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Loading... The innocent voyage (original 1929; edition 1944)| Recently added by | TempleCat, smlyniec, MeganCumberwire, jimbo435, private library, Korrick, zisnaf, annedp, Bumwizard79, x_hoxha | | Legacy Libraries | Terence Kemp McKenna, Leonard and Virginia Woolf, William Gaddis, Edward Estlin Cummings , George Orwell, C. S. Lewis, Lawrence Durrell, Carl Sandburg, T. E. Lawrence, Eeva-Liisa Manner — 4 more, Flannery O'Connor, Marilyn Monroe, Walker Percy, Ernest Hemingway |
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Information from the Norwegian Common Knowledge. Edit to localize it to the English one. | |
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One of the fruits of Emancipation in the West Indian islands is the number of ruins, either attached to the houses that remain or within a stone's throw of them: ruined slaves' quarters, ruined sugar-grinding houses, ruined boiling houses; often ruined mansions that were too expensive to maintain.  | |
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In another room, Emily with the other new girls was making friends with the older pupils. Looking at that gentle, happy throng of clean innocent faces and soft graceful limbs, listening to the ceaseless, artless babble of chatter rising, perhaps God could have picked out from among them which was Emily; but I am sure that I could not. (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.) | |
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Originally published in the US as The Innocent Voyage | |
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▾References References to this work on external resources.  Wikipedia in English
None ▾LibraryThing members' description ▾Book descriptions Amazon.com Amazon.com Review (ISBN 0940322153, Paperback)
A High Wind in Jamaica is not so much a book as a curious object, like a piece of driftwood torqued into an alarming shape from years at sea. And like driftwood, it seems not to have been made, exactly, but simply to have come into being, so perfectly is its form married to its content. The five Bas-Thornton children must leave their parents in Jamaica after a terrible hurricane blows down their family home. Accompanied by their Creole friends, the Fernandez children, they board a ship that is almost immediately set upon by pirates. The children take to corsair life coolly and matter-of-factly; just as coolly do they commit horrible deeds, and have horrible deeds visited upon them. First published in 1929, A High Wind in Jamaica has been compared to Lord of the Flies in its unflinching portrayal of innocence corrupted, but Richard Hughes is the supreme ironist William Golding never was. He possesses the ability to be one moment thoroughly inside a character's head, and the next outside of it altogether, hilariously commenting. Irony finds a happy home indeed in the book's mixture of the macabre and the adorable. The baby girl, Rachel, "could even sum up maternal feelings for a marline-spike, and would sit up aloft rocking it in her arms and crooning. The sailors avoided walking underneath: for such an infant, if dropped from a height, will find its way through the thickest skull (an accident which sometimes befalls unpopular captains)." In that "such an infant" lies a world of mordant wit. In fact, throughout, Hughes's wildly eccentric punctuation and startling syntax make just the right verbal vehicle for this dark-hearted pirate story for grownups. Hughes enjoys some coy riffing on the child mind, as with this description of the way Emily handles an uncomfortable social situation: "Much the best way of escaping from an embarrassing rencontre, when to walk away would be an impossible strain on the nerves, is to retire in a series of somersaults. Emily immediately started turning head over heels up the deck." Even so, Hughes never sentimentalizes his subject: "Babies of course are not human--they are animals, and have a very ancient and ramified culture, as cats have, and fishes, and even snakes." Children, as a race, are given rough treatment: "their minds are not just more ignorant and stupider than ours, but differ in kind of thinking (are mad, in fact)." That madness is here isolated, prodded, and poked to chilling effect. But Hughes never loses sight of his ultimate objective: A High Wind in Jamaica is, above all, a cracking good yarn. --Claire Dederer (retrieved from Amazon Thu, 03 Jan 2013 07:19:06 -0500) (see all 3 descriptions) ▾Library descriptions Presents the story of children sent to England after a hurricane destroys their parents' Jamaican estate; after a pirate attack, the children are accidentally placed on a pirate vessel, and they adjust to life on the pirate ship. (summary from another edition) » see all 2 descriptions |
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