Overview

When at age 51, Joshua �clair--victim of a pygmalianism gone awry--emerges from amnesia in a hospital in Montreal, he must explore what makes him want to erase his identity, and must undertake the process of exorcising what has brought him to this pass. This is the gripping story of a man's search for sanity set in the fictional Caribbean Isabella Island and the various places Joshua has fled to: Montreal, New York, Tallahassee, London, Paris and Madrid. This is a finely accomplished novel about a very modern predicament: the malformed dysfunctional identity in the global village.

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9781894770385

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From the Maple Tree Literary Supplement <p>In his novel Return to Arcadia, H. Nigel Thomas takes his reader on an intimate healing journey into Joshua ?lair? psyche. Upon awakening in a Montreal hospital with partial amnesia, Joshua soon realizes that the road to recovery is actually backwards. He is placed in the ambiguous position of having to recover the very memories that are so painful his consciousness is trying to obliterate them. If we are the sum of everything we have experienced, and our bodies their mirrors, then Joshua is the indecipherable addition of scars upon scars that are found like a map on his back. And it is this unreadable chart that he must unlock in order to be healed, like an Oedipal riddle. <p> Such un-resolvable spaces seem to run through the dynamics of Joshua? life: he is the child of a rape of a black woman by a plantation-owner white man, an uncomfortable homosexual dealing with masochist tendencies, and the rich heir of a woman who raised him to despise himself?to name only a few of the irresolvable dichotomies he is forced to wrestle with. <p> These moments of strain explode unto larger commentaries on social issues such as racism, colonialism, and sexual equality, the particular of Joshua? life reaching to the communal through the telling of his personal story. Inscribing itself as an unavoidable tale of post-colonial Caribbean literature, Joshua ?lair ? story is an unprotected plunge into the realities of these atrocities. Return to Arcadia re-affirms the need to continue the unveiling of historical injustices of plantation exploitation and adds to the complexity of these issues by having as a protagonist a man of mixed blood, allowing the difficulties of identity and self-definition to be pertinently addressed. These topics are a tightrope to walk on for any author and Thomas proves a skilful acrobat. <p> A compellingly honest, thorough, and difficult descent to the depths of the most painful of memories leads Joshua back to th

From the Maple Tree Literary Supplement <p>In his novel Return to Arcadia, H. Nigel Thomas takes his reader on an intimate healing journey into Joshua ?clair's psyche. Upon awakening in a Montreal hospital with partial amnesia, Joshua soon realizes that the road to recovery is actually backwards. He is placed in the ambiguous position of having to recover the very memories that are so painful his consciousness is trying to obliterate them. If we are the sum of everything we have experienced, and our bodies their mirrors, then Joshua is the indecipherable addition of scars upon scars that are found like a map on his back. And it is this unreadable chart that he must unlock in order to be healed, like an Oedipal riddle. <p> Such un-resolvable spaces seem to run through the dynamics of Joshua's life: he is the child of a rape of a black woman by a plantation-owner white man, an uncomfortable homosexual dealing with masochist tendencies, and the rich heir of a woman who raised him to despise himself? to name only a few of the irresolvable dichotomies he is forced to wrestle with. <p> These moments of strain explode unto larger commentaries on social issues such as racism, colonialism, and sexual equality, the particular of Joshua's life reaching to the communal through the telling of his personal story. Inscribing itself as an unavoidable tale of post-colonial Caribbean literature, Joshua ?clair 's story is an unprotected plunge into the realities of these atrocities. Return to Arcadia re-affirms the need to continue the unveiling of historical injustices of plantation exploitation and adds to the complexity of these issues by having as a protagonist a man of mixed blood, allowing the difficulties of identity and self-definition to be pertinently addressed. These topics are a tightrope to walk on for any author and Thomas proves a skilful acrobat. <p> A compellingly honest, thorough, and difficult descent to the depths of the most painful of memories leads Joshua bac

Author Information

H Nigel Thomas is the author of six novels, three collections of short stories, and a previous collection of poems, in addition to dozens of essays. His novels Spirits in the Dark and No Safeguards were nominated for the Hugh MacLennan Fiction Award, and Des vies cass�es, the French translation of Lives: Whole and Otherwise, was shortlisted for Le prix Carbet des lyc�ens. He holds the 2000 Professional of the Year Jackie Robinson Award, the 2013 Universit� Laval's Hommage aux cr�ateurs, the 2020 Black Theatre Workshop's Martin Luther King, Jr Achievement Award, and is the 2022 winner of the Canada Council John Molson Prize for the Arts. In 2024, he was named a laureate for Black History Month in Montreal. He is also the founder and English-language coordinator of Lectures Logos Readings. A Vincentian Canadian, he has lived in the province of Quebec since 1968 and is a retired professor of United States literature.

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