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MR POTTER
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Author:Jamaica Kincaid
The story of an ordinary man, his century, and his home: "Kincaid's most poetic and affecting novel to date" (Robert Antoni, The Washington Post Book World)
Jamaica Kincaid's first obssession, the island of Antigua, comes vibrantly to life under the gaze of Mr. Potter, an illiterate taxi chauffeur who makes his living along the roads that pass through the only towns he has ever seen and the graveyard where he will be buried. The sun shines squarely overhead, the ocean lies on every side, and suppressed passion fills the air.
Ignoring the legacy of his father, a poor fisherman, and his mother, who committed suicide, Mr. Potter struggles to live at ease amid his surroundings: to purchase a car, to have girlfriends, and to shake off the encumbrance of his daughters,one of whom will return to Antigua after he dies and tell his story with equal measures of distance and sympathy.
Retails:$11.00
ISBN: 0374528748
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B-MORE CAREFUL
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Author:Shannon Holmes
Holmes introduces characters with exhaustive backstories. We barely meet the book's major players before we're sent back to the womb with them, one after another, for the highlights of their upbringings and early days. Holmes plays chutes and ladders with time, backwards and forwards, giving us glimpses of the future before backtracking decades to an inciting or merely consonant incident in a character's past, leaving cliffhangers in the present (or future) for chapters at a time. B-More is a novel of gunplay, murder, and revenge, but because of its structure it doesn't build suspense in the manner of a conventional thriller. The book's narrative tensions, two major conflicts and countless smaller ones within them, are approached and resolved in the vocabulary of violence, in the climate of crime, but are at their root almost entirely interpersonal, predicated on familial, romantic or mentoring relationships gone wrong.
In B-More there is no right or wrong, no morality, only event. Holmes refuses to pass any judgment beyond that of the streets.
The streets are important. "The streets," used colloquially, comprise the undifferentiated wash of criminality and misery that's both the book's backdrop, flowing through its plot and housing projects, and a Greek chorus, a many-eyed, many-mouthed monster that grovels to the strong and devours the weak or weakening. The streets are always watching... They watch every character's decisions, they watch how the wicked are or aren't punished, and most of all they watch the lives of promising young black men and women spiral out of control.
Sometimes the spiral is upwards, into dizzying stratospheres of material excess, empires of luxury brand-name decadence built Yertle-the-Turtle style on an uneasy stack of middlemen, runners, and treacherous aspirants. Usually, though, and at least in the streets of B-More, inevitably, the spiral is downwards, to violent death at the hands of criminal and/or romantic rivals, to prison terms, or into the morass of addiction, the failure of the urban multitudes on which the (fleeting) success of the few is founded.
The author's voice is confident, her slang and aphorisms those of her characters. Aside from one pointed observation of linguistic difference -- a bigshot NYC dealer is annoyed by the Baltimorean affect of ending sentences with "yo," -- the narrator is as steeped in the story and its specific language as the characters. The immersion in Baltimore's street life is total, with the Virgil guiding us through this underworld so manifestly of it, but the downside is textual homogeneity. Especially in the long middle section things begin to blend, to blur: the voices, the histories, and even the chronology lose their sharpness, become unmoored from context, and we end up adrift in a river of shouts, threats and cries, of violence and doom, anguish and hardship looped, remixed, repeated, a punishing concatenation of gruesome deeds done to and by angry people in a slough that seems to allow no other course of action.
The book is exciting, if you have the imagination to fill in the descriptive blanks. It does hit hard, and while it isn't always vivid in the particulars, the characters behave believably and the author is in secure control of the twists and turns. The strangeness of the book, at least in relation to a conventional novel, is represented well by the bizarre afterword, a rambling poem by publisher Teri Woods. It's an astonishing self-indulgence on the part of Ms. Woods, made moreso by its final line: "Motherfuckers, I am the light."
Retails: $14.95
C&B Price: $10.00
Publisher:Teri Woods Publishing (Dec. 1, 2001)
Meow Meow Productions
ISBN: 0967224918
ISBN-13: 978-0967224916
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