Michael Anthony’s novels and short stories never made an international splash like those of the late Nobel laureate VS Naipaul, but Anthony is arguably one of the most popular and most important writers to emerge from the Caribbean.
His ability to expose rural Trinidad and present compelling stories with timeless themes of family, love and friendship along with riveting conflicts regarding trust, deception and loyalty appeals to a wide range of readers.
For decades, his short stories and novels, particularly Green Days by the River, The Year in San Fernando and The Games Were Coming have been on the CXC English literature reading list.
Now those novels and many of Anthony’s short stories are the subjects of a literary analysis – Mayaro Gold The Fiction of Michael Anthony by UWI professor Roydon Salick. We are sorely lacking a body of literary analysis for Caribbean works so Salick’s contribution is both welcome and necessary,
Mayaro Gold is a gold mine of biographical and literary analysis which converge to offer students, scholars, avid readers and aspiring writers a glimpse into Anthony’s writing craft. While it will help students to analyse Anthony’s work, it is not a pedestrian piece of analysis found in study guides.
Instead, Mayaro Gold is a stellar academic work which encourages students and readers to think more deeply and more clearly about an author’s works. This book is an intriguing read for the questions it evokes about character development and the literary process. The nuggets Salick offers may lead readers in certain directions, but there is much room for readers to draw their own conclusions from the information and analysis given.
Many writers speak volumes about their creative process and what led them to writing. Anthony never did. If writing is a destiny, Anthony never articulated such a belief. Salick discusses this point which forms an essential question in determining the “aboutness” of this literary analysis. How does a writer mine literary elements to create brilliant stories if he never intended to write and he is unaware of his own writing process?
At a panel discussion and question and answer session before the special Independence Day showing on TTT a few years ago, Anthony looked baffled and said, “I don’t know,” when asked why he thought his work was used so much in schools.
[caption id="attachment_1018373" align="alignnone" width="769"] Poet Mervyn Taylor had high praise for Michael Anthony's literary work. - File photo/ROGER JACOB[/caption]
Mayaro Gold is a traditionally structured literary analysis that begins with a short biography that places important notions in readers’ minds about the relationship between an author’s real life and literary works. Carefully and methodically Salick shows how growing up in Mayaro and living in San Fernando shaped Anthony’s literary career.
The introduction covers highlights of Anthony’s life from his birth in Mayaro on February 10, 1930 to his novels beginning with The Games Were Coming in 1963; then to The Briefcase in 201
