Dancing in the Dark

Zusatztext “His best work–cerebral! tender! masterful in its scope and vision.” – The Miami Herald “Delicate! moving! dramatic. . . . Phillips writes powerfully.” – The Washington Post Book World “An exquisitely moving novel. . . . Only a writer as profoundly intuitive as Phillips could bring that shrouded history to light.” – O! The Oprah Magazine Informationen zum Autor Caryl Phillips was born in St. Kitts, West Indies. Brought up in England, he has written for television, radio, theater, and film. He is the author of three books of nonfiction and seven previous novels. His last novel, A Distant Shore, won the 2004 Commonwealth Prize. His awards include the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, a Guggenheim fellowship, and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Phillips lives in New York City. Caryl Phillips’s The Final Passage, A State of Independence, The European Tribe, Higher Ground, Cambridge, Crossing the River, The Nature of Blood, The Atlantic Sound, A New World Order, and A Distant Shore are available in Vintage paperback. Klappentext In this searing novel, Caryl Phillips reimagines the life of the first black entertainer in the U.S. to reach the highest levels of fame and fortune.After years of struggling for success on the stage, Bert Williams (1874—1922), the child of recent immigrants from the Bahamas, made the radical decision to don blackface makeup and play the "coon.” Behind this mask he became a Broadway headliner-as influential a comedian as Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy, and W. C. Fields, who called him "the funniest man I ever saw, and the saddest man I ever knew.” It is this dichotomy at Williams' core that Phillips explores in this richly nuanced, brilliantly written novel, unblinking in its attention to the sinister compromises that make up an identity.Act One (1873-1903) It is February 1903 and at present he is impersonating Shylock Homestead in the musical In Dahomey, but only after dark. He shambles about as though unsure what to do next, as if a wrong turning has placed him upon this stage and he may as well stay put until somebody offers him the opportunity to withdraw. Every evening Mr. Williams wanders aimlessly, but despite his size there is some elegance to his movement. When the audience raises its collective voice and asks him to reprise a song, Mr. Williams acts as though he is first shocked and then somewhat embarrassed that they should be stirring him out of his befuddled anonymity. Of course, this is all the more comical to his audience for they have never before witnessed a Negro performer affecting such indifference in the face of such overwhelming approval. Back uptown in Harlem, few residents have actually seen him perform, but everybody is fully aware of his stellar reputation. However, there are some Harlemites who have sat upstairs in the balcony and looked down at the senior partner in the Williams and Walker comedy duo, who are unsure what to make of his foolish blackface antics. These days Mr. Williams seldom looks up at the parcel of dark faces that stare down at him from nigger heaven, but he is always grateful to hear a good number of these colored Americans applauding enthusiastically as In Dahomey unfolds. He stares at the contented white faces in the orchestra stalls knowing that he can hold an audience like nobody else in the city. He knows when to go gently with them, and he carefully observes their mood; he knows not to strain the color line for he respects their violence. At other times, when he can sense something close to warmth, he might push and cajole a little, and try to show them something that they had not thought of before; he might try to introduce them to the notion that music and wit are the colored man's gift to America, and then impress them with...

Product details

• Authors: Caryl Phillips
• Publisher: Vintage USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 10.10.2006
• EAN: 9781400079834
• ISBN: 978-1-4000-7983-4
• No. of pages: 224
• Dimensions: 131 mm x 202 mm x 13 mm
• Series: Vintage International; Vintage International
• Subject: Fiction > Narrative literature