Guest of the ilb 2002
Is Pauline Melville
related to Herman Melville, the author of 'Moby Dick'? If she
was, she wouldn’t utter a word about it as her own life story remains a
well guarded secret.
Thus, only fragments are known from her biography: her mother was
English and her father came from Guyana. She was also born here
in the former British colony on the Atlantic Coast of South America,
sometime during the fourties. In the eighties she played small
roles in English television and film, for example alongside Armin
Müller-Stahl in 'Utz', a filmed version of the novel by Bruce Chatwin
with whom the author doesn’t only share a longing to be in distant
places.
In 1990, with 'Shape-Shifter', her first collection of stories, she
made her writing talent known and received the Commonwealth Writers
Prize for the best debut. Her stories are set in Great Britain,
the Caribbean or in Guyana; her protagonists are in search of their
homeland, their identity and a past which helps live the present.
A fundamental unrest influences the stories with which Melville
illustrates and reflects on the states of post-colonialism. She
may not be any relation to Herman Melville but there is a tie to the
English romancier Evelyn Waugh, who in his diary of his Guyana travels,
tells of an encounter with a certain Amy Melville. This discovery
served as occasion for Pauline Melville’s first novel 'The
Ventriloquist’s Tale' (1997) which won not only the Whitebread First
Novel Award but was also translated into French, Dutch and
Catalonian. In Germany, the book appeared as 'Der Bauchredner'
(1998). In this novel, set in Guyana in the eighties, the
literary researcher, Rosa Mendelsohn, at the same time the alter ego of
the author, goes in search of people who Waugh met on his stay there in
1933. During her research she meets the Indian, Chofy and experiences
for herself the clash of two cultures. Melville artistically
crosses over to a romance and adventure novel in her stories.
Melville’s art of story telling and a fascination for detail also makes
her second collection of short stories stand out. 'The Migration
of Ghosts' (1998) has appeared in Germany under the title of 'Mrs. da
Silvas Karneval' (2002) and illustrates to the readers the wealth of
new experiences which have grown out of the meeting of Europe with
distant parts of the world. A seriously ill woman chooses Dante’s
'Divina Comedia' as accompaniment on her journey of suffering. An
old woman fulfils a dream of her youth to be at the centre of a
flamenco act one evening. The title giver, Mrs. da Silva, gets to
know a Jamaican postman at the Caribbean carnival in the streets of
Notting Hill. Hemingway meets Márquez: Pauline Melville writes
stories in which there is love and hate. Life starts and passes
away and this in a world which moves closer together. Pauline
Melville lives in London.
Dirk Naguschewski
© internationales literaturfestival berlin
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