Additional Reviews of Huracan
|
No novel I’ve
recently encountered wrestles so earnestly — and so movingly — with the ethical
dimensions of what Alfred López calls “bourgeois imperial whiteness” than Huracan. Despite
this evident ambition, however, McCaulay’s measured voice seldom slips into
diatribe. Like so many of us, she just wants to discover, intimately, the true
nature of her ancestry — a task made more difficult by the notorious fissures
and absences which govern the Caribbean archive. Though she takes her partial
knowledge for granted, one can feel McCaulay sigh a breath of relief at
discovering her worst fears are unfounded: her ancestors were not slaveowners. If not such
villains, then, her novel asks, who were her ancestors, really,
fundamentally? Stephen Narain, Los Angles Review
of Books
|
|
Diana
McCaulay’s Huracan is a deceptive novel, a hauntology.
This intergenerational story is so deftly woven and fluidly told that you quite
forget the weight of the history underlying it. Shifting between narratives set
roughly a hundred years apart, the novel opens in 1986 with the return of its
protagonist from foreign shores to the land of her birth after an absence of
fifteen years.
As Leigh McCaulay, the contemporary protagonist of Huracan, soon discovers, “bad things could happen even though the fences ran around the base of a hill and your house was right on top” . As she tries to slip back into the Jamaica she left as a fifteen-year-old, Leigh is confronted at almost every turn by her foreignness, born not merely from having been away so long but also because of her status as a minority: “White Gal!” shouts a bystander as she’s driven home from the airport. And thereupon hangs this tale. Annie Paul, University of the West Indies, Mona, Kingston |
|
Huracan is a courageous novel.
McCaulay's deft characterizations and ability to weave of plot lines across two
centuries demonstrate her talents as a remarkable storyteller and witness to
uncomfortable truths. Huracan reminds us that in the midst of slavery
there were individuals who were willing to transgress the boundaries of the
color line and claim their humanity--a lesson that Leigh McCaulay learns in the
present and which sets her free. Geoffrey Philp.
|
Diana's Books are available at Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook , Apple iBookstore. and Kobo books