It is about politics (“West Indian self-government”), cricket and I. So what is James playing at?īeyond a Boundary is a book about those things that James was trying to put aside so that he could concentrate on literature. It is a superb piece of scholarship and eminently readable. His “magnum opus” was 1938’s The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, a history of the world’s only successful slave revolt, which liberated Haiti. James’s first novel, Minty Alley, published in 1936, was in fact his last novel – or at least his last book that most people would recognise as such. Contrary to accepted experience, the real magnum opus was to be my second novel.” “Then,” as he writes thirty years later in Beyond A Boundary, “I would be free to get down to my own business. C.L.R James came to England from his native Trinidad in 1932 with two books to write: The Case for West Indian Self-Government and, as ghost-writer, Cricket and I, the autobiography of the cricketer who later became the Britain’s first black peer, Learie Constantine.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |