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| Into the Interior
ISBN: 9780816673766
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / University of Minnesota Press
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter
Subjects: Self-realization in women -- Fiction; Displacement (Psychology) -- Fiction; Bisexual women -- Fiction;
Ten connected stories from Cliff (Everything is Now) pursue the coming-of-age of an unnamed, Jamaican-born young woman finding her way from New York to London. Born to a mixed-raced family with old Victorian roots whose affluence is clearly dwindling, the girl of "Points of Departure" learns by age 10 how to "retreat" from great-grandmotherly admonitions for her own self-preservation. After the death of her depressed mother, and estranged from her distant, philandering father, the narrator comes by a "sense of things unexpectedly" in a Christian boarding school, and, while en route to graduate school in England in "Below the Waterline," she has a momentous lesbian encounter with Bex, who tells a ghastly tale of being attacked by hateful sorority sisters. In "Marooned," the narrator moves somewhat awkwardly among her student colleagues, gradually becoming politicized, especially by the anti-apartheid movement. Finally, the last two tales find a poignant convergence of the narrator's life and those who struggled before her. By rending the membrane between past and present, Cliff finds serene closure to these subtle, cautiously fashioned tales. (May) Copyright 2010 Reed Business Information.
Michelle Carla Cliff was born in Kingston, Jamaica on November 2, 1946. She received a bachelor's degree in European history from Wagner College in 1969. She briefly worked as a researcher at Time-Life Books and as a production editor at W. W. Norton. At the University of London, she studied art at the Warburg Institute and received a master of philosophy degree in 1974 after writing a thesis on the Italian Renaissance. She returned to Norton and worked as a production editor for books on history, women's studies, and politics. Her first book, Claiming an Identity They Taught Me to Despise, was published in 1980. Her other books included The Land of Look Behind: Prose and Poetry, The Store of a Million Items, and If I Could Write This in Fire. Her first novel, Abeng, was published in 1984. Her other novels include No Telephone to Heaven, Free Enterprise: A Novel of Mary Ellen Pleasant, and Into the Interior. She died from liver failure on June 12, 2016 at the age of 69. (Bowker Author Biography) |
