SOURCE: Gurnah, Abdulrazak. “A Confluence of Spaces.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4728 (12 November 1993): 22.

In the following mixed review, Gurnah summarizes the main themes of Resurrection at Sorrow Hill and The Carnival Trilogy, noting that the trilogy's prose is “obstinate and difficult.”

The Guyanese writer Wilson Harris long ago rejected realist fiction because of its “authoritarian” reliance on event and circumstance, and developed a different method in his own work. His prose cultivates ambiguity—not in the playful manner of postmodernism, which in the Harris cosmos is irresponsible frivolity—but in order not to foreclose on possibilities by precision. His language aspires to express “multitudinous life”: the simultaneous existence of past and present, life and death, the visible and the invisible. In this respect, his fiction resists being processed into the “strait-jacket” of meaning, and values above everything “multi-layered luminosities” and “numinous exactitudes” of experience. Resurrection at Sorrow Hill is...