Lamming, George (Vol. 144) - Neil ten Kortenaar (essay date April 1991)
Neil ten Kortenaar (essay date April 1991)
SOURCE: “George Lamming's In the Castle of My Skin: Finding Promise in the Land,” in Ariel, Vol. 22, No. 2, April, 1991, pp. 43-53.
[In the following essay, ten Kortenaar discusses his displeasure with In the Castle of My Skin, finding fault with Lamming's wordiness, insufficient character development, and lack of plot cohesiveness.]
Sandra Pouchet Paquet in her authoritative book on the novels of George Lamming analyzes In the Castle of My Skin as a sociological and political study of Barbados. She finds that the narrative reproduces the historical process whereby a feudal mercantilist economy gave way to a capitalist market economy. But in treating the novel as a sociological study, Pouchet Paquet ignores what is distinctive about the book: its ungainly style and its erratic narrative, aspects that longtime students of Caribbean literature no longer see but every...
[The entire page is 4304 words long]
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