The Night of the Rambler

by Montague Kobbé

Overview

A gorgeously written and highly entertaining debut novel about a small island's struggle for independence from Britain.

“[Readers] will be rewarded with deeper insight into the political and economic turmoil engulfing that region.” —Historical Novel Society

“The Night of the Rambler is revolutionary, a reliquary, an impressionist tale of men who are by turns melancholy, raging, and often comic, their voices unique to this place and given a singular story.” —Susan Straight, author of Between Heaven and Here

With echoes of Junot Díaz, Vargas Llosa, and Zadie Smith, an exhilarating voyage across the Caribbean during a time of revolution from debut novelist Kobbé.

On June 9, 1967, sixteen men from Anguilla, a forgotten island in the Caribbean, set sail aboard a thirty-five-foot sloop, the Rambler, to make the night-time journey to St. Kitts, where they intended to carry out a coup d’état and install a new government sympathetic to their separatist cause. Set against the turbulent background of world politics in the sixties, The Night of the Rambler tells the story of a misinformed and misconceived plan, carried out incompetently by a group of scarcely trained and ill-equipped amateurs who escape calamity by mere coincidence. And yet, somehow, the main purpose of their mission, the furtherance of Anguilla’s struggle to dissociate itself from the newly formed state of St. Kitts-Nevis-Anguilla and to return to the British colonial fold, is significantly strengthened by this, quite possibly the most outrageous episode in the history of revolutions.

Loosely based on the historical facts surrounding the Anguilla Revolution of 1967, The Night of the Rambler unfolds across the fifteen hours that lapse between the moment when the “rebels” board the motorboat that will take them across the strait to St. Kitts, and the break of dawn the following day, when it becomes obvious that the unaccomplished mission will have to be aborted. The novel consciously moves away from the “historical” category, purposely altering at will the sequence of “facts” narrated, collating fully fictional episodes with vaguely accurate anecdotes and replacing the protagonists with fictional characters. At turns highly dramatic and hilarious, Kobbé brings deep honesty to the often-unexamined righteousness of revolution.

With echoes of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and Mario Vargas Llosa’s Conversation in the Cathedral, The Night of the Rambler touches upon the universal topics of freedom and self-determination with humor and sensibility, creating an alternative reality that is informed by real life but ultimately governed by the uncanny.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781617751813
Publisher:	Akashic Books, Ltd.
Publication date:	09/03/2013
Pages:	260
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Montague Kobbé was born in Caracas, Venezuela, and has resided in the UK, Germany, and Spain. He has had close ties to Anguilla for over thirty years and maintains a regular literary column in Sint Maarten’s Daily Herald. His work has been published in the New York Times and El Nacional (Venezuela) among many other media outlets. He is the author of The Night of the Rambler (a finalist for the Premio Literario Casa de las Américas) and Tales of Bed Sheets and Departure Lounges. On the Way Back is his latest novel.

Editorial Reviews

The pivotal moment in Anguilla’s fight for independence, as Kobbé tells it in his debut novel, was the uncertain night 16 Anguillans spent at sea in a 35-foot sloop, the Rambler, on their way to attack neighboring St. Kitts. The events of June 9, 1967, bookend a narrative that unspools the tiny Caribbean island’s history of subjugation. Anguillans, then subjects of the British associated state of St. Kitts-Nevis-Anguilla, lived cut off from the world: no electricity, no telephone lines, no ports. Kobbé interweaves backstories of the chief populist leaders—the diplomatic Alwyn Cooke and the hot-tempered Rude Thompson—while capturing how news of the grassroots uprising spread from person to person “like a virus.” Colorful detours into native lore, such as a rich Dutchman’s fabled courtship of a local beauty, strike grace notes that echo Marquez. But Kobbé, who is Venezuelan by birth, falls short of another bestselling Hispanic novelist, Junot Diaz: this narrator’s heavy-handed foreshadowing and stilted interjections want for the linguistic verve of a Yunior. Even so, readers who stick with the Rambler as it drifts in the waves will be rewarded with the little-known tale of how the underdog country demanded its own place in the 20th century. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

"With tremendous humanity and humor, the novel articulates these themes through the power of the relationships and the urgency each character demonstrates in this quest for self-determination."

The Caribbean Writer

"The Night of the Rambler is exceptional. Riveting, deeply thoughtful, and constantly inventive, Montague Kobbé’s novel is part literary thriller, part revolutionary study, part epic historical narrative. Altogether, it makes for one profound read."

Joe Meno

"This is a fine novel, a surprising novel, perhaps the first true novel I have read about the nature of revolutions. The Night of the Rambler is ambitious, smart, and successful. It raises all sorts of questions about what revolutions want, how revolutions fail, and why revolutions are necessary—challenging all the while how history remembers them."

Percival Everett

"The Night of the Rambler is revolutionary, a reliquary, an impressionist tale of men who are by turns melancholy, raging, and often comic, their voices unique to this place and given a singular story."
—Susan Straight, author of Between Heaven and Here

"This is a fine novel, a surprising novel, perhaps the first true novel I have read about the nature of revolutions. The Night of the Rambler is ambitious, smart, and successful. It raises all sorts of questions about what revolutions want, how revolutions fail, and why revolutions are necessary—challenging all the while how history remembers them."
—Percival Everett, author of Erasure

"The Night of the Rambler is exceptional. Riveting, deeply thoughtful, and constantly inventive, Montague Kobbé's novel is part literary thriller, part revolutionary study, part epic historical narrative. Altogether, it makes for one profound read."
—Joe Meno, author of Office Girl and Hairstyles of the Damned

From the Publisher