Continental Drift (P.S.)
by Russell Banks
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Book Summary Information
Author: Russell BanksEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2007-03-13
ISBN: 0060854944
Number of pages: 410
Publisher: Harper Perennial Modern Classics
Book Reviews of Continental Drift (P.S.)
Book Review: The Loa Narrator
Summary: 5 Stars
In reading Continental Drift, a tragedy in every sense, I was struck by how usual the novel was in its structure and its distinct narrator. Banks employs a Haitian loa (a spirit of the dead) to tell us the story of Bob Dubois, a frustrated, blue-collar resident of New Hampshire, and Vanise Dorsonville, a Haitian immigrant, and young mother, looking to escape to America for a significantly better life. The traditional use of the narrator as an all-knowing persona, as Russell Banks explains is "a convention that went out the window in the twentieth century." While there has been a series of literary movements concerned with varying degrees of realism and a reduction in the psychic distance between readers and characters, Banks, in telling the story of disparate characters a world apart said, "I want to feel I have my arm around a shoulder of the reader and I'm explaining, narrating, telling a wonderful story to the person I've stopped, like the wedding guest in Coleridge's The Ancient Mariner...And I want to have that sense of intimacy, a face-to-face, arm around the shoulder contact." The use of the "omniscient" (psychically and physically detached narrator), in Banks's novel, creates an unusual richness in detail, characterization, and commentary that would be more difficult to achieve using third person limited point of view. And the loa, because he appeared to have no vested interest in manipulating the details of the story, seemed to be a more "reliable," believable, and interesting narrator of events than a story told from first person point of view. In a way, what Banks has done has fed the loas with his work, and tried to change how we see those we often look down upon. And, in truth, this is all an author can ask: to try to change the world through stories, through imaginary lives, and through the power of the written word.
Summary of Continental Drift (P.S.)
A powerful literary classic from one of contemporary fiction's most acclaimed and important writers, Russell Banks's Continental Drift is a masterful novel of hope lost and gained, and a gripping, indelible story of fragile lives uprooted and transformed by injustice, disappointment, and the seductions and realities of the American dream.
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