Bildungsroman
/ˈbɪldʊŋzrəʊˌmɑːn/
Noun: a novel dealing with one person’s formative years or spiritual education.
(Oxford Languages)
It’s been an eventful, ambitious summer for our readers as we chose a writer whose work highlights the variety of creative talents and strengths that the Caribbean cultivates.
Jamaican author Nalo Hopkinson became the youngest ever Grand Master of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association in 2020, joining the ranks of Ray Bradbury and Ursula K. LeGuin. Hopkinson is a prolific and renowned writer, speaker, educator and mentor and role model for young writers of colour. She is also professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside.
Hopkinson calls herself an afro-futurist and her writing draws from her heritage, upbringing (she is the child of a librarian mother and writer-educator father), oral tradition, and Anansi stories, Homer and Kurt Vonnegut (whose work she was reading competently by age six).
Midnight Robber is a complex novel that employs research and imagination to achieve complex world-building and a hybridised dialect combining English, French and creole influences. It tells the story of Tan-Tan, the Robber Queen and her exile from Toussaint, a distant planet where the future descendants of the Caribbean live. It can be a difficult novel to navigate and read as it explores and confronts difficult contemporary social issues. Our group was fortunate to have a special guest speaker at the last meeting to help navigate the genre, structure and influences. Dr. Sarah Falcus is an expert on feminist literature, and fictional portrayals of the Caribbean in fiction. Midnight Robber is included in her curriculum at the University of Huddersfield and we were grateful for her talk and Q&A.
We’re on a short break for the remainder of the summer, but returning in late September to discuss a new novel an celebrate Caribbean literature. Prepare for more great books. To read together in the remainder of 2022, watch this space.
Bildungsroman is the combination of two German words: Bildung, meaning “education,” and Roman, meaning “novel.” Fittingly, a bildungsroman is a novel that deals with the formative years of the main character, and in particular, with the character’s psychological development and moral education. (Merriam Webster)