"My Saint Lucian Literary Hero" (Malica Willie)

NOR ANY COUNTRY

By Garth St Omer

(1969)

Scarce first printing of the third novel by the distinguished St. Lucian writer, an exploration of disillusionment and "the struggle to live authentically and ethically in the face of the certainty of death" (Cousins).

Fine in near fine jacket.

Price: $600.00

NOR ANY COUNTRY

"For a long time he had believed he had remained personally inviolate within the skin he wore which everyone recognized, and that, in the anonymous city, he, too, could have remained anonymous."

St Omer, a graduate of University College of the West Indies and a longtime lecturer at UC Santa Barbara, was a contemporary and friend of fellow St. Lucian expatriate Derek Walcott, who dedicated to him the poem Homecoming ("all this you knew, / but never guessed you'd come / to know there are homecomings without home"). His early work was heavily influenced by the French existentialists and by James Joyce's DUBLINERS; his subject matter "the social and psychic dislocation of individuals and whole communities who endure the colonial condition against a backdrop of an inimical universe" (Cousins). Upon the news of his death in 2018, St. Lucian poet and critic Jane King wrote: "No-one else wrote about Saint Lucia the way he did. Ever."

Read more: Macdonald, The Fiction of Garth St. Omer: A Casebook; Cousins, "Symbol and Metaphor in the Early Fiction of Garth St Omer," Journal of West Indian Literature.

The Object

First edition. London: Faber and Faber, (1969). 7.25'' x 4.75''. Original red cloth with gilt-stamped spine. In original unclipped (21s / £1.05) cream dust jacket. 110 pages. Minor edgewear, traces of soil to jacket.

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