Story for a Black Night
Story for a Black Night (ISBN 0618494839) by Clayton Bess (real name Robert Locke), published in 1982, is a family drama novel set in Africa. It won the 2002 Phoenix Award Honor Book award.
Plot
A 40-year-old man tells a story of his childhood, when he was ten, living with his sister, mother and grandmother. When strangers left a baby with smallpox at the house, the family is affected by the disease.[1][2]
Reception
The book was included in the University of Chicago's Center for Children's Books' volume "The Best in Children's Books: The University of Chicago Guide to Children's Literature, 1979-1984", which called it "a stunning first novel", "taut and tender, deftly structured, vivid".[2]
Many other similarly favorable critical comments are available on Robert Locke's personal website. Easiest way to get there is to google "robert locke black night". From that main page there are links to many other pages including Q & A from students of literature asking the author to further describe the differences between the true story and his fictional version. There is also a fascinating link to the efforts of Rose-Marie Vassallo-Villaneau in her two translations into French. Locke asked Vassallo-Villaneau when she undertook the first translation how she intended to deal with the Liberian English of the narrator. She replied that she would use the simplest, purest French. But after the English version won the Phoenix Honor Award in 2002 for a book that has endured, she decided that she wanted to do a second translation, this time attempting her own French West African dialect.
Also from this main page is a link to the 2014 one-act play "PURE HEART in Black of Night" with the author now using his playwright's name Robert Locke. Locke speaks of how thrilling it was for him to tell the same story again, revisiting these characters with whom he has such simpatico, but creating brand new lines of dialogue in that rich Liberian English he so admired in order to achieve that mesmerizing in-this-moment storytelling of live theater, actors before an audience, no black-outs, the locales changing as the actors move among and between them fluidly.
These last two paragraphs supplied by Robert Locke, Aug. 2016.
References
- ↑ "Story for a Black Night", Kirkus Reviews, https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/clayton-bess-2/story-for-a-black-night/
- 1 2 Zena Sutherland, The Best in Children's Books: The University of Chicago Guide to Children's Literature, 1979-1984, U of Chicago Press, 1986