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Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James
Jun. 16th, 2019 10:37 amBlack Leopard, Red Wolf
3/5. Tracker, who has a nose, is recruited to join the search for a boy allegedly kidnapped from a slaver. The search takes them across fantasy Africa.
Oof. I struggled with this. I kept thinking I would abandon it, but whenever I picked it up, it had this rubbernecking road accident quality to it.
I should rephrase. This book is definitely doing A Thing. But it is not A Thing I like or want, and I don't even really have the tools to evaluate whether it is doing the thing well (I suspect it is, though). It's a floridly violent, queer, slippery, unreliable narrator thing steeped in myth that I know very little about. Also a complicated cultural concept of gender thing that I did not entirely follow. And my morbid fascination for what you can clearly see is going to be a train wreck like 500 pages out did not ever tip over into enjoyment.
I tell you what, though, the commercial audio is interesting. It's narrated by a man of color with an accent who is leaning hard into the rhythms of this book, which are deeply oral rhythms. So much so that I had to slow the speed of this down from my usual, uh, very fast, and I struggled to follow it on my commutes with a lot of ambient noise. It's just doing audio in a way my brain isn't used to clocking. Which is absolutely appropriate to the book, I think, and I applaud the commitment. And it highlighted how unusual this book is, stylistically. Didn't help with my lack of enjoyment though.
Content notes: Violence and death everywhere, rape, other kinds of sexual violence, slavery, lots of ways of being awful. And a deeply disturbing thing with the loss of an eye that – maybe people who don't have my history with eye surgery won't be as squicked by, but I can't promise anything.
3/5. Tracker, who has a nose, is recruited to join the search for a boy allegedly kidnapped from a slaver. The search takes them across fantasy Africa.
Oof. I struggled with this. I kept thinking I would abandon it, but whenever I picked it up, it had this rubbernecking road accident quality to it.
I should rephrase. This book is definitely doing A Thing. But it is not A Thing I like or want, and I don't even really have the tools to evaluate whether it is doing the thing well (I suspect it is, though). It's a floridly violent, queer, slippery, unreliable narrator thing steeped in myth that I know very little about. Also a complicated cultural concept of gender thing that I did not entirely follow. And my morbid fascination for what you can clearly see is going to be a train wreck like 500 pages out did not ever tip over into enjoyment.
I tell you what, though, the commercial audio is interesting. It's narrated by a man of color with an accent who is leaning hard into the rhythms of this book, which are deeply oral rhythms. So much so that I had to slow the speed of this down from my usual, uh, very fast, and I struggled to follow it on my commutes with a lot of ambient noise. It's just doing audio in a way my brain isn't used to clocking. Which is absolutely appropriate to the book, I think, and I applaud the commitment. And it highlighted how unusual this book is, stylistically. Didn't help with my lack of enjoyment though.
Content notes: Violence and death everywhere, rape, other kinds of sexual violence, slavery, lots of ways of being awful. And a deeply disturbing thing with the loss of an eye that – maybe people who don't have my history with eye surgery won't be as squicked by, but I can't promise anything.