A Brief History of Seven Killings: WINNER of the Man Booker Prize 2015 (urspr publ 2014; utgåvan 2015)

I really liked the book, but it is a lot of work. The internet was my friend. I found references for patois and history, and even a book guide. I intend to read it again and I expect a second reading will result in 5 stars. ( )

4.5 stars. The actual crime-politics overarching story of this is fairly impenetrable to me; however, James's rotating cast of narrators is extremely rich and vivid to the point where that often fades into the background. Looking forward to reading more. ( )

Read in parallel with lots of other books as it's quite long compared to what I usually read. Really enjoyable and distinct every time I came back to it. ( )

I remember at some point while reading this book thinking that it was sort of a cross between As I Lay Dying and 2666 and perhaps some literature from Jamaica that I hadn't encountered yet, so it was sort of rewarding to read an explicit nod to the Faulkner in the book's closing acknowledgments. I do like both the Bolaño and the Faulkner, but I'm not sure that the grit of the former and the narrative trick of the latter are a great fit at great length. Length, then, is my main complaint with James's book. I learned more about Jamaican history and about Bob Marley and about the Rastafarian religion (who knew it was an actual religion and not just a pot-centric lifestyle?) than I had ever known, and for that I'm grateful. I enjoyed learning to read the Jamaican patois without stumbling (I've internalized "bombocloth" and am likely to have trouble suppressing that swear word from my own vocabulary). And I found the story somewhat interesting, if also somewhat spare in spite of all the words in its telling. I just really think I would have liked 350 or even 400 pages of the book rather than almost 700. It became a burden and I found myself reading to end it rather than reading to savor it. This book is another for which I really wish I could give partial stars. It's a better book than 2 stars but, for me, maybe not up to 3. ( )

A Long, Drawn-Out History of a Bunch of Killings

Well, the book is actually called A Brief History of Seven Killings, but my title is more realistic. Parts of James Marlon's book are excellent (for example, the chilling chapter told from the point of view of a man being buried alive), but I would not have missed parts of it at all.

The story is at first about an attempt on Bob Marley's life, which left him wounded but not dead on the eve of a peace concert; the narrative then expands to include drug gangs that made crack into big business in the US. The story is told from the points of view of myriad characters: not just the would-be killers and other gangsters, but also CIA agents in Jamaica, one of their Jamaican girlfriends, an American journalist, and so on.

Perhaps as a woman I'm biased, but my favorite character is the girlfriend, who also once slept with The Singer, as he is known. She witnessed the attempt on him and spends the rest of the book fleeing and using false names. I like her persistence and cunning in the face of violence.

However, many of the other characters began to blur together for me. Nonetheless, I'm glad I finished the book, as some loose pieces came together at the end. And I learned a lot of Jamaican slang, in which the worst curse word is a term for menstrual pad!

Three little quotations:

"Jail is the ghetto man university."
"Peace can't happen when too much to gain in war."
"...the quickest way to not live at all is to take one day at a time." ( )