Trinidad and Tobago / All works
Novel
Minty Alley
C. L. R. James · 1936
Synopsis
In Port of Spain, Mr Haynes, a young man alone and idle since his mother's death, rents a room in a house in Minty Alley, with Mrs Rouse and her niece Maisie. There he discovers a small world that was foreign to him: the lodger Benoit, an Indian servant, an ambitious nurse and her son, the quarrels, the debts, the hidden loves. A spectator at first, he gradually lets himself be drawn into the dramas of the yard.
Context
Written in 1928, after a summer the author had spent in a working-class yard in Port of Spain, the novel was sent in manuscript to England; Secker & Warburg published it in 1936, the same year in which his play about Toussaint Louverture was staged in London with Paul Robeson. It was the first novel by a Black West Indian to be published in England, and the only one by its author, who never returned to fiction. James said that the root of his political commitment was already in this book.
Who it is for
A short novel, with a meticulous observation of a yard and its inhabitants, for those who want to read James before the historian.
Prizes and reception
Praised for its sensitive portrait of the poor, and above all of poor women, it is still reissued in English.