The Lonely Londoners
SELVON, Samuel
London: Allan Wingate. 1956.
Description:
First edition. 8vo. 184x120mm. pp. [7], 8-171 [1bl]. Original green cloth with original strikingly illustrated dustjacket. Head and top corners of dustjacket a little chipped and some wear to the jacket. Internally it is a little toned to the edges but overall an excellent copy of this groundbreaking and important book. Rare in commerce, no copies appear in the auction records.
"If I were to point to a writer who captures the tone...and texture of London when the austere '50s were about to give way to the swinging sixties...for acuity of vision, intellectual rigour and sheer beauty...it would have to be the works of Sam Selvon which would figure pre-eminently". For Caryl Phillips, Selvon's significance as a writer lies in his creation of a new linguistic style - that of the spoken language of the West Indian London diaspora. This stretching of literary and linguistic boundaries has led Selvon, a Trinidadian who moved to England in 1950, to be called the "father of black writing" and there is no doubting his central place in the history of English post-colonial literature. Once an outsider in every sense, his place in the canon is now assured.
But, as well as capturing the speech of the Caribbean immigrants who came to Britain after the War, Selvon wrote about how they lived, not so much in terms of formal plot-lines but rather in their daily relationships with each other, with the people into whose world they had come, and with the London itself. The novel "encapsulates the romance and disenchantment of an imagined city that was both magnet and nightmare for its new colonial citizens, a promised land that despite its lure turns out to be an illusion". (Susheila Nasta, introduction to the Penguin Modern Classics edition).
Description:
First edition. 8vo. 184x120mm. pp. [7], 8-171 [1bl]. Original green cloth with original strikingly illustrated dustjacket. Head and top corners of dustjacket a little chipped and some wear to the jacket. Internally it is a little toned to the edges but overall an excellent copy of this groundbreaking and important book. Rare in commerce, no copies appear in the auction records.
"If I were to point to a writer who captures the tone...and texture of London when the austere '50s were about to give way to the swinging sixties...for acuity of vision, intellectual rigour and sheer beauty...it would have to be the works of Sam Selvon which would figure pre-eminently". For Caryl Phillips, Selvon's significance as a writer lies in his creation of a new linguistic style - that of the spoken language of the West Indian London diaspora. This stretching of literary and linguistic boundaries has led Selvon, a Trinidadian who moved to England in 1950, to be called the "father of black writing" and there is no doubting his central place in the history of English post-colonial literature. Once an outsider in every sense, his place in the canon is now assured.
But, as well as capturing the speech of the Caribbean immigrants who came to Britain after the War, Selvon wrote about how they lived, not so much in terms of formal plot-lines but rather in their daily relationships with each other, with the people into whose world they had come, and with the London itself. The novel "encapsulates the romance and disenchantment of an imagined city that was both magnet and nightmare for its new colonial citizens, a promised land that despite its lure turns out to be an illusion". (Susheila Nasta, introduction to the Penguin Modern Classics edition).