Marlon James

F

forclosure

Well-known member
I mean sod it i'm surprised there hasn't been any thread on him not just cause he was the first Jamaican to win it but just generally speaking

I've read 3 of his books (Book of Night Women, Black Leopard Red Wolf, and of course A Brief history of seven killings) part of the way through his most recent one which i would like to get back to

but where do you man stand?
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
i might read 7 killings one day. danny l liked it. thats the best i can do, sorry.
 
C

catalog

Well-known member
I read about 3/4 of it and then I lost it on a long bus journey, but never bothered to buy it again. Couldn't really get into it.

But then my friend just posted it me (as an exchange present when I posted him neon screams) and my other mate was saying the subsequent Sci fi ones might be up my street cos they feature some outre sex scenes.
 
C

catalog

Well-known member
I wouldn't bother personally. From what I can remember, it was trying to hit a few too many things and seemed to lack any kind of sympathetic character. There's some CIA characters that are laughable.
 
padraig (u.s.)

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
been a minute but I recall Seven Killings being pretty great

not only a postcolonial text, but very much a great postcolonial novel in the tradition of Things Fall Apart etc, tho a modern one in the sense that it deals with the consequences of both direct British imperialism and later indirect U.S. imperialism - poverty and the legacy of a monocropping economy intersecting with being yet another Cold War sphere of influence proxy battlefield. thought it was really successful at evoking a multifaceted cross-section of mid-late 70s JA - which you don't usually get as a foreigner unless you know the country quite well - how different kinds of people lived with and thought about the JLP/PNP situation, as well as a pretty neat dissection of how neoliberal indirect imperialism actually functions. and I particularly liked how strongly and seamlessly he follows that American-backed political violence through to the Shower Posse et al JA gangsters and the 80s crack trade.
 
C

catalog

Well-known member
its true it was deinitely not what i was expecting ("multifaceted cross-section of mid-late 70s JA") but nothing copnving for me. can't see that i'll re=read it anytimer soon but keep it coming those who've read it
 
C

catalog

Well-known member
literally got it on the shelf and apart from claudiius the god, i got nothing else on,. out of interst padraig haver you read claudius novels ?
 
V

version

Well-known member
padraig (u.s.) said:
been a minute but I recall Seven Killings being pretty great

not only a postcolonial text, but very much a great postcolonial novel in the tradition of Things Fall Apart etc, tho a modern one in the sense that it deals with the consequences of both direct British imperialism and later indirect U.S. imperialism - poverty and the legacy of a monocropping economy intersecting with being yet another Cold War sphere of influence proxy battlefield. thought it was really successful at evoking a multifaceted cross-section of mid-late 70s JA - which you don't usually get as a foreigner unless you know the country quite well - how different kinds of people lived with and thought about the JLP/PNP situation, as well as a pretty neat dissection of how neoliberal indirect imperialism actually functions. and I particularly liked how strongly and seamlessly he follows that American-backed political violence through to the Shower Posse et al JA gangsters and the 80s crack trade.
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This is a decent read on Jamaica and the Cold War.

defector.com

The Cold War Killed Cannabis As We Knew It. Can It Rise Again? | Defector

Somewhere survives the original cannabis strains, those plants that had not been bred to be more profitable or less conspicuous. The plants that had not been burned by the Americans trying to deny their real or imagined enemies in Moscow or Kingston the financial benefits.
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padraig (u.s.)

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
catalog said:
I wouldn't bother personally. From what I can remember, it was trying to hit a few too many things and seemed to lack any kind of sympathetic character. There's some CIA characters that are laughable.
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in re sympathetic character - the obv one is the almost entirely off-page Singer (i.e. Bob) around whom the novel book orbits, tho you could probably look at some other characters (the older head gangster in the Tivoli Gardens equivalent comes to mind) as relatively sympathetic. mostly it's a book about people making decisions in difficult circumstances, occasionally other people who are creating those circumstances, and the consequences of those decisions. not sure the point of the book - or any novel - is sympathetic characters.

there's only one CIA character iirc and I didn't think he was laughable at all - he's portrayed as a frustrated imperial bureaucrat in addition to a mid-70s, paranoid CIA case officer, which rings pretty true to me.

"trying to hit a few too many things" I don't necessarily agree with but is a valid position to take, I think
 
C

catalog

Well-known member
i think it was one of those i was really looking forward to and it just went in this totally off direction for me. likr the bob depicted felt like an interesting way to do it, wheres he off to one side, if you see what i mean, but there's then this aloofness wehich stops you being arsed about him
 
padraig (u.s.)

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
yunno thinking about it the book it most reminds of is maybe Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson

the ability to produce something compelling out of a sprawling historical sweep with many threads, to bring very diverse characters to life as multifaceted individuals, and to get to some kind of insight about the heart of darkness

Seven Killings isn't quite on the same level, but then not much is on the same level as the magnum opus of probably on the greatest writers of the last few decades, so next tier down is still pretty good
 
padraig (u.s.)

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
catalog said:
out of interst padraig haver you read claudius novels ?
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no. the Roman Empire and dynastic succession and palace coups interests me vastly less than the Republic.

I probably should at some point, they're supposed to be good and canonical in the popular view of antiquity I guess.

I did read Colleen McCullough's Masters of Rome series a couple years ago, which is Tolstoyan epic covering the last 60+ years of the Republic (i.e. its most interesting, and best historically documented, period)

not sure if I'd recommend it or not - I quite liked it, but goes on forever and has a million characters, not sure if people here would be into it. the prose is also quite utilitarian, it's very focused on characters, dialogue, plot.
 
padraig (u.s.)

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
Mary Renault's novels are supposed to be quite good, and authentic, on Ancient Greece btw but I haven't read them so couldn't say
 
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