Anton Nimblett’s stories are about characters driven by desire - for dignity and justice for a dead son, for privacy from a neighbour who collects lives, for sexual fulfilment as a gay man, for an old man’s last assertion of love for a dying wife, for a man on the edge trying to block out the destructive voices of past pains. What is so impressive about the stories, beyond Anton Nimblett’s sharp ear for a wide range of distinctive voices, and the ability to create vividly sensual pictures of place, and particularly of erotic encounters, is their facility in inhabiting contrary tendencies without strain. There is also an expert cinematographer’s sense of when to cut and when to join, and several stories build to powerful dramatic tension through arresting montage. Within the collection there is both fluidity and sharp definition. Characters migrate between stories (just as they migrate between Trinidad and New York), being sometimes at the fringes, sometimes at the centre - Trinidadian lives seen both in motion and at rest. Writing with equal empathy about the lives of gay men, heterosexuals, young and old, country folk and urbanites, Anton Nimblett is a singularly attractive new voice in Caribbean writing.
Readers' comments
...I've already blown off dinner, several phone calls from good friends and I'm only at 'Ring Games'. This is good!
Stephen M.
...I could taste Marjory's Meal, on all levels, and thought the ending was perfection...
Nancy M
... I'm using this in my class! Wonderful! Evangaline Leonard: I love her!
CeCe F
...I'll never look at an orange the same way.
Yolaine S.
...I highly recommend Sections of an Orange ... for its stories--each possessing something marvel-worthy--and for its voices.
C. H. Valere on www.signifyingguyana.typepad.com
...By the time you realize Nimblett’s characters are not always simple or sympathetic, they’ve snuck up on you, and you care about what happens to them.
Dr. Rosamond King, on gspottt.wordpress.com
...The writing is exquisite. Anton takes the reader on a journey... Bliss, realism and fantasy. The language is sexy and some of it is in Trinidadian dialect.
Cheryl Boyce Taylor
