City of Light

by Cyrus Colter

Overview

Paul Kessey, age twenty-nine, is caught between two worlds. Although his is a privileged world of successful blacks in Chicago, and he is a graduate of Princeton, handsome and well-connected, Kessey is uncertain how to identify himself in relation to the African diaspora, partly because of his light skin. Throughout a Paris sojourn, he is both attracted and repelled by different ideas, attitudes, and concepts regarding the place of blacks in a white society; he goes back and forth among the persons and the ideas they represent, and thus among contradictory possibilities of life as a black man.

By intertwining in an intricate web racial, class, and political issues with the intense struggles of one man's heart, Colter presents a vivid portrait of the personal effects of prejudice and its hypocrisies. City of Light remains a daring push against the grain of American literary fashion.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780810150805
Publisher:	Northwestern University Press
Publication date:	04/15/1998
Edition description:	1
Pages:	423
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Cyrus Colter was a distinguished attorney and public servant when he took up writing in midlife. He is the author of five other works, among them The Beach Umbrella and Other Stories, The Hippodrome, Night Studies, and A Chocolate Soldier, all published by TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press

Editorial Reviews

Paul Kessey is a Princeton-educated African American living in Paris, where he has used his wealthy father's money to found the Coterie, an organization with an uncertain political agenda that flirts with the idea of creating an African homeland for diaspora blacks. Occasionally Paul interrupts his philosophical conversations with his landlady and with his lover, Cecile(a married white doctor with two daughters), and other acquaintances to write long letters to his dead mother, Saturn Marie. These include passages about their quasi-sexual relationship, his resentment of his light-skinned mother's treatment of his first love, Jeannette, a brilliant black woman, and of her general attitudes toward color. ``But why didn't you school me on how to be black?'' he asks plaintively. Colter ( A Chocolate Soldier ) has a difficult, wordy style that tends to bog down what little action there is, but his imagery is occasionally inspired. After Paul and Cecile are the victims of a racist attack, Cecile begins having nightmares and then grows fat on a steady diet of ``niggerines,'' tiny chocolate candies shaped like ``grinning, dancing, Negro minstrels.'' (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly