SOURCE: A review of The Pleasures of Exile, in World Literature Today, Vol. 59, No. 2, Spring, 1985, pp. 307-08.

In the following review of the reprinting of Lamming's The Pleasures of Exile, Dasenbrock laments that the book has not aged well and finds it to be bitter and illogical.

I am a little perplexed as to why Allison & Busby, George Lamming's British publishers, would issue this reprint of his only work of nonfiction, published initially in 1960, for its has not worn well in the intervening twenty-five years. I hesitate to use a more precise term than “work of nonfiction,” as The Pleasures of Exile is, among other things, part autobiography, part travelogue, part literary criticism, and part a retelling of the story of Toussaint L'Ouverture. If anything holds this jumble together, it is not the title theme of exile but Lamming's recurring use of Shakespeare's Tempest as a myth of...