Customer Reviews:
Journey we should all take.......2007-05-21
Although this book is written in a different style than I expected.(The going back and forth between past present and future will get you lost if you're not careful)I believe it was well written and has deeper meaning, Avey Johnson goes on a cruise with friends and realizes that she's not exactly where she needs to be but finds out that she was closer than she thought. We should all take a journey of re self-discovery....remembering never to forget our roots or that we can always go home.
Praisesong for the Widow.......2006-10-19
Avey Johnson - a black, middle-aged, middle-class widow given to hats, gloves, and pearls - has long since put behind her the Harlem of her childhood. Then on a cruise to the Caribbean with two friends, inspired by a troubling dream, she senses her life beginning to unravel - and in a panic, peaks her bag in the middle of the night and abandons her friends at the next port of call. The unexpected and beautiful adventure that follows provides Avey with the links to the culture and history she has so long disavowed.
--- from book's back cover
Odd Style, but Deeper Meanings.......2002-12-12
...The occasionally brilliant wording and the solid characterization make Avey Johnson an engaging protagonist. Her journey from a confused, troubled widow on an expensive cruise to a liberated woman with deeper understanding of her cultural and familial heritage make this book worth reading. This journey is interspersed with recollections of her relationship with her dead husband. This allows the reader to empathize deeply with her plight.
On a Caribbean cruise, Avey Johnson begins to have symptoms of both mental and physical illness. Driven by needs she doesn't understand, she leaves the cruise and finds herself adrift in a tide of Patois-speaking islanders, who are all intent on a cultural pilgrimage to a neighboring island. Her meeting with an island patriarch draws her into the pilgrimage as well. There, she learns that this is the culture she abandoned at the same time she abandoned her working-class roots.
The flashbacks to her life with her husband Jay not only chronicle her life preceding the cruise but also give a greater understanding of Avey as she throws herself headlong into a mysterious journey of self-discovery. The greater familiarity with the character is one of the book's strongest points.
The reason the book only rates four stars is that its symbolism makes it inaccessible when simply read for pleasure. This is not an offense worthy of a whole star, so my actual rating is four and a half stars, or 90%.
The symbolism sprinkled throughout the book does provide constant rewards, though- like Shakespeare, you can never finish gaining new insight through re-reading.
I feel confident in recommending this book to anyone who enjoys character-driven fiction. The symbolism was made apparent to me, as I read the book as part of a writing course. With that in mind, use only as directed.
Enjoyable read.......2001-01-01
Praiseong for the Widow is as its name suggest. You wil enjoy reading the novel about Avery Johnson and her journeay as a widow.
The Burden of Survival.......2000-12-25
"She even thinks that up in heaven / Her class lies late and snores,/ While poor black cherubs rise at seven / To do celestial chores." --"For a Lady I Know" by Countee Cullen
The Harlem Renaissance poet Countee Cullen speaks of a creature of leisure in his short poem, "For a Lady I Know"--the type of person who expects those of an African-American heritage to handle matters of work even unto death. Jerome Johnson, the husband of the staid protagonist of Paule Marshall's _Praisesong for the Widow,_ Avey Johnson, lives the reality of Cullen's words. The industrious Jerome labors beneath an Irish supervisor who allows Jerome to do all the work in the department store they both work in, while the supervisor takes the credit. Jerome expresses his dismay about this in an argument he has with Avey one evening, in which she accuses him of cheating on her in the long hours he spends away from the home. He cries: "Okay, you go take my job at the store then! Go on. Go on down there and see how you like working for some red-faced Irishman who sits on his can all day laughing to himself at the colored boy he's got doing everything" (105)
When Jerome is young, newly married to Avey and living on Halsey Street, he is aware of the pressures of race working at the department store in the shipping room. Not only does he organize the store's floor so that it is efficiently run during its opened hours, he also stays after work late, slaving in the storeroom to ensure that the store will be smoothly operating during the next day. Jerome's supervisor realizes that Jerome runs shipping and receiving, although "[Jerome has] to be careful not to make it appear so" (92). This truth is known throughout the store, even to the salesgirls who secretly admire Jerome's work ethic and charm. The pretenses of the supervisor's work are just a formality, something that is probably meant to soothe the supervisor's ego and to keep Jerome's job in the Caucasian-dominated store safe.
In working as endlessly as he does, allowing another person to take the credit, Jerome is succumbing to the sway of oppression. He is aware of the sacrifices he is making and how they strip pieces of his dignity away from him, even if he does not outwardly acknowledge it often. When he does speak of it, it is in the privacy of his apartment, and only to his wife. He downplays the seriousness of what he is allowing to happen to him in order to survive in a business that favors light-skinned people. He says to Avey, trying to laugh it off: "Two jobs for the salary of one. They really got themselves a good thing in me" (92).
Jerome's attempt to find levity in the bad business practices of his supervisor seems to be his way of coping with what would otherwise fill him with anger and despair. Hints of the passion and rage burning beneath his civilized façade emerge during his lovemaking with Avey, a time when he is able to surrender from the pressures of race that are a force during his working hours and also, when he returns home. During these stolen times with Avey, Jerome alternates between an almost blind need to possess her and a desire to cleanse himself of the sins of the day. During one interlude, he cries to her, like a man stripped of his dignity and bared to the marrow: "Take it from me, Avey! Just take it from me" (129). Marshall likens the emotion of the moment to, "a burden he wanted rid of. Like a leg-iron which slowed him in the course he had set for himself" (129).
The impassioned Jerome speaks beneath the surface of their sexual liaisons and perhaps hints at the shame he feels at having to present himself a certain way for the benefit of his Caucasian coworkers. Jerome neatly grooms his mustache with oil and carefully presses his clothes, trying to affect an air of appeal and trust amongst his coworkers. He secretly takes pride in the fact that they do not regard him the way they do most African-Americans. Many African-Americans refer to this readiness to appease Caucasians as "the Uncle Tom syndrome," which relates to the title character of Harriet Beecher Stowe's _Uncle Tom's Cabin_, first published on March 20, 1852. Certainly Jerome "Jay" Johnson does not do these things for any other reason but survival. Instinctually, he realizes that he must play a certain game to move further at the store.
Later in Marshall's novel, after Jerome has scaled the proverbial ladder of success, he becomes disparaging of the African-Americans who are not as successful as he is. On one of his tirades to Avey, he shouts:
The trouble with half these Negroes out here is that they spend all their time blaming the white man for everything. He won't give `em a job. Won't let `em in his schools. Won't let `em in his neighborhood. Just won't give `em a break. He's the one keeping `em down. When the problem really is most of `em don't want to hear the word `work.' If they'd just cut out all the good-timing and get down to some hard work, put their minds to something, they'd get somewhere (135).
Avey gently reminds him that he was turned away from jobs because of his colour and also overworked so another could take his credit; Jerome is not moved, showing that the strain of the past has taken quite a toll on him. Clearly, he has changed from the young, ambitious man he used to be. Where he once eagerly returned home from work to dance to his favorite records by "Coleman Hawkins, the Count, Lester Young (old Prez himself), The Duke--along with the singers he loved: Mr. B., Lady Day, Lil Green, Ella" (94), he now returns home sans his mustache, proud of his accomplishments in a world that had once denied him. Jerome fails to realize that in discovering success in the Caucasian world by pretending to be something other than himself, he has left a piece of himself behind. The burden of colour is now the mask he wears, a mask that has become his face until even Avey mourns the loss of the man he once was, compared to the man she sees before her in the final years before Jerome Johnson's death.
Written by Jewel Welter
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Writings on Black Women of the Diaspora: History, Language, and Identity (Garland Reference Library of the Humanities)
Lean'tin Bracks
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ASIN: 081532734X |
Book Description
Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Paule Marshall, and Mary Prince represent the best of African American women writers who draw on the tortuous legacy of their people as a source for their art, revealing and defining themselves as they create compelling narratives that illuminate their roots, their heritage, and their unique culture. The themes that suffuse their writing are family, community, strong women, cultural memory, oral history, and slavery. By analyzing the works of these four remarkable writers, the study shows how today's black woman can take control of her destiny by coming to grips with an obscured and distorted past. These original essays articulate the way in which historical awareness, sensitivity to language, and an understanding of stereotypes can empower enduring artistic visions in a world that is largely indifferent to marginal voices.
Customer Reviews:
Paule Marshall Reading Brown Girl Brownstones Praisesong for the Widow.......2007-08-14
Being only excerpts of the literary works, it's only value lies in aesthetic quality. Any other aspects of the item are useless as a reading or learning tool.
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Praisesong for the Widow
Paule Marshall
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Sages Sorcieres?
Kathleen Gyssels
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ASIN: 0761818758 |
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The comparative study, "Sages Sorcieres?", brings together Afro-Caribbean and Afro-American female writing. Gyssels approaches francophone literature and anglophone literature as two separate entities, rather than simply grouping them together as postcolonial literature. By doing so, she opens new dimensions in (traditional) comparative literature studies: until now, geographical and linguistic barriers have torn apart female writing of the Black Diaspora. (Text in French).
Book Description
This digital document is an article from MELUS, published by Thomson Gale on March 22, 2005. The length of the article is 7499 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.
Citation Details
Title: Weaving the web of reintegration: locating Aunt Nancy in Praisesong for the Widow.
Author: Shanna Greene Benjamin
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MELUS (Magazine/Journal)
Date: March 22, 2005
Publisher: Thomson Gale
Volume: 30
Issue: 1
Page: 49(19)
Distributed by Thomson Gale
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Praisesong for the Widow
Manufacturer: Plume
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Customer Reviews:
Great Omnibus.......2002-05-13
Inspector Morse is just one of my most favorite British murder mystery hero! If one is at all interested in Colin Dexter's mysteries, this omnibus (there are several other too) is a great way to get the best stories. One of my favorite being "Silent World of Nicholas Quinn".
Warning! Mistitled.......2000-07-21
Please note: this "first omnibus" is *not* made up of the first three Morse novels. Last Bus to Woodstock was his first book (1975), and these are '77, '79, and '81. Confusing.... (ignore the star rating, please)
Book Description
"[Morse is] the most prickly, conceited, and genuinely brilliant detective since Hercule Poirot."
--The New York Times Book Review
Nicholas Quinn is deaf, so he considers himself lucky to be appointed to the Foreign Examinations Board at Oxford, which designs tests for students of English around the world. But when someone slips cyanide into Nicholas's sherry, Inspector Morse has a multiple-choice murder. Any one of a tight little group of academics could have killed Quinn. Before Morse is done, all their dirty little secrets will be exposed. And a murderer will be cramming for his finals. . . .
"[Dexter] is a magician with character, story construction, and the English language. . . . Colin Dexter and Morse are treasures of the genre."
--Mystery News
"It is a delight to watch this brilliant, quirky man [Morse] deduce."
--Minneapolis Star & Tribune
Customer Reviews:
"My weakness is guesswork. I leap to conclusions, often wrong.".......2006-09-21
Written in 1977, this is the third of the thirteen-novel Inspector Morse series. Here Morse is not so well-developed as he becomes in later novels, when the reader of the series has more background to draw from, but he is still a fascinating character--a single man, a huge fan of crossword puzzles, a beer-lover, and a committed student of classical music, who is also crotchety, impatient with his less educated assistant (Sgt. Lewis), and unwilling to give up on a case until all the pieces fit perfectly.
Here Morse and Sgt. Lewis are called to Oxford to investigate the murder of Nicholas Quinn, a profoundly deaf man who worked on the university's Examinations Board, developing the tests to determine future entrants to the university. Security breaches have occurred and copies of the test may have been sold in the Middle East. No one knows whether Nicholas Quinn was involved, and if not, who was. Most importantly, who killed him, and why?
As Morse investigates the case, the private lives of the various dons and their secretary are revealed, and when Monica, the secretary, is attacked and injured, she arouses Morse's finer feelings (a "rescuing" trait of Morse which continues to develop in later novels with other "damsels in distress"). With none of the players exactly who they seem to be and questions arising as to when, exactly, Nicholas Quinn died, Morse pursues numerous dead ends and actually arrests several innocent people.
Written fully ten years before some of the best of the series, this novel is fun to read as a Morse curiosity, but it is still a well-developed mystery. Morse's character is obviously still evolving--he makes a lot of mistakes which need to be corrected-- and his relationship with Sgt. Lewis is still "in process." The famed red Jaguar has not yet appeared--Morse drives a Lancia here--and his diabetes and his love of scotch whisky are still unknown to the reader. Morse is a man of integrity, however, and he is committed to finding the killer--his character and methods to be fully developed by the author in future novels. n Mary Whipple
Silent World of Nicholas Quinn.......2005-09-22
As usual, Colin Dexter is in fine form with his Inspector Morse.
Keeps You Guessing Until the Very Last!.......2004-09-13
This is a truly wonderful book. It's a classic example of a "who-done-it" with the British twist! It is also a brilliant example of how Morse's wonderful mind works. In it we see Morse in all his glory - brilliant, quirky, and vulnerable! I clearly remember seeing this one done on film, but even as good as that one was, it cannot match the complexity of this book. In the story, Morse is afer the killer of an employee of one of Britain's national examination companies. We see the world of the ivory tower in a completely new light, and Morse is almost out-matched by a brilliant killer. Wonderful stuff and a true mystery classic!
Great characters!!.......2004-02-24
This is one of the great books. This book is a perfect example of what makes Dexter so great, his knack for writing great, realistic and likeable characters! Quinn's a sympathetic character; you just have to relate to him.
The plot is, a bit like usual, but hey, why mess with a working formula? The books are a little cynical at times, but hey, we're not living in the days of Agatha Christie writing anymore, the world is like Dexter describes it, "like as not"
Great read! I consider it one of the better Dexters (along the lines of Service of all the dead and Remorseful day)
This is a gret mystery/criem books since it doesn't have the need to follow a formula, or describe VEREY detail of the Police station and the interriagtions. It's a cross between an avergae detective fiction and a great novel.
The Brilliant Morse Does it Again!.......1999-07-24
A very well-written and enrossing story....Morse keeps us guessing until the very end. I found the characters to be interesting and complex, the dialog entertaining, and the story itself very cleverly written. Colin Dexter is a true genius.
Product Description
Three in one book.. English detective stories
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- Rain Gardens: Bringing Water to Life in the Designed Landscape
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- Running from the Law
- Sarah's Song (The Red Gloves Collection #3)
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- School Rumble, Volume 1
- Selected Stories by O Henry (Classic Books on Cassettes Collection) [UNABRIDGED]
- Showcase Presents: Green Arrow, Vol. 1
- Showcase Presents: Superman, Vol. 1
- Simply Scandalous (The Simply Series, Book 2)
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