cover image The Accidental Indies

The Accidental Indies

Robert Finley. McGill-Queen's University Press, $39.95 (128pp) ISBN 978-0-7735-2006-6

A highly imaginative, at times elusive exercise in poetic prose, this retelling of Columbus's discovery of the New World navigates the tenuous boundaries between academic study and literary imagination. Finley uses Columbus's voyage as an allegorical lightning rod to explore how we understand and appropriate the world around us by measuring and naming our surroundings. We are first introduced to the infant Christopher, who, one sleepy Genoese afternoon, shows an inherent instinct for exploration as he intrepidly ventures out of his crib--only to tumble headlong to the floor. This initial adventure foreshadows his adult voyages of discovery. Finley's fictional Columbus is not merely a scientific navigator, but also a dreamer and a visionary guided by the star of Wishful Thinking, one of the many arch devices Findley employs. Like Noah in the Ark and Moses in the desert, he lives in exile on the Sea of Allegory, because landfalls can be fixed only in relation to the chartless sea. By recording his travels in diary entries and on charts, Columbus fashions a virtual world. And when he strikes land at last and begins to name the islands, bays and hills on his maps, he again translates reality into record. In the act of writing, Columbus lays claim to his erroneously dubbed ""Indies,"" and it is Columbus' transcription of the so-called New World, his ersatz version of this unknown land, that is brought back to the Old. In this intellectual, though somewhat cryptic meditation, 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. Illustration. (Apr.)