While I have been on holiday I have been reading West Indian writers - Jean Rhys, VS Naipaul and Andrea Levy. It wasn't an area that I was particularly familiar with, so I was looking forward to new insights about the world. The Rhys book is set in Dominica, the Naipaul book in Trinidad and the Levy book in Jamaica.
Above: Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys. I was astonished by the power of this book - poetic, subtle, intelligent. Like Barbara Pym, there was a long period when her books were out of print, which seems incredible for writing of this quality.
Above: VS Naipaul has been a great discovery for me - I had never read anything by him before. A House for Mr Biswas is one of the funniest and most engaging novels I have read. 623 pages long, I enjoyed every word and completely sympathised with Mr Biswas and his struggle to overcome the poverty created by a bad start in life.
Above: The Long Song by Andrea Levy was a let-down. I got it from the library as a talking book, and listened to it for an hour every morning. Although I eventually finished it, the work is not good - so disjointed it seems to be several sketchy books crammed into one. The main problem is that the characters do not behave coherently or have an internal logic that is convincing. Andrea Levy also seems to have crammed lots of extraneous information into the book that is not really integral to the story. For instance a huge amount of "filler" about the printing industry (it is as if the author was determined to use up all her notes whether they were relevant or not). The book tries to be a tragedy and a comedy simultaneously without succeeding (a more accomplished author, such as VS Naipaul, might be able to manage this, but Andrea Levy fails).
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