Prismns

Peepal Tree Press has announced its publication of a new novel by Garth St. Omer (written several years ago). Titled: Prismns.

“Eugene Coard is woken one morning by a phone call to report the murder of a former St Lucian friend. It throws him back to memories of their island days, and his complicated love life in London that made necessary his relocation to the USA. Thoughts about his friend’s metamorphosis from middle-class “CB” to criminal, ghetto-dwelling “Red” provoke Eugene to review his own so far profitable transformations. But just how much of Eugene’s story can we believe? His confessions reveal him as probably the most unreliable and devious narrator in Caribbean fiction; has he, as a writer and psychiatrist, been exploiting the confusions of race in the USA to his own advantage?

With nods to Ellison’s Invisible Man and a witty inversion of Saul Bellow’s Sammler’s Planet , Prismns is a dark comedy about the masks people wear in a racially divided society that anticipates the metafictions of a writer such as Percival Everett. In the shape-shifting figure of Eugene Coard, Garth St Omer has created a character whose admissions will bring the reader shocked and horrified delight. Prismns was written in the 1980s but perhaps because it was so ahead of its time, not published until now.

Garth St Omer was born in St Lucia in 1931. He is the author of four previous novels and a novella, mainly set in St Lucia and published between 1964-1972. Until his retirement as Emeritus Professor, he taught for many years at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Garth St Omer was born in Castries, St Lucia in 1931. During the earlier 1950s St Omer was part of a group of artists in St Lucia including Roderick and Derek Walcott and the artist Dunstan St Omer.” – Peepal Tree Press blurb.

Thanks to John Robert Lee, author of Discovering Caribbean Literature in English: a Select Bibliography, one of the more popular features on this site, for sharing this.