Kobbé Montague, novelist, launched his second book in Anguilla.
Caption2:Tales of Bed Sheets and Departure Lounges by Kobbé Montague
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GREAT BAY, St. Martin - The launch of
Tales
of Bed Sheets and Departure Lounges by Montague Kobbé, on
April 30 in
Anguilla, at The Valley Bistro, at
5 pm, introduces the author’s newest book to
the Caribbean.
Kobbé, whose
acute literary features appear regularly in
The
Daily Herald’s
WEEKender supplement, is excited
about “sharing with the people in Anguilla a different
book to the last, where the focus is not on an Anguillian story but still there
is creative material of interest to a local readership.”
Tales of Bed
Sheets and Departure Lounges is a book of 50 micro
stories about love and lust, travel and sleep. “Juancho
Yrasquin [airport] is central to a couple of the stories. Many of them are not
localized, and needn’t be, but were still written in Anguilla. Also on the
plane between St. Lucia and London for instance,” said the author.
Kobbé is well traveled. The conventional tropes of his stories are “deliberately approached with awareness of the
tradition and a dose of provocation, sending the reader on a dangerous path
along the outer edges of the cliché, hanging by the thread of irony and humour
over the abyss of the banal.” That’s how the UK-based Dog
Horn Publishing described its newest book by an author steeped in the
Caribbean, no matter how far he may wander.
Here’s another
discovery, or another way of spreading stories throughout the region: the book
is bilingual. The title in Spanish is
Historias de camas y aeropuertos. The very layout of the text simultaneously
highlights “the similarities (or lack thereof) between the two languages and
the shortcomings of language in general to express reality in full,” concurred Kobbé. The ever-searching
literary critic is also the constant blogger at
Memo from La-La land (mtmkobbe.blogspot.com).
The first book by Kobbé,
The Night
of the Rambler (2013), a novel about 1960s
Anguilla, promised that the writer would be back.
Tales of Bed Sheets … makes good on that promise with a book in which sound (there’s a
temptation to read the pieces aloud) and the short stories are boiled down to what
the publisher called, the “most fundamental core: action.”
Montague Kobbé was born in Caracas,
Venezuela, and over the past decade has resided in Bristol, Leeds, London, and
Munich. His close ties to the Caribbean stem from his life and family ties of
over 25 years in Anguilla. His writings have been published in Anguilla, St.
Martin, Antigua, Trinidad and Tobago, Argentina, Venezuela, USA, Spain, and the
United Kingdom.
