The Accidental Indies

marvel, as Europeans must have then, at the first sight of parrots ... Finley gives us the opportunity to stand watch all night with Columbus, keeping the admiral company as we wait for land." The Citizen's Weekly Books "A remarkable achievement, an impeccably researched and engagingly inquisitive hybrid, as lovely and articulate as New World Parrot." Malahat Review "The grace and poetry of Finley's text ensure that any moralizing remains subordinate to the power of his classic storytelling. Striking images, rhythmic phrasing, and an eclectic vocabulary that prefers Anglo-Saxon to Latin results in a text that is as thrilling as it is serene." The Harvard Book Review "Read this short book and then read it again so that you can begin filling in all the marginalia that you missed the first time: the "fantasies - grotesques - titillations and taboos." The Accidental Indies is a work of adventure and exploration, about Columbus certainly, but also about how storytelling and language fills out but never replaces our metaphors and our own travels." The Montreal Gazette "Robert Finley's gorgeous, imaginative first book of fiction, beautifully explores the theme of mistaken identity: how perceptions of the new are twisted by where we come from, how our cultural signifiers reshape unfamiliar environments and people to suit our prejudices ... What a lovely book." The Georgia Straight "Finleys lyrical style, conjuring up the exotic, is reminiscent of Marlowe's or Shakespeare's. Finley's description of Columbus painstakingly decorating his chart of the newly discovered islands savours of the golden qualities of the age - gorgeous richness and variety in everything from apparel to poetry." The Globe and Mail "Finley appropriates and recasts the Columbus myth in order to provide a thought-provoking commentary on the possessive and interpretative power of words, legends, and visions." Publishers Weekly "With the details of seaman ship and sailing culture also as authentic as possible, the book is in many respects a rigorous imaging of what it might have been like to really be there, without the knowledge and prejudices of today." University of Toronto Quarterly "A meditation on Christopher Columbus, the poetic prose of this book evokes the life's journey of the great navigator, from early childhood to his discovery of Hispaniola. By reproducing all the stylistic inventions of the author, the translator has masterfully rendered this prose poem filled with historical detail and the magnificent vocabulary of sailing ships and the sea. He makes us actually hear the intertwining voices of this dream-like tale." Jury for the 2004 Governor-General's Literary Award in the category of French Translation