Visitants
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Very good
Jacket: Very good
Pages: Good , price clipped
Markings: No markings
A landmark of Australian postcolonial fiction, Visitants unfolds with haunting, fragmented intensity on a remote Papua New Guinean island in 1959, chronicling the psychological unraveling of a group of colonial patrol officers as mysterious lights appear in the sky and rumors of supernatural visitors spread among the local Trobriand Islanders. Randolph Stow constructs the narrative through a mosaic of testimonies, official reports, and personal accounts, presenting the story from multiple perspectives that collectively illuminate the collision between colonial authority and indigenous belief. The novel's tone is deeply unsettling and elegiac, capturing the twilight of empire through characters whose grip on reason and purpose steadily erodes under the tropical heat and the weight of their own alienation. Stow argues, with quiet but devastating force, that the true visitants are the colonizers themselves — strangers in a land they can neither understand nor control — making this a profound meditation on power, perception, and cultural disintegration.
Author: Randolph Stow
Format: Hardback
Published: 1981, Taplinger Publishing Company / New York
Genre: Modern fiction
Condition remarks:
Book: Very good
Jacket: Very good
Pages: Good , price clipped
Markings: No markings
A landmark of Australian postcolonial fiction, Visitants unfolds with haunting, fragmented intensity on a remote Papua New Guinean island in 1959, chronicling the psychological unraveling of a group of colonial patrol officers as mysterious lights appear in the sky and rumors of supernatural visitors spread among the local Trobriand Islanders. Randolph Stow constructs the narrative through a mosaic of testimonies, official reports, and personal accounts, presenting the story from multiple perspectives that collectively illuminate the collision between colonial authority and indigenous belief. The novel's tone is deeply unsettling and elegiac, capturing the twilight of empire through characters whose grip on reason and purpose steadily erodes under the tropical heat and the weight of their own alienation. Stow argues, with quiet but devastating force, that the true visitants are the colonizers themselves — strangers in a land they can neither understand nor control — making this a profound meditation on power, perception, and cultural disintegration.