Roydon Salick’s Mayaro Gold: The Fiction of Michael Anthony was printed this month by Ian Randle Publishers. It is without doubt one of the books introduced this yr on the Bocas Lit Fest, happening from April 28 to 30, in Port of Spain, Trinidad.
Ken Ramchand describes the guide as an “introductory examine [that] understands properly sufficient the mixed drive of the fictions and the social, cultural, and historic works wherein Anthony builds a singular historical past of Trinidadian cultures and historic moments. It invitations new readers to take a critical take a look at Michael Anthony as an educator who makes it thrilling to search out out who we’re.”
Description: The absence of a full-length examine of the fiction of Michael Anthony is a lamentable hole in West Indian Literary criticism. Roydon Salick units out to right this lacuna in a balanced examine of 15 of Anthony’s works of fiction, wherein he assesses the strengths and weaknesses of this author of tales, brief tales, and novels.
The creator makes a convincing case for Anthony as an necessary populist author whose works are written with the typical reader in thoughts by way of easy plots, a lucid fashion, and uncomplicated narrative strategies. For Salick, Anthony’s actual energy as a author lies, not in his means to trend absorbing plots however in his means to depict memorable characters and create a way of place. He might not have produced something as nice as A Home for Mr Biswas or as trend-setting as A Brighter Solar, however any author whose work so memorably places the city of San Fernando or the village of Mayaro on the literary map, so efficiently marries island historical past and fiction, so tellingly depicts so many sides of Trinidadian tradition and so movingly explores the world of adolescence, is one who should be taken significantly, pedestalled and cherished.
Roydon Salick has printed articles on William Wordsworth, Mervyn Morris, Lionel Hutchinson, Sonny Ladoo, and different West Indian writers. He has edited The Poems of Sam Selvon (2012) and is the creator of The Novels of Samuel Selvon (2001), Samuel Selvon (2013), and Ismith Khan: The Man and His Works (2012).