![]() ![]() ![]() At 620 pages of dense, challenging prose Black Leopard, Red Wolf is James’s absolutely stunning tour de force a classic Bildungsroman set in the mythical neverwhen of pre-colonial Africa, where monsters prowl the land and sometimes hide behind human eyes, where humans take on animal forms, where magic is ordinary, and miracles are everyday occurrences, but where human kindness is rarer than gold. ![]() And yet Black Leopard, Red Wolf is also a book describing with heartbreaking detail the fleeting, protean essence of happiness the capriciousness of fate and coincidence the twisted, uncanny ways of human heart. When James writes that there are two pages in this book that his mother is not allowed to read, I feel I know exactly which two pages he talks about and they are horrifying in the portrayal of the most intimate, vengeful violence. It is indeed a visceral, shockingly brutal and sometimes outright nightmarish journey through atrocities and evils, real and imagined. Black Leopard, Red Wolf elicits quite extreme reactions from readers – from hate to confusion to appreciation to love – and after reading it I no longer find this surprising. If Quentin Tarantino and Guillermo del Toro ever had a child who was an empath with deep, abiding love for Africa and penchant for intimate, graphic violence, his name might have been Marlon James. ![]()
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