Bøker av Joyce Cary

From her prison cell, the irrepressible, magnetic Sara Monday looks back on the past half-century of her life in Herself Surprised. Born into a poor family, her employment while still a young girl as a cook in a middle-class household set her on a colourful and picaresque path. In To Be a Pilgrim, Tom Wilcher, a wealthy and disgraced lawyer who has been both Sara's employer and her lover, has retreated to his estate near the end of his life to wrestle with his tormented conscience. And the centre of The Horse's Mouth, a charming, talented,impoverished artist named Gulley Jimson-also a lover of Sara Monday-is a restless, rebellious, and self-serving scoundrel whose antics verge on the appalling and farcical.Read together, these three vigorous and unforgettable narrative voices offer a sweeping vision of the first half of the twentieth century that is lyrical, profane, tragic, and comic all at once.Published in 1941, 1942, and 1944, the novels in Cary's trilogy were designed to reveal three complex characters, not only as they see themselves, but as they are seen by one another, resulting in a work of three-dimensional depth and force.'Family life just goes on. Toughest thing in the world. But of course it is also the microcosm of a world. You get everything there-birth, life, death, love and jealousy, conflict of wills, of authority and freedom, the new and the old. And I always choose the biggest stage possible for my theme...' Joyce Cary

Memoir of the Bobotes is an extraordinarily vivid account of a forgotten war, fought by peasants under primitive conditions and perhaps a precursor for Balkan wars of more recent memory. This literary tour de force is both a moving account of war and a touching portrait of the naivety of youth, originally written as a journal of the author's own experience - Cary was a Red Cross stretcher-bearer and cook in the Balkan War of 1912 to 1913. From one of the greatest writers of the twentieth-century, Memoir of the Bobotes is a beautiful classic of British and Irish literature. Joyce Cary was born in 1888 into an old Anglo-Irish family and educated at Clifton. He studied art, first in Edinburgh and then in Paris, before going up to Trinity College, Oxford in 1909 to read law. On coming down he served as a Red Cross orderly in the Balkan War of 1912-13, the inspiration for Memoir of the Bobotes, before joining the Nigerian Political Service. He served in the Nigeria Regiment during the First World War, and his time in Africa provided the inspiration for his first four novels. Though he settled in Oxford as a full-time writer in 1920, it was not until 1932 that his first book was published. At the time of his death in 1957, he was recognised as one of the leading novelists in the world.

This 1958 book by artist Joyce Cary examines 'the relation of the artist with the world as it seems to him, and to see what he does with it'. Cary speaks from practical experience when describing artistic inspiration and the ways in which varying arts present different forms of 'truth'.