My Father House In Search of a Lost Past eBook Matthew Carr
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Reviews
' Bill Carr embodied all the idealism and sickness of the colonial mind and his son's narrative is a monumental exploration of the paradoxes of Empire. It is written as if from the pen of a novelist, superbly plotted with a marvellous sense of the intricacies of character and a panoramic view of British and colonial history. Matthew Carr has made astonishing art of his father's wreckage.'
David Dabydeen, The Times
'Matthew Carr embarks, literally, on a journey in search of his father. His book combines the skills of a gifted travel writer, a novelist and a biographer. The result is a high-class creation that unfolds with the excitement of a detective story.'
Richard Gott, The Independent
' ...almost impossible to categorize. A personal biography, it reads at times as a socio-political history and at others as a gripping novel.'
The Times
' ...an honest and decently written memoir, and Carr junior's motive in writing it is exemplary.'
The Mail on Sunday
Product Description
In 1995 Matthew Carr returned to Guyana in the Caribbean, where his parents' marriage had broken up nearly thirty years before, in order to investigate the mysterious death of his father Bill Carr in 1991. A popular and charismatic English lecturer, a lover of DH Lawrence, Shakespeare and Matthew Arnold, and a left-wing political activist with a strong public presence in West Indian politics, Bill Carr was also a violent alcoholic who beat his wife and children, and whose alcohol-induced mayhem forced his family to return to England without him in 1967.
In the ensuing decades little was known of the life he led in a country whose single claim to international fame in all that period was the 'Jonestown massacre.' Apart from a single visit to England a few years before his death, Bill Carr had, it seemed, cut himself off from his family and his country and chosen to live a life of exile with a new family in his adopted country. His son's decision to return to Guyana for the first time since 1967 was partly prompted by the confused circumstances that preceded his father's death, in which he seemed to express a wish to return to his native land.
What began as an exploration of a lost West Indies childhood in Jamaica and Guyana and an investigation of his father's chaotic and contradictory personality, became a compelling and extraordinary journey into the racial politics and history of the Caribbean, and Guyana in particular. Why did so many people remember Bill Carr so well when his family remembered him so badly? Why had his father cut himself off from his family so completely and so brutally? Why had he wanted to return? What caused his death?
Alternating between meetings with his father's friends, colleagues, enemies and family members, Carr sets out to answer these questions and reconcile their memories with those of his family. In doing so he draws an often shocking and disturbing portrait of a tormented and contradictory figure whose undoubted capacity for good was often matched by a formidable self-destructive streak that eventually killed him and damaged many of those closest to him.
The result is a striking combination of family history, travelogue, and colonial history that recalls Malcolm Lowry, Graham Greene and Joseph Conrad, in which the story of Bill Carr's steep descent into masochistic self-destruction mirrors the collapse of Guyana under the post-colonial dictatorship of Forbes Burnham.
Out of print for some years now, this acclaimed memoir is now available for the first time as an e-book to a new generation of readers.
About the Author
Matthew Carr is a writer, broadcaster, and journalist, whose work has been published in The Guardian, History Today, The Observer, The New York Times, Geographical Magazine, and Esquire. He has appeared as a guest on BBC Radio, Sky and BBC television.
My Father House In Search of a Lost Past eBook Matthew Carr
Here's another book that went on much too long. In general I'm a fan of good memoirs. Since I knew next to nothing about Guyana (South America) it was interesting, if depressing to learn some the history of this country. The premise wasn't bad, since the author returns to a country from which he was more or less expelled by his father as a child. He is rather obsessed by trying to find out who his father truly was and why he rejected his family and sent them home. I felt the author might have benefitted more from a good therapist, because the events of his childhood seem to have kept him from being happy or developing as a well-rounded adult. What he discovers in Guyana doesn't seem to help much. Since I am the co-author and translator of my husband's memoir (to be published by Macmillan in Feb 15th, and titled Unlikely Warrior, I know a little whereof I speak. Some amazing people are able to take the terrible events of their childhood and youth, be grateful for having survived and used their unhappy pasts to create a happy life. This, sadly, is not the case for Matthew Carr.Product details
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My Father House In Search of a Lost Past eBook Matthew Carr Reviews
Invoking a sense of location in a piece of writing is quite tricky and Matt’s exploration of his lost past in the West Indies is a good attempt. I’ve been lucky enough to spend a little time on travels around the Caribbean; in the magical city of Cartegena, on the islands of Guadeloupe and Saint Lucia as well as Cuba and some beautiful coastal villages and lagoons in Honduras and Nicaragua. In all these trips the rough undercurrents of the palm encircled beaches and bays full of cruise liners and yachts have gradually become apparent. Beneath the colourful landscapes and below the sharp blue sky are the bitter smells and tastes of inequality, racism, violence and corruption. The pirates and slave traders of the region weren’t as lighthearted as Hollywood has portrayed them and they left a terrible legacy.
I haven’t got Matt’s extraordinary flair for descriptive prose, so my reflections on the Caribbean rapidly descend into cliché. On one level – a joy of reading My Father’s House is that the story operates on numerous levels intertwined – the book is an excellent introduction to the region’s geo-politics in the second half of the twentieth century, with a special focus on political intrigues and revolutionary dreams in Guyana. On another level, the painful process of coming to terms with a traumatic upbringing and searching for clues to understand why things turned out as they did is also totally absorbing. All in all Matt’s relentless dissection of motive, mishap and madness, makes compulsive reading.
This is not a pretty tale. The evasions, excuses and extreme behaviours which tear the main characters asunder are carefully analysed. Sadly, there are few people who leave clean smells behind them (as it seems George Orwell said of Mahatma Gandhi). Although we take up our righteous causes with the best intentions, aiming for enlightenment through education, to confront oppression, protect the environment and to stand up for the marginalized and hungry, there always seem to be distractions and distortions. The world is messy and with the help of alcohol, the messiness becomes fuzzy and sometimes it seems that the only thing to do is lash out in furious (blind) anger, as Bill Carr did in mistreating his wife and kids.
We grew up in Cambridge in the 1970s influenced by the slogan about personal life being integral to the political sphere. Matt has written a towering epic on this theme, with his destructive and desperate father at the centre of the stage, “full of sound and fury” while the post-colonial struggles of the Caribbean rage in the wings. There is much to learn about how our lives flow in different dimensions and different worlds at the same time in this wonderful narrative.
My Father's House had a really good base. The narrative got me. It was a little dry in reading and I couldn't get the picture of someone reading it to me out of my head. Was it good? YES I liked the history of Guyana. The family story was troubling. Another book where alcohol defines a family, wrecks it and wont let it go. I really found Bill's life fascinating. The letters in the beginning of the book were very telling. I thought if you sort of read between the lines there is a lot of double meanings.
The fact that the trips to Guyana were very descriptive shows the author has a gift with descriptions. There is a lot to the child character remembering things that he chose to remember. Sometimes we tend to glorify people in memories.
The book was good especially if you enjoy more of a narrative/biography then it is for you.
Here's another book that went on much too long. In general I'm a fan of good memoirs. Since I knew next to nothing about Guyana (South America) it was interesting, if depressing to learn some the history of this country. The premise wasn't bad, since the author returns to a country from which he was more or less expelled by his father as a child. He is rather obsessed by trying to find out who his father truly was and why he rejected his family and sent them home. I felt the author might have benefitted more from a good therapist, because the events of his childhood seem to have kept him from being happy or developing as a well-rounded adult. What he discovers in Guyana doesn't seem to help much. Since I am the co-author and translator of my husband's memoir (to be published by Macmillan in Feb 15th, and titled Unlikely Warrior, I know a little whereof I speak. Some amazing people are able to take the terrible events of their childhood and youth, be grateful for having survived and used their unhappy pasts to create a happy life. This, sadly, is not the case for Matthew Carr.
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