Omeros Reading Response

Derek Walcott's Omeros is certainly a difficult book to write a response to, and with that being the task that lies before me, I must admit to being overwhelmed.

Actually, through a conversation with a friend in class, I came to this conclusion. My friend said that she feels that because Derek Walcott is an acclaimed author who clearly has a wonderful grasp of language and words as well as talents that go beyond our ability of understanding [as students] he should be recognized for that, and she should consider him a good author. But at the same time, isn't the mark of a good author that his readers connect and understand and relate to him? How can he be a "good" author if we just don't get it? Or does the fault lie within us, within our lack of intelligence, not high enough to appreciate the great academic masterpiece that is Omeros.

I think that- and correct me if I'm wrong- it's okay, to decide that a book is bad, or even perhaps to go as far as to say an author is bad, based on my own personal perception of the novel. The epic poem Omeros was, while beautifully written, indescribably confusing. I didn't appreciate Walcott's style of weaving back and forth between reality and fictitious worlds, his style of recording the events of the story so ambiguously, his style of using too many complex characters and too many time zones and too many references and just too...many.

In other words, I think the man tried to pack too much into one book. I think he has the potential to be an author I could really revere and love, but he fails to make himself relatable to the common reader, or at least this reader. I think that is a shortcoming on his part, and I think his work would be much more appreciated and much more powerful if he had made it more accessible to other people, people who aren't inside his head and don't think quite as complexly as he does.

That being said, I didn't walk away from Omeros with nothing of worth at all. There were themes which I found beautiful,  which I could recognize, and understand the importance. Themes of passion, and how passion can overtake us and kill us, literally or just emotionally. Themes of sin and redemption of course, made their way in. The themes of imperialism, of change, of the old combining with the new, of colonizing lands and taking from the natives who had resided there for years before. In this way, I found the book to be very poignant and at times I understood the characters; their own confusions, struggles, despairs, attempts to reconcile what they wanted with what they actually got. I found this all interesting and intriguing.

But Walcott's work was too peppered with superfluities, with question marks and pretty language to be an epic with real power. They say less is more and it is certainly the case here.