Novel
Two Times Resurrection
Rexford Orotaloa · 1985
Synopsis
The novel opens with a tale of the elders, that of the big man Erelifoia, told by the narrator's grandfather. Toga, a descendant of a warrior chief of the artificial island of Sāno, learns that his true name, Orotaloa, means the force that prevails over the other forces. A good pupil but short-sighted, he goes off to earn the money for glasses in Honiara, where a cousin teaches him that food has to be paid for, then on a plantation, while his father tells him that education is a fight.
Context
Published in 1985 by the Solomon Islands Centre of the University of the South Pacific, it is the second novel written by a Solomon Islander, after The Alternative by John Saunana. Stephen Oxenham, in World Literature Today in 1986, found in it a power and a charm of its own, born of the mixing of oral and literary conventions. Robert Viking O'Brien, in the Canadian review Ariel in 1996, reads in it a partly autobiographical coming-of-age novel, whose hero plans to write a book with the same title.
Who it is for
For reading a Melanesian youth told at the crossroads of the elders' oral narrative and the novel.
Prizes and reception
Albert Wendt praised, in the anthology Nuanua in 1995, the complexity of its narrative and its use of oral techniques.
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