Prisnms
Eugene Coard is woken one morning by a phone call to report the murder of a former St Lucian friend. It throws him back to memories of their island days, and his complicated love life in London that made necessary his relocation to the USA.
Price
£8.99
Author(s)
Garth St. Omer
ISBN number
9781845232429
Pages
144
Price
£8.99
Classification
Fiction, Novel
Ebook
Country setting
St Lucia
United States of America
Publication date
17 Aug 2015

Eugene Coard is woken one morning by a phone call to report the murder of a former St Lucian friend. It throws him back to memories of their island days, and his complicated love life in London that made necessary his relocation to the USA. Thoughts about his friend’s metamorphosis from middle-class “CB” to criminal, ghetto-dwelling “Red” provoke Eugene to review his own so far profitable transformations. But just how much of Eugene’s story can we believe? His confessions reveal him as probably the most unreliable and devious narrator in Caribbean fiction; has he, as a writer and psychiatrist, been exploiting the confusions of race in the USA to his own advantage?

With nods to Ellison’s Invisible Man and a witty inversion of Saul Bellow’s Sammler’s Planet , Prisnms is a dark comedy about the masks people wear in a racially divided society that anticipates the metafictions of a writer such as Percival Everett. In the shape-shifting figure of Eugene Coard, Garth St Omer has created a character whose admissions will bring the reader shocked and horrified delight. Prisnms was written in the 1980s but perhaps because it was so ahead of its time, not published until now. 

Variations

Garth St. Omer

Garth St Omer was born in Castries, St Lucia in 1931.
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