DUNFORDS TRAVELS EVERYWHERES

by William Melvin Kelley ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 4, 1970

Readers of Mr. Kelley's earlier novels will recognize his concern with black experience--the quality of estrangement and the substance of that unique legacy--and they will remember, too, the Dunfords and the Bedlows, a relatively well-to-do family and a poor one, who figured so prominently in Dancers on the Shore (1964). This time the exploration turns inward, into the minds of Chig Dunford and Carlyle Bedlow. Chig has become a successful academic, funded to study 19th century literature in Europe, Carlyle a Harlem hustler; but though they seem to have little common ground, their deepening fantasies converge in the richly snarled dream narratives that bridge their separate stories. The stuff of these dreams is their shared subconscious heritage; the medium, however, is an invented idiom of Joycean near-homonyms whose black accent and oral tone are unmistakable, but which is exhaustingly difficult to read--despite the Fact that it holds the key to the rest of the work. This apparent stubbornness arises from the author's realization that the English language has itself been a factor in black disinheritance, to which an epigraph from Joyce applies: "". . . His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. . . . My soul frets in the shadow of his language."" Patient readers will find this inventive, sophisticated, and serious; others will not read enough to form an impression.

Pub Date: Sept. 4, 1970

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1970

Categories: FICTION