 | |
| Author | Austin Clarke |
|---|---|
| Country | Canada |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Thomas Allen Publishers |
Publication date | 2002 |
| ISBN | 0-88762-110-4 |
The Polished Hoe is a novel by Barbadian writer Austin Clarke, published by Thomas Allen Publishers in 2002. It was the winner of the 2002 Scotiabank Giller Prize and the 2003 Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Canada and the Caribbean region and 2003 Trillium Book Award.
The novel is a narrative by Mary-Mathilda (Miss Mary Gertrude Matilda Paul) of her confession of a crime. The events takes place in about twenty-four hours of span starting on a night in the 1950s post World War II era. She is a respected woman of the island of Barbados, popularly called "Bimshire." She goes to the police and encounters her old friend Percy, a police sergeant with whom she shares unrequited feelings. Mary-Mathilda confesses to murdering Mr. Belfeels, the owner of a sugar plantation, a rich man known for his arrogance towards the workers under him. Mary-Mathilda had been working as a field labourer, kitchen help and then as a maid and for many years has also been Belfeels' mistress. She has a son Wilberforce with Belfeels who becomes a doctor after being funded by his father. Her son returns to the island after his studies abroad. Belfeels lives with his wife and two daughters and keeps Mary-Mathilda in a house on the outskirts of plantation away from the town. Belfeels objectifies her and treats her ruthlessly on various occasions. On their first encounter, while she was quite young, he undresses her using a riding crop while her mother turns a blind eye. Due to this she develops a nausea of leather's smell. She also discovers a dark secret kept by her mother that she herself is Belfeels' daughter which shatters her and provokes her to eventually murder Belfeels.
The book is Clarke's tenth novel. [1] He had also published five short story collections before this book. [2] Clarke mentioned in an interview that he listened "very attentively" to American jazz trumpeter, bandleader, and composer Miles Davis while writing some of the sections of the novel. [3] : 135 Clarke structured the novel in the form of short stories. [4] The novel was published by Thomas Allen Publishers in November 2002. [5]
Clarke mentioned that he was inspired by British poet and writer Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales , a collection of twenty-four stories that runs to over 17,000 lines written in Middle English and its "non-traditional" usage. [6] He also noted that "[his] main concern was to find a language, or to more strictly use the language [he] already knew, in such a way that it become, in [his] manipulation of it, a new language." [6] Clarke said that he intended to "creolize Oxford English". [6]
One of the narratives of the novel is based on a real life incident in Clarke's life, which he describes as "first confrontations with racism". Clarke experienced racism while travelling from Barbados to Little England, Canada with the Trans-Canada Air Lines in September 1955. He narrated the incident as the journey told by Mary-Mathilda, the leading character of the novel, who is travelling from Miami to Buffalo. The novel was later translated into Dutch by publishing house, De Geus. [6]
In 2005, when Clarke read De Inventione , an Italian handbook by Marcus Tullius Cicero, he noted that if he had known about it while writing the novel, "[he] might very well have drawn the characters of Mary-Mathilda; her son, Wilberforce; Sergeant; and the Constable; to say nothing of Mr. Bellfeels; in sharper poignancy and focus". [6] In the handbook, Cicero mentions that "We hold the following to be the attributes of persons: name, nature, manner of life, fortune, habit, interests, purposes, achievements, accidents, conversation." [6]
In September 2022, Dundurn Press released a twentieth anniversary edition of the novel with a foreword by Rinaldo Walcott.
The novel won the 2002 Scotiabank Giller Prize adjudged by Barbara Gowdy, Thomas King, and W. H. New while being shortlisted along with Mount Appetite (by Bill Gaston), The Navigator of New York (by Wayne Johnston), Open (by Lisa Moore), and Unless (by Carol Shields). [7] It also won the 2003 Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Canada and the Caribbean region and 2003 Trillium Book Award. [8] [9]
Upon publication, the novel received mostly favourable reviews with some criticism. [10] [11] [12] [13] Kirkus Reviews appreciated the novel as "a memorable landscape of oppression but a problematic central figure". [14] While Ihsan Taylor of The New York Times noted that "There's a mesmerizing stillness to Austin Clarke's latest novel", [15] British writer Maya Jaggi mentions in her The Guardian review that the "[novel]'s meandering orality, its slow-burning power, succeed movingly in asserting memory over the silent gaps in recorded history." [1] Another British novelist Naeem Murr criticised Clarke for losing confidence in his characters and for forcing them deliver sociological truths but appreciates the "brilliantly written dialogue". [16] Craig Taylor in his Quill & Quire review called the novel as "a wonderful book to meander" and mentioned that "it adheres to the slow pace of the life it describes and allows characters room to become memorable." [5] Jeffrey Brown of PBS noted in an interview with Clarke: "There is a mix in your book of a kind of... I would call it almost a high poetic language, a very formal language, and then a dialect, the way they would talk to each other." [4]
The Time in Between is a novel by Canadian author David Bergen. It deals with a man, who mysteriously returns to Vietnam, where he had been a soldier earlier in his life, followed by his children, who also go to Vietnam to search for him. The novel was the recipient of the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award in 2005.
Austin Ardinel Chesterfield "Tom" Clarke,, was a Barbadian novelist, essayist, and short story writer who was based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Among his notable books are novels such as The Polished Hoe (2002), memoirs including Membering (2015), and two collections of poetry, Where the Sun Shines Best (2013) and In Your Crib (2015).
Lynn Coady is a Canadian novelist and journalist.
Anne Michaels is a Canadian poet and novelist whose work has been translated and published in over 45 countries. Her books have garnered dozens of international awards including the Orange Prize, the Guardian Fiction Prize, the Lannan Award for Fiction and the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for the Americas. She is the recipient of honorary degrees, the Guggenheim Fellowship and many other honours. She has been shortlisted for the Governor General's Award, the Griffin Poetry Prize, twice shortlisted for the Giller Prize and twice long-listed for the International Dublin Literary Award. Michaels won a 2019 Vine Award for Infinite Gradation, her first volume of non-fiction. Michaels was the poet laureate of Toronto, Ontario, Canada from 2016 to 2019, and she is perhaps best known for her novel Fugitive Pieces which was adapted for the screen in 2007.
Events from the year 2002 in Canada.
Miriam Toews is a Canadian writer and author of nine books, including A Complicated Kindness (2004), All My Puny Sorrows (2014), and Women Talking (2018). She has won a number of literary prizes including the Governor General's Award for Fiction and the Writers' Trust Engel/Findley Award for her body of work. Toews is also a three-time finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and a two-time winner of the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize.
André Alexis is a Canadian writer who grew up in Ottawa and lives in Toronto, Ontario. He has received numerous prizes including the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize.
Eden Victoria Lena Robinson is an Indigenous Canadian author. She is a member of the Haisla and Heiltsuk First Nations.
Michael Redhill is an American-born Canadian poet, playwright and novelist. He also writes under the pseudonym Inger Ash Wolfe.
Emma Donoghue is an Irish-Canadian playwright, literary historian, novelist, and screenwriter. Her 2010 novel Room was a finalist for the Booker Prize and an international best-seller. Donoghue's 1995 novel Hood won the Stonewall Book Award and Slammerkin (2000) won the Ferro-Grumley Award for Lesbian Fiction. She is a 2011 recipient of the Alex Awards. Room was adapted by Donoghue into a film of the same name. For this, she was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.
Rachel Cusk is a British novelist and writer.
The In-Between World of Vikram Lall is a novel by M. G. Vassanji, published in 2003 by Doubleday Canada. The novel won the Scotiabank Giller Prize that year and narrates a story of Vikram Lall in the colonial and post-colonial Kenya. The title for the novel also inspired the title for Elizabeth Nunez's novel Anna In-Between, published in 2009.
A Good House is the first novel by Canadian writer Bonnie Burnard, published by Picador in 1999 and later by Henry Holt and Company in United States of America. It was the winner of that year's Scotiabank Giller Prize. The novel narrates the story of a family in three generations, five houses starting from 1949 until 1997.
Clara Callan is a novel by Canadian writer Richard B. Wright, published in 2001. It is the story of a woman in her thirties living in Ontario during the 1930s and is written in epistolary form, utilizing letters and journal entries to tell the story. The protagonist, Clara, faces the struggles of being a single woman in a rural community in the early 20th century. The novel won the Governor General's Award in English fiction category, the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and the Trillium Book Award.
Souvankham Thammavongsa is a Laotian Canadian poet and short story writer. In 2019, she won an O. Henry Award for her short story, "Slingshot", which was published in Harper's Magazine, and in 2020 her short story collection How to Pronounce Knife won the Giller Prize.
Us Conductors is a debut novel by Canadian writer Sean Michaels. Published in 2014 by Random House in Canada and Tin House in the United States, the novel is a fictionalized account of the relationship between Léon Theremin, the inventor of the theremin, and Clara Rockmore, the musician regarded as the instrument's first virtuoso player.
Maya Jaggi is a British writer, literary critic, editor and cultural journalist. In the words of the Open University, from which Jaggi received an honorary doctorate in 2012, she "has had a transformative influence in the last 25 years in extending the map of international writing today". Jaggi has been a contributor to a wide range of publications including The Guardian, Financial Times, The Independent, The Literary Review, The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Review of Books, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, New Statesman, Wasafiri, Index on Censorship, and Newsweek, and is particularly known for her profiles of writers, artists, film-makers, musicians and others. She is also a broadcaster and presenter on radio and television. Jaggi is the niece of actor and food writer Madhur Jaffrey.
Zalika Reid-Benta is a Canadian writer, whose debut short story collection Frying Plantain has been nominated and won numerous awards. The book is a collection of linked short stories centering on the coming of age of Kara Davis, a young Jamaican-Canadian girl growing up in the Eglinton West neighbourhood of Toronto, Ontario.
The following is a list of winners and nominees in English-language categories for the Trillium Book Award, a Canadian literary award presented by Ontario Creates to honour books published by writers resident in the province of Ontario. Separate awards have been presented for French-language literature since 1994; for the winners and nominees in French-language categories, see Trillium Book Award, French.
The following is a list of winners and nominees in French-language categories for the Trillium Book Award, a Canadian literary award presented by Ontario Creates to honour books published by writers resident in the province of Ontario. Separate awards have been presented for English-language literature since 1994; for the winners and nominees in English-language categories, see Trillium Book Award, English.
{{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)