Birthmark

Amazon.com Price: $24.95 (as of 02/05/2019 16:40 PST- Details)

Description

When Stephen Clingman used to be two, he underwent an operation to take away a birthmark under his right eye. The operation failed, and the birthmark returned, but in quite altered form. In this captivating book, Clingman takes the fact of that mark―its appearance, disappearance, and return―as a guiding motif of memory.

Not only used to be the operation unsuccessful, it affected his vision, and his eyes came to see another way from each other. Birthmark explores the questions raised by living with divided vision in a divided world―the world of South Africa under apartheid, where every view used to be governed by the markings of birth, the accidents of color, race, and skin. But what were the effects on the mind? Clingman’s book engages quite a few questions. How, in such circumstances, are we able to come to a deeper kind of vision? How are we able to achieve wholeness and acceptance? How are we able to find our place in the middle of turmoil and change?

In a beguiling narrative set on three continents, this can be a story that may be personal, painful, comic, and in the end uplifting: a book not so much of the coming of age but the coming of perspective.


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