Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #262208 in Books
• Published on: 2005-12-22
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 244 pages

Synopsis
The young narrator of "The Intended" is twelve when he leaves his village in rural Guyana to come to England. There, he is abandoned into social care, but with great determination and self-discipline seizes every opportunity to follow his aunt's farewell advice, 'but you must take education...pass plenty exam' and wins a scholarship to Oxford. With an upper-class white fiancee, he has unquestionably arrived, but at the cost of ignoring the other part of his aunt's farewell: '...you is we, remember you is we.' Through remembering his Guyanese childhood and youth in working class Balham, the narrator's older self explores the contradictions, the difficulties implicit in his aunt's advice and the cost to his personality of losing that past. At one level a moving semi-autobiographical novel, "The Intended" is also a sophisticated postcolonial text with its echoes of 'Heart of Darkness', its play between language registers and its exploration of the instability of identity.

As an Indo-Guyanese, the narrator finds himself seen as 'Paki' by the English, and as some mongrel hybrid by 'real' Asians from India and Pakistan; as sharing a common British 'Blackness', yet acutely conscious of the real cultural divisions between Guyanese of African and Indian origins.

Customer Reviews

Breathtaking and distressing
Another book I bought because of its Guyana link. The synopsis gives an accurate summary of the story of the novel.

It is beautifully written and would make a great English Lit text itself because it leaves so much open to examination as the narrator himself examines his identity and his knowledge and lack of it of those around him. It is in some ways a simple story and in others shows so many layers of the complexity of our identities, especially focusing on the dilemas of the immigrant, knowing yourself, acceptance of where you are from and where you are now.

The exploration of how this group of 5 school friends from different immigrant backgrounds drawn together by the fact they have the common trait of being 'outsiders' find and struggle (or in some cases appear not to) with their own identities and how that effects their friendships is incredibly well done. I had a strong empathy for all the characters, even though their situations are completely different to mine.

Joseph, the illiterate, abandoned black young man in the story is shown as the one who can actually see aspects of life in the way the educated Indo-Guyanese narrator tries to see in his assessment of English literature texts.

The issue of race is ever present in all the dynamics but in the complexity that really exists, not in the simplistic way it is often viewed. He examines the racial prejudices of his memories in Guyana as well as the UK.

I loved the memories of Berbice and especially New Amsterdam.

For me the ultimate sense of aloneness at the end of the book brought tears to my eyes. In some ways that sense reminded me of 'A Dry White Season' by Andre Brink which was one of the most haunting but brilliant novels I've read.