But what has stayed with me are his more subtle observations on the human condition, how people don’t run away from terrible situations only because they don’t know where else to go, how love is like fear, grief is like fury and revenge can never be as satisfying as you imagine. James’s imagination is vast and fiery, and his numerous fight scenes are heart-pumping and vivid. The cities of this world rival any creation of Italo Calvino. The flow of bodily fluids is still relentless, and there is to my mind an excess of crudely referenced orifices and thrusting male genitalia. Then a line of pure poetry would stop me in my tracks. I reread sections to try to understand who was speaking and what was being said. The book is told in the syntax of a dialect: Verbs are left unconjugated, and words are shuffled around. 'Let us make this quick,' Sogolon often said, just as I was trying to catch my breath. Read Full Review >ĭuring the course of more than 600 pages, Sogolon lives a dozen lives and is haunted by a hundred ghosts. This is a novel about the power of grief where anger is a driving force, and in that, despite all its fantastical elements, it is a deeply human story. Retelling the same story from a different perspective is not a gimmick here it is a successful literary device that leads to a gripping narrative. This is writing with a kind of cadence that turns every line into a poem, every story a tale told around a fire, every event an occurrence deserving of attention.
As lush as the forests he describes, the prose in this novel is simple, rhythmic, and strangely elegant. an impressive amalgamation of folklore, magic, and mythology that weaves together several narratives, but the element that makes it memorable is James’s prose.
While shifting points of view, James.enriches the existing story, and the result is a book that simultaneously celebrates African mythology while creating its own. Marlon James’s Moon Witch, Spider King, the second book in his Dark Star trilogy, is both a continuation of the narrative that began with Black Leopard, Red Wolf in 2019 and an outstanding retelling of that story that expands on what the first book started.
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