A Brief History of Seven Killings (Booker Prize Winner)

Besprechung
How to describe Marlon James s monumental new novel A Brief History of Seven Killings? It s like a Tarantino remake of The Harder They Come but with a soundtrack by Bob Marley and a script by Oliver Stone and William Faulkner, with maybe a little creative boost from some primo ganja. It s epic in every sense of that word: sweeping, mythic, over-the-top, colossal and dizzyingly complex. It s also raw, dense, violent, scalding, darkly comic, exhilarating and exhausting a testament to Mr. James s vaulting ambition and prodigious talent.
Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

[Marlon James] is a virtuoso [the novel is] an epic of postcolonial fallout, in Jamaica and elsewhere, and America s participation in that history. the book is not only persuasive but tragic, though in its polyphony and scope it s more than that .It makes its own kind of music, not like Marley s, but like the tumult he couldn t stop.
New York Times Book Review
 
Nothing short of awe-inspiring.
Entertainment Weekly
 
[A] tour de force [an] audacious, demanding, inventive literary work.
Wall Street Journal
 
Rendered with virtuosic precision and deep empathy.
Time
 
Exploding with violence and seething with arousal, the third novel by Marlon James cuts a swath across recent Jamaican history This compelling, not-so-brief history brings off a social portrait worthy of Diego Rivera, antic and engagé, a fascinating tangle of the naked and the dead.
The Washington Post

A strange and wonderful novel Mr. James s chronicle of late 20th-century Jamaican politics and gang wars manages consistently to shock and mesmerise at the same time.
The Economist  

James has written a dangerous book, one full of lore and whispers and history [a] great book... James nibbles at theories of who did what and why, and scripts Marley s quest for revenge with the pace of a thriller. His achievement, however, goes far beyond opening up this terrible moment in the life of a great musician. He gives us the streets, the people, especially the desperate, the Jamaicans whom Marley exhorted to: Open your eyes and look within:/ Are you satisfied with the life your living?
The Boston Globe
 
Thrilling, ambitious Both intense and epic.
Los Angeles Times
 
A prismatic story of gang violence and Cold War politics in a turbulent post-independence Jamaica.
The New Yorker
 
I highly recommend you pick [A Brief History of Seven Killings] up. As a book of many narrators, this novel reminds me of Roberto Bolano's The Savage Detectives.
NPR, All Things Considered
 
An impressive feat of storytelling: raw, uncompromising, panoramic yet meticulously detailed. The Jamaica portrayed here is one many people have heard songs about but have never seen rendered in such arresting specificity and if they have, only briefly.
Chicago Tribune
 
A sweeping novel that touches on family, friendship, celebrity, art, sexuality, ghetto politics, geopolitics, drug trade, gender, race and more, sending the reader from Jamaica to New York via Miami and Cuba and back.
Newsweek
 
Like a capacious 19th-century novel crossed with a paranoid Don DeLillo conspiracy-theory thriller the book rewards time spent, bringing a complex perspective on violence, corruption, and the untidiness of humanity to vivid life and astonishing detail. It makes you want to rush out and read everything else James has written.
The Philadelphia Inquirer
 
The way James uses language is amazing .Vigorous, intricate and captivating, A Brief History of Seven Killings is hard to put down.
Ebony  
 
A gripping tale in which music, drugs, sex, and violence collide with explosive results.
Bustle
 
James s masterful novel radiates; [it s] a character-driven tale that takes place in a maelstrom of guns, drugs and politics.
Playboy
 
Brilliantly executed The novel makes no compromises, but is cruelly and consummately a work of art.
The Minneapolis Star Tribune

Textauszug

 

Listen.

Dead people never stop talking. Maybe because death is not death at all, just a detention after school. You know where you re coming from and you re always returning from it. You know where you re going though you never seem to get there and you re just dead. Dead. It sounds final but it s a word missing an ing. You come across men longer dead than you, walking all the time though heading nowhere and you listen to them howl and hiss because we re all spirits or we think we are all spirits but we re all just dead. Spirits that slip inside other spirits. Sometimes a woman slips inside a man and wails like the memory of making love. They moan and keen loud but it comes through the window like a whistle or a whisper under the bed, and little children think there s a monster. The dead love lying under the living for three reasons. (1) We re lying most of the time. (2) Under the bed looks like the top of a coffin, but (3) There is weight, human weight on top that you can slip into and make heavier, and you listen to the heart beat while you watch it pump and hear the nostrils hiss when their lungs press air and envy even the shortest breath. I have no memory of coffins.

But the dead never stop talking and sometimes the living hear. This is what I wanted to say. When you re dead speech is nothing but tangents and detours and there s nothing to do but stray and wander awhile. Well, that s at least what the others do. My point being that the expired learn from the expired, but that s tricky. I could listen to myself, still claiming to anybody that would hear that I didn t fall, I was pushed over the balcony at the Sunset Beach Hotel in Montego Bay. And I can t say shut your trap, Artie Jennings, because every morning I wake up having to put my pumpkin-smashed head back together. And even as I talk now I can hear how I sounded then, can you dig it, dingledoodies? meaning that the afterlife is just not a happening scene, not a groovy shindig, Daddy-O, see those cool cats on the mat? They could never dig it, and there s nothing to do but wait for the man that killed me, but he won t die, he only gets older and older and trades out wives for younger and younger and breeding a whole brood of slow-witted boys and running the country down into the ground.

Dead people never stop talking and sometimes the living hear. Sometimes he talks back if I catch him right as his eyes start to flicker in his sleep, talks until his wife slaps him. But I d rather listen to the longer dead. I see men in split breeches and bloody longcoats and they talk, but blood comes out of their mouths and good heavens that slave rebellion was such ghastly business and that queen has of course been of bloody awful use ever since the West India Company began their rather shoddy decline compared to the East and why are there so many negroes taking to sleeping so unsoundly wherever they see fit and confound it all I seem to have misplaced the left half of my face. To be dead is to understand that dead is not gone, you re in the flatness of the deadlands. Time doesn t stop. You watch it move but you are still, like a painting with a Mona Lisa smile. In this space a three-hundred-year-old slit throat and two-minute-old crib death is the same.

If you don t watch how you sleep, you ll find yourself the way the living found you. Me, I m lying on the floor, my head a smashed pumpkin with my right leg twisted behind the back and my two arms bent in a way that arms aren t supposed to bend and from high up, from the balcony I look like a dead spider. I am up there and down here and from up there I see myself the way my killer saw me. The dead relive a motion, an action, a scream and they re there again just like that, the train that never stopped running until it ran off the

Beschreibung
Winner of the Man Booker Prize

One of Entertainment Weekly's Top 10 Books of the Decade

One of the Top 10 Books of 2014 Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

A thrilling, ambitious . . . intense (Los Angeles Times) novel that explores the attempted assassination of Bob Marley in the late 1970s, from the author of Black Leopard, Red Wolf

In A Brief History of Seven Killings, Marlon James combines masterful storytelling with his unrivaled skill at characterization and his meticulous eye for detail to forge a novel of dazzling ambition and scope.

On December 3, 1976, just before the Jamaican general election and two days before Bob Marley was to play the Smile Jamaica Concert to ease political tensions in Kingston, seven unnamed gunmen stormed the singer s house, machine guns blazing. The attack wounded Marley, his wife, and his manager, and injured several others. Little was officially released about the gunmen, but rumors abounded regarding the assassins fates. A Brief History of Seven Killings is James s fictional exploration of that dangerous and unstable time in Jamaica s history and beyond. Deftly spanning decades and continents and peopled with a wide range of characters assassins, drug dealers, journalists, and even ghosts James brings to life the people who walked the streets of 1970s Kingston, who dominated the crack houses of 1980s New York, and who reemerged into a radically altered Jamaica of the 1990s. Brilliantly inventive, A Brief History of Seven Killings is an exhilarating (The New York Times) epic that s been called a tour de force (The Wall Street Journal).