A Brief History of Seven Killings eBook Kindle

This was probably the most challenging novel I've read in several years. Who am I kidding? There's no probably about it. Marlon James has constructed an incredibly complex story, and it took every bit of memory available to me to keep up. He was kind enough to include a cast of characters, but I made it a point to refer to it as little as possible, opting instead to try and follow the story under my own power.

Add to the story's complexity the fact that most of the characters are from the ghettos of Kingston, and speak in a patois that takes some serious acclimation initially, and will slow your reading speed to a crawl at times. Amazingly though, after spending nearly a week with these characters, I felt like I had picked up the meanings quite well and could read those sections much quicker. Strangely, for me, this adaptation was the most rewarding aspect of this particular reading experience. In fact, as much respect as I now have for Marlon James' talent, I have to admit that I did not actually enjoy this novel, and found it made for an almost constantly uncomfortable reading experience.

The last time I felt the inability to enjoy such a well written book, I was reading In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, a Pulitzer finalist. Both books require the reader to spend most of their time in very difficult places. By difficult I mean places where innocents suffer a great deal of agony and injustice, and both books left me feeling a certain hopelessness from which I felt the reader was never released. That may well be James' intention, and the fact that he could take me to such places and make them feel so real as to make me uncomfortable is a testament to his talents.

This novel contains a great deal of incredibly graphic violence (including rape), and in fact I cannot name a more graphically violent novel that I've read in the past few years. Perhaps Philip Meyers' "The Son" comes close? There is also a lot of quite graphic sex, and since the majority of the novel's many characters are hardcore criminals, the language is very often coarse throughout the story. The number of such moments are what makes it difficult for me to recommend the book to anyone whose taste and tolerance for such things I do not know well. But the novel seems to me to have been an honest one, and as you wallow in the depths and the dregs with these gangsters, you sense the suffering from which they were born, and and begin to understand their Machiavellian existence. Again, James was able to take me to some places I've certainly never been, but I can't necessarily say I'm glad I went there.

Overall, this is a brilliantly executed novel by a man who possesses a great deal of talent, and yet it is a book that is likely to prove a challenging read to most, for the reasons I've listed and more. I can't say that I'm happy to have read it, but I can certainly appreciate the art that James has created, and I do take some personal satisfaction in having followed such an intricate story to its end. Reading difficult fiction isn't always enjoyable, but it is usually beneficial, and for that I can say I'm grateful to have read A Brief History of Seven Killings.

"A Brief History of Seven Killings" is an epic, intense, and awe-inspiring book. The comparisons to James Joyce and "As I Lay Dying" are apt and deserved.

A caution: This novel has multiple narrators (one of whom changes names several times), lengthy stream-of-consciousness passages, and is written with a great reliance on Jamaican patois and with references to events that may be unfamiliar to many readers. In short, it is a tough read. I started it and got about 50 pages in and realized I had no idea what I had read, so I put it aside, read some lengthy reviews and pieces of literary criticism about the book, and then started over. That was time well-spent, since after that I quickly became immersed in the book and enjoyed it thoroughly.

The first half of the book, leading up to the attempted assassination of Bob Marley (referred to only as "The Singer", which gets to be a bit cloying), is stronger than the second half, dealing with the deaths of those involved in the attempt. This is not because those latter stories are uninteresting -- they are -- but because James is at his best in fully painting the world of December 1976 Jamaica. The first 300-odd pages take place over just two days, giving all the characters time to emerge. The rest of the book is a bit more rushed (and therefore a bit more confusing).

Each chapter of this book is a first person account. Some of the chapters are quite graphic in both their language and content. This entertains, but because there are so many switches from politicians, to scared women, to gangster killers, to CIA, to journalists, etc, etc, in the end I had to make an exhaustive, hand written list of who was who and who was what (although there is a list of all the characters at the start of the novel, my ebook cannot automatically return to a specific place once it leaves that page). Finally, with this list I was able to work out who the 'bombocloth' was doing the talking in each chapter. Every one of the characters live in their own little self-made or circumstantial hells, so be forewarned that this is not an easy read for this reason alone. It's also not an easy read due to the Jamaican patois of some of the characters and convoluted structure of the story. I had to take regular breathers from the novel to rid myself of the thoughts of certain psychopathic types (psychopaths abound in this book, so don't be squeamish). Characters appear and disappear at random. Some are significant to the plot and some are not. Thankfully, by perserverance, I was finally able to decipher what was being said by the Jamaicans and a plot even began to emerge. The story started to take on an exciting, suspenseful edge towards the second half. Be warned, this novel is fully bad to the core (although not a bad read at all).

I got the audio version of the book and it was fantastic. It had multiple narrators so the female person was read by a female, persons with American accents read for the American characters and the same was done for the Jamaican characters. I liked the story although I thought it was a little long. The first part where the Singer's attack was being planned I found was more cohesive than the later parts but all the events dovetailed in the end. There were a large number of balls in the air for this novel and the writer kept most of them moving smoothly for the most part but there were a few that fell. Profane language is used frequently and there is a great deal of graphic violence. The focus is on people who are poor, not short on money, but poor and trying to survive any way they can - this results in hard actions by desperate people. Given the writer's choices I think he did a great job in conveying how people survive in desperate circumstances and the forces that take advantage of them for selfish purposes. The book can be hard to read but I think it is worth it if the reader can stand the profanity and violence. I recommend this book and am hoping to read more works by this author

A BRIEF HISTORY OF SEVEN KILLINGS is bound to be a bestseller as it has an intriguing premise inspired by fact, an interesting setting and many critical endorsements even before the book is actually released. However prospective readers should also know this is a long complicated book that has a diverse cast of characters telling the story. Thankfully there is a list of seventy-six characters mentioned by these narrators sorted by the location and time period where they appear helpfully supplied at the beginning of the book. This list even includes a brief statement of these players' roles in the novel. I admit to turning to these four pages frequently in the course of reading the novel. Some of the narration uses a great deal of slang that is occasionally difficult to figure out even using context clues. I found myself often using internet resources to decipher some of this language as well as to get more background information about Jamaica in the 1970's, 80's and early 90's. This is certainly an ambitious book and it is well rendered. However the casual reader may want to realize the investment in time and effort needed to appreciate it.