Amazon.com Review
It's 1981 and Jean Landing is about to flee her disintegrating homeland, Jamaica, but first, she must bury her sister. Lana, a pop singer in the early days of Reggae, has immolated herself in a moment of madness and must be buried immediately "because, as someone explains to Jean, burned bodies decompose quickly." The funeral takes place in the morning; that afternoon, Jean is on her way across the mountains to a rendezvous with a private plane that will take her to the States. Accompanied by her childhood friend, Paul, she drives across her island nation, noting the increasingly violent confrontations between political factions even as she retreats into memories of her own fractured past:
Ghosts stand on the foothills of this journey. She smells their woody ancestral breath in the land's familiar crests and undulations. She has heard them all her life, these obstinate spirits, desperate to speak, to revise the broken grammar of their exits. They speak to her, Jean Landing, born in that audient hour before daylight broke on the nation, born into the knowledge of nation and prenation, the old noises of barracks, slave quarters, and steerage mingling in her ears with the newest sounds of self-rule. On verandas, in kitchens, in the old talk, in her waking reveries and anxious dreams, she has heard their stories.
From her own mother, the light-skinned, "selfish and adamant" Monica, sister Lana, and deceased father, the black nationalist Roy Landing, to her white ancestor Rebecca Crawford, they are all here, sometimes in Jean's memory, other times telling their stories in their own voices. It's a complicated weave of story lines and voices, but Margaret Cezair-Thompson carries it off with aplomb.
The True History of Paradise explores both the political and the personal as Jean's childhood remembrances play out against the war-torn landscape of Jamaica. Near the end of the novel Jean reflects, "To leave one's country. It is not a complete sentence, a complete anything. Its infinitive possibilities leap from loss to promise and back again from promise to loss." This promising first novel makes those leaps with nary a stumble.
--Margaret Prior
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
Political unrest and violence in early 1980s Jamaica serve as the backdrop for a young woman's struggle to come to terms with her past and her country's history in Cezair-Thompson's strong debut novel. Jean Landing's island ancestry goes back to the late 17th century, and although in many ways she feels inextricably bound to Jamaica, the political turmoil makes her question whether she can continue to live in her native land. A series of profoundly unsettling eventsAshe is knifed by thugs, sees a bystander shot by a soldier during a minor traffic accident, tearfully keeps vigil over her best friend Faye's hospital bed after Faye is raped and assaultedAseems portentous. But her talented sister Lana's tragic death is the catalyst to Jean's angst-ridden decision to leave her homeland and seek shelter with her stateside lover, a married man. Paul, her longtime neighbor, confidante and dear friend, drives her across the island to meet her departing flight. During the journey, they reflect on Lana, whose manic depressive illness contributed to her fiery death. Vignettes in the many voices of Jean's ancestors (Scottish, Chinese, Indian, Creole and African) punctuate the text, their eccentricities lending credence to the probably hereditary effects of mental instability and granting perspective to Jean's weighty decision. It falls to those voices to liven up the narrative when her sometimes overly earnest self-reflections begin to stall the momentum of the cross-island journey. Born in Jamaica, Thompson's use of island patois is robust and authentic. She manages to depict with vivid immediacy Jamaica's terrors and seductions, portraying a society in which poverty is endemic, and a sense of menace exists in a setting of paradisal beauty. Agent, Susan Bergholz. (Aug.) FYI: Cezair-Thompson's first screenplay, Photo Finish, was sold to Oprah Winfrey's Harpo Productions.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
