A Harlot's Progress
A Adult Fiction, Historical book. David Dabydeen is a Guyanese novelist who is not as well known as...
A HARLOT'S PROGRESS reinvents William Hogarth's famous painting of 1732 which tells the story of a whore, a Jewish merchant, a magistrate and a quack doctor bound together by sexual and financial greed. Dabydeen's novel endows Hogarth's characters with alternative potential lives, redeeming them for their cliched status as predators or victims. The protagonist - in Hogarth, a black slave boy, in Dabydeen, London's oldest black inhabitant - is forced to tell his story to the Abolitionists in return for their charity. He refuses however to supply parade of grievances, and to give a simplistic account of beatings, sexual abuses, etc. He will not embark upon yet another fictional journey into the dark nature of slavery for the voyeuristic delight of the English reader. Instead, the old man ties the reader up in knots as deftly as a harlot her client: he spins...
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- Filetype: PDF
- Pages: 288 pages
- ISBN: 9780099288725 / 99288729
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More About A Harlot's Progress
David Dabydeen is a Guyanese novelist who is not as well known as he should be. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (the second West Indian writer to be a member; the first being V S Naipaul) and has won numerous awards for his poetry and novels. He is currently the Guyanese ambassador to China. This novel takes its starting... Dabydeen is a beautiful writer but this book made me want to retch every other page. I don't mind hard to read material, but the outright disgusting portions of this story seemed repetitive, excessive and, in many places unnecessary. Plus, I wish he would have just gotten to the point instead of telling the stories of all these secondary... This novel is certainly not an easy read and it is not a pleasure read but that is exactly the point. In many ways, this is a novel about different forms of storytelling, and Dabydeen plays with the genre of the traditional slave narrative (for example Equianos autobiography) as well as with techniques of intermediality when he uses...
