Soul Clap Hands and Sing (Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: Paule Marshall
- First Published: 1961
- Type of Work: Four novellas
- Genres: Short fiction, Novella
- Subjects: African Americans, Caribbean, Jews or Jewish life, Islands, Brazil or Brazilians, Identity, Loneliness, South America or South Americans, Middle age, Old age or elderly people, Mortality
- Locales: Brooklyn, NY, Brazil, Barbados, British Guiana
The title and thematic center of Soul Clap Hands and Sing are taken from William Butler Yeats's poem “Sailing to Byzantium”: “An aged man is but a paltry thing,/ A tattered coat upon a stick, unless/ Soul clap its hands and sing.” The male protagonists of these novellas are not singing. Each is middle-aged or older and has lived a life essentially empty of commitment; each reaches out tentatively and too late to another person.
In this collection, Marshall moves the setting beyond the United States to the islands of the Caribbean Sea and South America,...
[The entire page is 735 words long]
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