah Kamau weaves a colorful story, full of deception, love, and loss, around a community's remembrances of a Gladstone Belle. We discover the intricacies of living in a small Caribbean community by seeing things through the eyes of an array of vivid characters, including Isamina, his wife; Esther and Sonny-Boy, his mother and father; Carl, the suspicious husband of his former lover; PeeWee, the village gangster; Theophilus Bascombe, a disgruntled coworker; and Marie Antoinette LaSalle, the histrionic clairvoyant.
In a diverse community and political world riddled with rumors of murder and disappearance, Gladstone's humble beginnings and honest manner win the community's trust. He quickly moves up the political ladder. But his life is cut short when he decides that he can no longer look the other way. He realizes that everything around him has suffered from this corruption: his marriage, his friendships, and his dignity. The narrative of Gladstone Belle's life and death illumines the complexity of class distinctions within a postcolonial community.

"Gladstone Belle, a man with a high position in island politics, is found hanging from the rafters of his home, which triggers gossip about his lief and tragic end. Did he kill himself in remorse for the wrongs, civil and social, he had committed or out of realization that his wife wa unfaithful? Or was he killed? A local schoolteacher, and the widow's lover, is the primary narrator of the life and times of this complicated man. From diaries reluctantly accepted from Gladstone's father, the narrator learns the deceased man's priv

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Employing a richly varied chorus of voices and excerpts from diaries and journals, Barbados native Kamau explores the enigmatic character of Gladstone Belle, former minister of tourism and culture of a small Caribbean country, in this followup to Flickering Shadows, Kamau's acclaimed debut. After Belle's body is discovered hanging in his bedroom, friends, relatives and acquaintances recount their interactions with the fallen bureaucrat, and a nuanced picture gradually emerges of a man who was at once a flamboyant, charismatic politician and a retiring private figure. As in his first novel, Kamau has assembled an impressive supporting cast: Isamina, Belle's unfaithful wife; Sonny-Boy and Esther, his colorful parents; Pee Wee, a heartless thug; and Carl, the clueless husband of Debra, one of Belle's former lovers. Each one presents a different and conflicting vision of Belle. Meanwhile, Sonny-Boy, Belle's wise, insightful and incorruptible father, is shown to be a character nearly as complex as his son. Feeling like an outsider in his native land, Sonny-Boy left for America, where he lives in Florida and works as a janitor, returning to bury the son he never knew, and participating in a communal grieving process that brings every rumor and deceit into the open. While Isamina recalls her husband's excessive brooding and drinking in the weeks before his death, she wonders whether the cause for his fall was political, romantic or spiritual. Did he really have a man killed to cover up an act of agency fraud? Did he know about her affair? As the evidence piles up, Kamau imparts wisdom on issues of race, class, political corruption and reform, and moral decay in this multilayered puzzler about a man whom nobody really knew. (Sept.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Kamau's intriguing second novel (after Flickering Shadows) gives new meaning to the notion that seeing is not always believing. At the opening of the book, former Deputy Prime Minister Gladstone Belle hangs, dead, from a ceiling joist in his house. Almost immediately, his parents, Miss Esther and Sonny-Boy; his widow, Isamina; and assorted others begin to suspect foul play. Set on a small island in the Caribbean, the book moves from voice to voice as Gladstone's childhood friends, neighbors, ex-girlfriends, widow, daughter, and co-workers all ruminate upon the mark he left on their lives. Gladstone himself narrates bits of the novel, via journal excerpts and poems in which he writes eloquently about his failures as a husband and his disillusionment with government corruption. In the end, one character notes, "Trying to discover who a person is is like trodding down all kinds of dead ends in a maze." Kamau writes in a lilting, unaffected style with real compassion for his characters. This is a haunting, powerful, beautiful story; highly recommended for public and academic libraries.ALisa S. Nussbaum, Euclid P.L., OH
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Coffee House Press; 1st edition (September 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 156689087X
• ISBN-13: 978-1566890878
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,781,846 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars the next Carlos Fuentes?, March 26, 2000

By 

Jeff Lodge (Richmond, Virginia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Pictures of a Dying Man: A Novel (Hardcover)

It's tempting to think of PICTURES OF A DYING MAN, the latest novel by Agymah Kamau, as maybe THE DEATH OF ARTEMIO CRUZ for his fictional Caribbean island nation, as a way to learn of a country's history through a study of the life of one of its prominent citizens. To do so seems, on the surface, to relegate to PICTURES a lesser status. The Mexico of Carlos Fuentes certainly has a larger, more diverse population and a more varied and, if not longer, at least more documented history than does Kamau's island nation. But in ways, sometimes less can be more, or if not more, still plenty.

Such is the case here. In the opening pages, we learn that Gladstone Augustus "Gabby" Belle, former deputy prime minister of the newly liberated island, former minister of education, minister of tourism and culture, minister of labor, "envoy to this and ambassador of that," member of parliament, and former boyhood friend of the narrator, has apparently hanged himself. What follows is a mix of narration (in the narrator's own voice as well as in the voices of the many who knew Belle), of transcripts of radio announcements, and of Belle's chilling diary entries and image-filled poetry. It is as if Kamau is holding a prism up to the light and turning it slowly, revealing facet after surprising facet both of Belle's life and of the young nation's history.

And it all makes for interesting reading in what it reveals of the post-colonial era in the Caribbean, and in the world, for that matter. But in the months leading up to the apparent suicide, the narrator, a village schoolteacher, has been having an affair with Isamina, Belle's wife. Belle himself has been having his own affairs, first with a servant and then with a co-worker, and has been accused of raping his own illegitimate daughter. Finally, although Belle resigned his government position months before his apparent suicide, in his political life he was connected with "political gangsters," and talk is that he may have become another of their victims. So PICTURES OF A DYING MAN works on one level as a simple, or rather a complex, study of a culture, but moves to a much more satisfying though disturbing meditation on the human condition, a poignant study of the nature of identity, of estrangement from family and friends, from one's roots, from one's youth. And throughout, it's told from the perspective of a man haunted by guilt and remorse-not to mention Belle's "duppy," a kind of ghost-of a man trying to find the meaning in his own life even as he searches for the meaning in Belle's.

Belle, finally, is portrayed as a man built of contradictions-a politician of the people who may have been responsible for killing some of them; a man who as an adult lived the life of the affluent on the island, but who as a youth had lived the life of the homeless in New York City; an introverted, "mannerly little boy" who seemed easygoing enough but who would lace the tail of his kite with razor blades so that his would fly the highest, slicing to pieces any that threatened to come near it. Kamau thus constructs a complex and worthy follow-up to FLICKERING SHADOWS, his critically acclaimed first novel. We should all eagerly await future work by this remarkable new voice in American literature.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Very intriguing and a must read book!, December 22, 1999

By 

Gregory P Jourdan -The Tender Warriors Book Club (Suisun, California) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Pictures of a Dying Man: A Novel (Hardcover)

I thought the book was filled with insightful looks at the way people perceive others, yet often are misguided by their perceptions. It seems that depending upon individual circumstances human beings can run the gamut of emotions and be attentive or uncaring and uncompromising. The narrative style was very interesting. Mr. Kamau's humor and style of communicating feelings of faith, love, optimism, and enthusiasm leads to an enthralling read. The Tender Warriors Book Club rates Pictures of a Dying Man a must read.