The Jamaican writer Marlon James won on Tuesday night the Man Booker Prize for A Brief History of Seven Killings , about trying to Bob Marley musician’s murder in 1976.
Marlon James, 44, is the first writer of Jamaica to win the most prestigious British literary award for the best novel. “This is so ridiculous that I think I’ll wake up tomorrow and did not happen,” said James when took the stage after being announced winner at the ceremony in London, dedicated the award to late father who, in rum bars in Kingston , was literary duels around Shakespeare as a child.
The book tells in 686 pages political conflicts and the rise of drug trafficking in Jamaica and has every chapter written in patois (the Jamaican Creole). This is the third novel writer who lives in Minneapolis, USA. The first, John’s Crow’s Devil , about the relationship between two rival preachers in Jamaica in the 1950s, was almost hidden forever on a computer hard drive, after being rejected 78 times by publishers approached by James . Would eventually be released in 2005 and was followed in 2009 by The Book of Night Women , romance dedicated to the scourge of slavery, told through the eyes of a Jamaican born a slave on a sugar plantation eighteenth century.
Marlon James, now based in the United States, where he teaches creative writing at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota, ranked A Brief History Of Seven Killings as an “exile novel”, explaining that if he lived now in Jamaica would not have written. “We do not want to talk about history, we do not talk about corruption, we do not even speak of homosexuality,” said the writer to the New York Times . “I love my country to death, but I also have memory of how much of our history has been paid with blood”.
And blood is not lacking in this polyphonic book who live the most diverse characters (CIA agents and Jamaican politics, politicians, Cuban exiles, drug dealers, music journalists, Bob Marley, and always identified only as “Singer”). The turning point serving spark the whole narrative is the attempt of Bob Marley murder in 1976 in their own home and a few days of a concert for peace timed to coincide with the elections which then divided the country in two, generating huge domestic violence (between supporters rival gangs of each of the parties and an endemically corrupt police) and an intense geopolitical activity (the CIA openly supported the Labour Party and sent operating for the land, while the People’s National Party, which introduced as Marley concert promoter that nearly took the life the musician, had political support of Cuba and the Soviet Union). The story travels to the 1980s, jumping from Jamaica to the United States, where Jamaican traffickers play important role in the crack trade.
“It’s a detective story that moves in addition to the criminal world and leads us to a recent history that we know very little, “said jury chairman, Michael Wood, after announcing the winner. The president of the jury also said it was “an extraordinary book.” Quoted by the British newspaper The Guardian , Michael Wood added that it is a novel “very exciting, very violent, full of profanity.” “It was a unanimous decision” and that “had no difficulty deciding”.
The book writes the Guardian , has many fans. The newspaper New York Times published a very flattering critique: “It’s like Tarantino’s remake of the movie The Harder They Come but with a soundtrack written by Bob Marley and . a screenplay by Oliver Stone and William Faulkner, with perhaps a little creative impulse of a little marijuana is epic in every sense of the word:. radical, mythical, top, colossal and disturbingly complex is also raw, dense, violent, blistering, darkly humorous, exciting and exhausting – a testament to the grand ambition and the prodigious talent of Mr. James. ” Marlon James, who in addition to the decisive influence of Faulkner, also mentions the name of Charles Dickens as critical to look mosaic of a society built by the meeting of different perspectives, contexts and language features of the multitude of characters who inhabit the novel.
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