Wilson Harris

"We may dream, while still alive, of dying. But the dream is soon forgotten, as are the edges and corners of a relived life of which we dream. It is buried in the unconscious. We know that life fades into death but, in what degree, does life relive itself as it dreams of dying? In The Ghost of Memory, novelist Wilson Harris poses these and other questions in a chameleon fiction that explores the blurred boundaries between our waking and our dream lives."--BOOK JACKET.

"Wilson Harris's new novel, The Mask of the Beggar is an original inquiry into the roots of consciousness and the cross-cultural realities and mythologies that have come to dominate the making of, and the nature of, art. The Mask of the Beggar is based on the disguise Odysseus adopts on returning to his kingdom in Ithaca, but the mythologies and civilisations explored go way beyond this premise. Pre-Columbian imageries continually resurface and characters as diverse as Van Gogh, Dorian Gray, Cortez and Goethe make appearances in Harris's latest meditation on the timelessness of art and the creative impulse."--Jacket.

Wilson Harris’ 1996 novel Jonestown charts the attempt of a survivor of the mass suicide and killings at Peoples Temple in Jonestown, Guyana, to come to terms with his survival and the others’ deaths. While the events of November 18, 1978 form the background of the novel, Harris is not writing a history of Jonestown, Jim Jones, or even the fictional survivor, Francisco Bone. Instead, he is looking through what the narrator calls a Dream-book: “I feared to write in – and be written by – a demanding book that asserts itself in Dream and questions itself from time to time (even as I question the meaning of survival) as you will see as you read”. In the course of the novel, Francisco Bone will move through his past to explore how he came to be associated with Jim Jones, the connections of Jones to Guyana, and the circumstances surrounding his salvation in the events in Jonestown that November.