- Paperback: 176 pages
- Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd; 1st edition (4 Oct 2001)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0141005440
- ISBN-13: 978-0141005447
- Product Dimensions: 19.6 x 12.6 x 1.4 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 2,023,507 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Continent
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Product Description
Review
'A remarkable first novel, which announces a most promising new fabulist in English fiction' John Fowles
Product Description
This novel explores the tribes and communities, conflicts and superstitions, flora and fauna of a wholly spellbinding place: an imaginary seventh continent. In these seven tales Jim Crace travels a strange and wonderful landscape, as fabulous as it is eerily familiar.
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First Sentence
Consider your inheritances, fellow students. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
Consider your inheritances, fellow students. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
Stories from an unknown continent - but it might as well be Africa, or Borneo, or Brazil, or anywhere hot and humid with wilder reaches, largely unknown to the West. The conceit of this book is that the places in the stories, exist in a new continent and the world it purports to describe is meant to be `not ours'. Yet it so clearly is.
The momentary puzzlement is chiefly in why there is a need to invent a new continent, when we quickly grasp that these are old stories. They describe tribes discovered, peculiarities of tradition and ritual; they describe a calligraphic art desecrated by greedy politicians; they describe a young man travelling to America and back to his father's farm in the distant hills, replete with contempt for the old superstitions by which his people live. The stories, in fact, parallel the stories of colonialism, corruption and patronisation with which we, here in this world, are all too familiar.
I am hugely admiring of Jim Crace for his refusal to be bound by literary realism's conventions. I loved Quarantine, Six, The Gift of Stones, Being Dead, The Devil's Larder, and most of all The Pesthouse and Signals of Distress, for me his two masterpieces.
Continent is beautifully written, since Crace cannot write a bad sentence, but this is an early book and much that came after it is superior in story-telling. Any of the novels listed above have in abundance Crace's true gift of compelling literary genius. This one, for me, is only slightly marred by the conceit of its setting.
The momentary puzzlement is chiefly in why there is a need to invent a new continent, when we quickly grasp that these are old stories. They describe tribes discovered, peculiarities of tradition and ritual; they describe a calligraphic art desecrated by greedy politicians; they describe a young man travelling to America and back to his father's farm in the distant hills, replete with contempt for the old superstitions by which his people live. The stories, in fact, parallel the stories of colonialism, corruption and patronisation with which we, here in this world, are all too familiar.
I am hugely admiring of Jim Crace for his refusal to be bound by literary realism's conventions. I loved Quarantine, Six, The Gift of Stones, Being Dead, The Devil's Larder, and most of all The Pesthouse and Signals of Distress, for me his two masterpieces.
Continent is beautifully written, since Crace cannot write a bad sentence, but this is an early book and much that came after it is superior in story-telling. Any of the novels listed above have in abundance Crace's true gift of compelling literary genius. This one, for me, is only slightly marred by the conceit of its setting.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This book is made up of many smaller stories, of which create powerful images of a new imaginary continent. The vies are related to the third world, and give the natural paradise of this new fantastic place. From what I have read of his previous work, this is a new experiment, and has payed off, because it is one of his best. A must have!!
Format:Paperback
An American friend put me on to this English writer and I first read, and loved, Arcadia.
Continent, his debut, is different. I don't think it's a novel, for a start. It reads like seven short stories. And I don't see why he had to invent a seventh continent as backdrop. I've never been to Africa or South America but have read enough from both to visualise them as the settings for this book.
So, that apart, it is of course a good read and two of the pieces stand out - On Heat in the middle, with a very fine twist, and Electricity as a good example of prefiguring a final scene. A sense of menace suffuses all the stories; perhaps this disturbance casts the reader into an unknown world, an unknown continent.
Continent, his debut, is different. I don't think it's a novel, for a start. It reads like seven short stories. And I don't see why he had to invent a seventh continent as backdrop. I've never been to Africa or South America but have read enough from both to visualise them as the settings for this book.
So, that apart, it is of course a good read and two of the pieces stand out - On Heat in the middle, with a very fine twist, and Electricity as a good example of prefiguring a final scene. A sense of menace suffuses all the stories; perhaps this disturbance casts the reader into an unknown world, an unknown continent.
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