Joyce Cary – Mister Johnson

Mister Johnson (1939) is the last of Joyce Cary’s four novels drawn from his experience in the British colonial service in Nigeria from 1913 to 1919. The „Mister Johnson” who gives the book its title is an ebullient, dream-filled native clerk away from home and family, unknowingly at sea in a world he cannot comprehend. „Johnson swims gaily on the surface of life,” says Cary in a prefatory essay–throwing parties, drinking wine, making sons („he is a poet who creates for himself a glorious destiny”), all the while accumulating debt. And when his errors in judgment lead to his killing a white man, Johnson faces his probable execution with naïve disbelief. In 1991, Mister Johnson was made into film by Australian director Bruce Beresford (Driving Miss Daisy, Paradise Road).

„Johnson illustrates one of the rarest miracles that literature is capable of: that inexplicable process by which the intellectually simple becomes the emotionally dense…” –Brad Leithauser, The New York Review of Books

„…a wonderful book, one of the best novels of Africa…” –John Updike

Mój egz. to „second printing”, prawdopodobnie z I połowy lat 2000. (mss)   źródło opisu: New Directions, 20xx źródło okładki: goodreads.com