A brief history of seven killings

A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A Brief History of Seven Killings is a richly textured, complex, monumental piece of oral literature. In order to sell more books, an inside blurb by Riverhead compares it to work by a string of American authors, when in reality James’s book integrates a Caribbean pantheon populated by the works of Patrick Chamoiseau, Luis Rafael Sánchez, Guillermo Cabrera Infante and Jacques Stephen Alexis.

At first it’s no cakewalk. Jamaican patois has a pretty steep learning curve. After a while, though, you actually resent the chapters written in regular American English and begin missing and hoping for the ones written in Jamaican. (Your r’asscloth mind will not let go of it for a while after you finish reading the bomboclat novel, too. Seen?)

James is knowledgeable, real and unafraid. He is not an American author performing Jamaican; he is a Jamaican writing a polyphonic, choral masterpiece where voice (idiom, slang, English, Patois, the Word), is both conveyor of meaning and meaning itself; maker of personality and protagonist.

All characters are finely shaped and contoured, making them real and unforgettable. Josie Wales’ character arc is an achievement in itself. Some chapters work as standalone short stories, especially the one called “Kim Clarke,” a Caribbean character study of great psychological depth.

Flaws? Only one made me cringe, for true… The Spanish. That is one embarrassing thing to get wrong, and it adds to the embarrassment that it would have been so easy to get it right. In his acknowledgments, James thanks one Martha Dicton for her translation of James’s “loose English” into Cuban Spanish… My youth, I’m here to tell you that next time you should check what you’re given with a native speaker. Sometimes Doctor Love sounds like he’s from Ciudad Juárez, sometimes he sounds like he’s from Sevilla, but never from Cuba. If you had never told me he’s from Havana, I would never had gotten it from his speech.

But even with that speckle marring an otherwise impeccable narrative, this is certainly a book to be read and reread. An instant classic.

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