When Guntur, the main character of Norman Lock’s Shadowplay, commits himself to the life of a dalang, a Javanese shadow-puppeteer, the narrator spells out his future: "Guntur would be . . . a shadow—a ghost—a teller of stories about shadows and ghosts to people who will be shadows and ghosts for him always." Guntur, perhaps like all storytellers, is bound to tell his story from behind a screen, separating himself from the world even as he aims to represent it. Just as a dalang retells ancient and iconic stories in his puppet-theatre, Shadowplay is itself a fable that stages the storyteller's struggle between imagination and reality, experience and its record.http://www.raintaxi.com/online/2010summer/lock.shtml
Buy Shadowplay from Ellipsis Press.
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