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Title: Mr. Potter
Author: Jamaica Kincaid
Narrator: Robin Miles
Format: Unabridged
Length: 5 hrs and 28 mins
Language: English
Release date: 01-17-17
Publisher: Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Ratings: 4.5 of 5 out of 2 votes
Genres: Fiction, Contemporary
Publisher's Summary:
A great writer's lush, panoramic novel: the story of an ordinary man, his century, and his home.
Jamaica Kincaid's first obsession, the island of Antigua, comes vibrantly to life under the gaze of Mr. Potter, an illiterate taxi chauffeur who makes his living along the wide, open roads that pass the only towns he has ever seen and the graveyard where he will be buried. The sun shines squarely overhead, the ocean lies on every side, and suppressed passion fills the air.
Misery infects the unstudied, slow pace of this island and of Mr. Potter's days. As the narrative unfolds in linked vignettes, his story becomes the story of a vital, crippled community. Kincaid strings together a moving picture of Mr. Potter's ancestors - beginning with memories of his father, a poor fisherman, and his mother, who committed suicide - and the outside world that presses in on his life, in the form of his Lebanese employer and, later, a couple fleeing World War II. Within these surroundings, Mr. Potter struggles to live at ease: to purchase a car, to have girlfriends, to shake off the encumbrance of his daughters - one of whom will return to Antigua after he dies and tell his story with equal measures of distance and sympathy.
In Mr. Potter, her most luminous, ambitious work to date, Kincaid breathes life into a figure unlike any in contemporary fiction, an individual consciousness emerging gloriously out of an unexamined life.
Critic Reviews:
"Fifteen years after it appeared in print, this fictionalized account - and accounting - of the novelist's father and her childhood viewpoint of him finds a vehicle in Robin Miles's exquisite narration.... Employing a range of emotional tones in a consistent and accurate Caribbean accent, Miles turns Mr. Potter from problematic to human, albeit flawed." (
AudioFile)
Members Reviews:
Nice Insight into Antiguan Life
In "Mr. Potter", Jamaica Kincaid examines the life of the subaltern through an allegory of her narrator's father. Mr. Potter, who can neither read nor write, represents different things to the different people in his life, either his employer, his daughter, or others on the island of Antigua. Mr. Potter's experiences reflect the legacy of colonialism while allowing him to exist as an individual. Kincaid's writing uses repetition and stream-of-consciousness to convey her ideas to her readers.
Great book!
Jamaica Kincaid's beautiful narrative is something everyone should be aware of. She puts poetry in the voice of the oppressed and makes it a beautiful experience to read about serious, heavy and intriguing themes.
A very tentative rating - Kincaid had me in her hands
Mr. Potter is written in the same style of language circling as her Autobiography of My Mother. When I had read about 20 pages, I had to start over to determine if I had missed a transition in the storyline or if the author had omitted the transition - the latter being the correct answer. In Mr. Potter the circular language almost demands that you read out loud - or at least form the words in your mind - if you are to follow the story. In that sense, I did not enjoy reading this book as I had her earlier works.
However, by the end of the book I had to be in awe of the author. She succeeded in presenting both the despair and the wisdom of being inconsequential.
