Purchase
Knopf
November 2008
On Sale: November 11, 2008
176 pages
ISBN: 0307264238
EAN: 9780307264237
Hardcover
Add to Wish List
Non-Fiction
A powerful tragedy distilled into a jewel of a masterpiece
by the Nobel Prize–winning author of Beloved and, almost
like a prelude to that story, set two centuries earlier. In the 1680s the slave trade was still in its infancy. In
the Americas, virulent religious and class divisions,
prejudice and oppression were rife, providing the fertile
soil in which slavery and race hatred were planted and took
root. Jacob is an Anglo-Dutch trader and adventurer, with a small
holding in the harsh north. Despite his distaste for
dealing in “flesh,” he takes a small slave girl in part
payment for a bad debt from a plantation owner in Catholic
Maryland. This is Florens, “with the hands of a slave and
the feet of a Portuguese lady.” Florens looks for love,
first from Lina, an older servant woman at her new master’s
house, but later from a handsome blacksmith, an African,
never enslaved. There are other voices: Lina, whose tribe was decimated by
smallpox; their mistress, Rebekka, herself a victim of
religious intolerance back in England; Sorrow, a strange
girl who’s spent her early years at sea; and finally the
devastating voice of Florens’ mother. These are all men and
women inventing themselves in the wilderness. A Mercy reveals what lies beneath the surface of slavery.
But at its heart it is the ambivalent, disturbing story of
a mother who casts off her daughter in order to save her,
and of a daughter who may never exorcise that abandonment. Acts of mercy may have unforeseen consequences.
Comments
No comments posted.
Registered users may leave comments.
Log in or register now!
| 
© 2003-2024 off-the-edge.net
all rights reserved Privacy Policy