Author A. Colin Wright’s Bio:
After graduating from Cambridge University in Modern Languages, A. Colin Wright worked as an English teacher in Sardinia. There he experienced what was still a primitive society, lacking the freedoms of English social life. He now lives in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, where he worked for many years as a Professor of Russian.
Featuring Sardinian Silver by A. Colin Wright
To Arthur Fraser, a young Englishman, Sardinia in 1960 is perfect. It’s an island filled with Roman ruins, exotic scenery, local customs, and morally traditional values-he loves everything. To assimilate into the strange and belong to a society different from his own has always been his desire. Arthur arrives in the resort town of Alghero to work as a representative for a tourist company. His ambition is to find a Sard girl for himself. He is quickly thwarted, though, by the orthodox beliefs of the inhabitants. Unmarried couples cannot meet without chaperones, and anyone with “continental” attitudes is immoral. Arthur quickly learns that dating is fraught with real dangers. When Arthur finally falls in love with Anna, a Sard girl, he discovers that she lives in Rome and is no longer accepted at home. But she then falls in love with one of his best friends, and Arthur becomes irrationally obsessed. He incessantly schemes about winning back her affections, despite her efforts to dissuade him. In Sardinian Silver, author Wright masterfully evokes a mysterious society, its flamboyant people, and the Island’s beauty. Like Arthur, you’ll never want to leave Sardinia, with its wide sands, low hills, sun, and blue sea and its superficial pleasantness of life.
Details:
Paperback: 196 pages
Publisher: IUniverse (October 28, 2008)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0595481000
ISBN-13: 978-0595481002
Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6.4 x 0.7 inches
Paperback Price: $14.95 $11.66
Purchase Link:
http://www.amazon.com/Sardinian-Silver-Anthony-Colin-Wright/dp/0595481000/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1243434809&sr=1-1
Sardinian Silver Book Review:
After an absence of forty-two years, languages professor A. Colin Wright returned for a visit to Sardinia. His nostalgic novel, Sardinian Silver, he says in its afterword, “evokes a Sardinia that no longer exists but which had a quality of its own that is worth remembering.”
It was a quality he also found in the no longer extant brand of Sardinian Silver wine that was “like a fleeting memory of something beautiful.” His efforts to recapture the quality and memories of Sardinia, the wine, and his friends from the 1960s have resulted in a novel of superior literary merit. Wright’s novel is a pastoral romance about a summer in the life of twenty-four-year-old Englishman Arthur Fraser, a tourist guide in Sardinia.
It is skillfully and evocatively written, relying on the interactions between its characters as they travel, fall in and out of love, and indulge in occasional bacchanalian festivals. While there are no action-packed adventures, there is a well developed sojourn to Orgosolo, an enclave of outlaws where Arthur and his friends feel, “as though we’re entering a forgotten civilization, peopled by ghosts of ancient warriors.” And when Arthur and his friend Gavino vie for the same girl, a kind of genteel jealousy arises, which suits the type of novel Wright has written. Otherwise, the novel relies upon Arthur and his several female acquaintances to add spice in some episodes and humour in others.
Of particular note is Wright’s ability to elicit the morals and mores of 1960’s Sardinia, both through what happens on the island and in Rome, and by the attitudinal interplay between traditionalist Sards and visiting foreigners like Arthur and his transplanted English friends. Wright’s characters spring to life, full blown. Angst-ridden Arthur unceasingly searches for love with all the wrong women until the right one arrives at the book’s conclusion. His girlfriends contrast the morality of the day and the place with their boldness and outspokenness. The men, on the other hand, either appear grateful to follow in the wake of the women or to participate in surreptitious affairs, like the “nauseating man with the moustache and the nasty smile” inquiring of Arthur about the availability of a servant girl for “other things.”
In the end, as Arthur reminisces years later with his wife about Sardinia and “all the people we knew there,” he concludes, “An odd bunch, weren’t they?” But odd or not, they are well worth knowing.
Review by M. Wayne Cunningham
ForeWord Clarion Review
Please Visit Author A. Colin Wright’s Author Page
http://www.booksinsync.com/authordirectory/wrightacolin.html
Website (s):
www.sardiniansilver.com
www.acolinwright.ca
www.authorsden.com/acolinwright
E-mail Address:
acw@queensu.ca
Submitted by Theodocia McLean
Owner of Books In Sync
Website: http://www.booksinsync.com
Submission Date: January 17, 2010
No comments:
Post a Comment