TIL about the author Richard Flanagan. This excerpt from his new book, 'Question 7', is compelling and a bit horrifying. While reading, I found myself making sure I could breath.The book is out in the UK and coming to the US in September.
The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin audiobook review – from the civil rights frontline
Law & Order’s Jesse L Martin narrates two powerful essays examining the Black experience in the US, the first in a series marking the author’s centenary year
The Church in a Secular Age series of books is just. So. Good! The historical narrative Andrew Root expertly describes of 20th and 21st century America and how mass consumer culture, mass media, and Protestant Christianity contributed to and adapted to each other to create the hell we live in today is just 🤯.
Just finished 'Not Without Flowers' by Amma Darko. It is definitely very readable. Some of the dialogue feels clunky, but only some. It feels like it doesn't quite have a moral vision though it is reaching for one. It reminds me of Soyinka, though with less big grammar and without Soyinka's metaphysical and political vision. ( This could just be me lumping West African writers together, because you know that old racism thing).
Darko gets extra points for not taking time to explain her Ghanian cultural references. I suspect other authors from the region get pressured into it by editors and publishers. It really grinds my gears when the narrator explains things that may be unfamiliar to an English reader like me. You are not writing ethnographic studies for tourists. You are writing, in this case, a Ghanaian novel. So I appreciated her consistency there.
It is also sad and scary. It is a cast of sad broken people. In Soyinka's hands they would have looked for redemption and failed to find it without extinguishing hope. In Darko's, I think, that they somehow find absolution or punishment. The ending feels weak. Having said that the build up towards the ending is magnificent. The various characters story arcs come together in a well worked crisis. It is the crisis itself that I'm unsure about.
Her plotting and pacing is great. The story telling pleasantly demanding. It was a Sunday well spent.