![]() ![]() Both books provide unexpected, time- and thought-consuming templates for how to navigate the difficult and increasingly newspeak-infested divergence between the black and white, right and wrong certainties of the map of the world and the ever-shifting, fluid realities of life on the ground. Seven Killings is a periphery-focused, Joyce-infused, time-and-space-travelling, difficult, overly ambitious but ultimately brilliant literary moonwalk between the boundaries separating historical fact and its unique, witty, powerfully questioning reconfiguration of the events surrounding the attempted assassination of Bob Marley in 1976 and their aftermath. On the other stands Marlon James’s 2015 Man Booker Prize-winning A Brief History of Seven Killings-a bass-heavy, reggae-charged, ‘five-o’ cornerboy shout-out to an alternative history of the same century. On one end stands Don DeLillo’s 1997 epic magnum opus Underworld, a novel described by Michael Ondaatje as ‘an aria and a wolf whistle’ to the turbulent, late-Cold War uncertainties of the second half of the twentieth century. In my personal, once vivacious, now sadly less regular reading life, there are two books that mark either end of the imaginary shelf of my interests, from the beginning of the twenty-first century to 2015. ![]() Black Leopard, Red Wolf is a frustrating could’ve, would’ve, should’ve affair, although it may yet prove to be the beginning of something, writes Tymon Smith. ![]()
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