SOURCE: Breslow, Stephen. Review of Resurrection at Sorrow Hill, by Wilson Harris. World Literature Today 69, no. 1 (winter 1995): 203–04.

In the following review, Breslow discusses Resurrection at Sorrow Hill in terms of Harris's use of language and allegory.

Wilson Harris, the Guyanese-born, English-settled dreamer of South American mythologies, has continued his cycle of poetic novels with Resurrection at Sorrow Hill. Like the other novels of this long series, begun with The Guyana Quartet—which comprised the novels Palace of the Peacock, The Far Journey of Oudin, The Whole Armour, and The Secret Ladder (1960–63)—this latest text hangs its intensely complex fabric of poetic legendizing and abstract discourse upon a simple, quasi-realistic skeletal frame story. Imagine an insane asylum located in the remote Camaria region of Guyana where the patients and the psychiatric director articulate fantasies of their “real” and imagined lives to one another over a period of years, as...