The Accidental Indies

By Robert Finley

Book Overview

At once moving and lyrical, The Accidental Indies is a tale in which we join Christopher Columbus on a fantastical voyage through western seas and Western imagination. Robert Finley imagines, sings, charts, and paints the story of Columbus's problematic 1492 expedition to the Caribbean, creating a world that is as vivid and compelling as the explorer's own voyage to the misnamed "Indies". It is a journey through wondrous words that begins with Columbus's earliest explorations when he first "tests the heft and roundness of this earth against his infant head" by stepping from the edge of his rocking cradle to come up short on the boards of the nursery floor. Finley charts a course for us through the days at sea, through the voyage itself, its records and commentaries, into the fraught territory of Columbus' imaginary "Indies" and the representation of this New World on his return to Spain. This incisive and luminescent story, scrupulously grounded in sixteenth-century sources, illuminates the power that "naming" has to create a world - in this case a world still haunted by being the accidental Indies. It is a book about how we perceive and represent the world around us, about the creative and destructive power of language. Through its elaboration of the rich and lively ironies of the Columbus story, The Accidental Indies looks at the nature of storytelling itself.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0773520066
• ISBN13: 9780773520066
• Release Date: May 2000
• Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
• Length: 128 Pages
• Weight: 0.71 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.7" x 8.8"

Customer Reviews

Wonderful!

I'm not just saying that because I know the author. He's an amazing writer, and this is an amazing book.

A terrific novel with a "you are there" approach for readers

This tale of Christopher Columbus provides a vivid story of his expedition to the Caribbean, providing a fictionalized account of his earliest explorations and including a healthy dose of poetic description. A unique "you are there" approach brings the experience to life: "It is not disappointment, but surprise to find so little of what he had been thinking of, ghosting in on the making tide to a broad and shining bay. The bosun sounds the still water. At every fall the lead marks its own centre; ripples widening outward link with those before and after, the ship's course marked by this light chain."