The Four Banks of the River of Space

The Carnival Trilogy #3

by Wilson Harris

A novel about the complexities of memory, Wilson Harris's The Four Banks of the River of Space is a return to the writer's childhood haunts. Shunning what he calls sterile realism, Harris digs under the reality of perception and language to find the hidden music or pattern which gives significance to apparently desperate situations. Memory thus becomes a form of creation which follows the Odyssean metaphor of the quest naturalized here in the author's original Guyana heartland. This journey into the past does not limit itself to the reassertion of the protagonist's multiculturalism. It states that poetic language can only progress through erasure leading to the opening out of new doors or windows into essential reality, where polarities melt away.
The Four Banks of the River of Space fragments the epic figure of Ulysses into several personalities who conduct self-analyses to redefine the nature and function of myth.

160 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 1990

About the author

Born in Guyana in 1921 and based in England since 1959, Wilson Harris is one of the most original novelists and critics of the twentieth century. His writings, which include poems, numerous essays and twenty-four novels, provide a passionate and unique defense of the notion of cross-culturalism as well as a visionary exploration of the interdependence between history, landscape and humanity. In 2010 he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for his services to literature.

Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wilson Harris takes us along in his unique journey through the world of the living and the dead, a long voyage in search of an eternal home.

Music possesses such solidity one may hold it in one’s mind, sculpt it into a mysterious flute, a flute that is akin to a spiral or a curious ladder that runs into space… The invisible stream of the river of the dead runs far below, far under our knees. The flute tells of the passage of the drowned into the river of the dead. The flute tells that the river of the dead and the river of the living are one quantum stream possessed of four banks.

The Four Banks of the River of Space is a quantum stream of consciousness – the narration is out of time and out of place so it can access any time and any place.

Creation’s a curious and a serious comedy, and divine comedy is more genuinely disturbing than tragedy. For in divinity’s shadow arises the daemon of freedom that rends the human imagination with a sense of lost paradise, a sense of miraculously regained entry into paradise…

Probably somewhere, far beyond the horizon, there are gates…

[PaperBird · Rating 5 out of 5]

Discussed this book here: https://youtu.be/8MX-W35FtF0