A High Wind in Jamaica (New York Review Books Classics)
by Richard Hughes

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Book Reviews of A High Wind in Jamaica (New York Review Books Classics)

Book Review: "Children find amusement even in discomfort..."
Summary: 4 Stars

Summary of A High Wind in Jamaica (New York Review Books Classics)

The swift, almost hallucinatory action of Hughes's novel, together with its provocat ive insight into the psychology of children, made it a bestseller when it was first published in 1929 and have since established it as a classic of twentieth-century li terature--an unequalled exploration of the nature, and limits, of innocence.

One of the Modern Library's 100 Best Novels of the Twentieth Century

Irony finds a happy home indeed in the book's mixture of the macabre and the adorable. The baby girl, Rachel, "could even sum up maternal feelings for a marline-spike, and would sit up aloft rocking it in her arms and crooning. The sailors avoided walking underneath: for such an infant, if dropped from a height, will find its way through the thickest skull (an accident which sometimes befalls unpopular captains)." In that "such an infant" lies a world of mordant wit. In fact, throughout, Hughes's wildly eccentric punctuation and startling syntax make just the right verbal vehicle for this dark-hearted pirate story for grownups.

Hughes enjoys some coy riffing on the child mind, as with this description of the way Emily handles an uncomfortable social situation: "Much the best way of escaping from an embarrassing rencontre, when to walk away would be an impossible strain on the nerves, is to retire in a series of somersaults. Emily immediately started turning head over heels up the deck." Even so, Hughes never sentimentalizes his subject: "Babies of course are not human--they are animals, and have a very ancient and ramified culture, as cats have, and fishes, and even snakes." Children, as a race, are given rough treatment: "their minds are not just more ignorant and stupider than ours, but differ in kind of thinking (are mad, in fact)." That madness is here isolated, prodded, and poked to chilling effect. But Hughes never loses sight of his ultimate objective: A High Wind in Jamaica is, above all, a cracking good yarn. --Claire Dederer

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