The Book of Jamaica
1980
First Published
3.55
Average Rating
352
Number of Pages
"A truly excellent novel... The morbidly fascinating little twists of human existence are all love, sex, life and death, beauty and horror—the works." — Chicago Sun-Times In The Book of Jamaica, Russell Banks explores the complexities of political life in the Caribbean and its ever-present racial conflicts. His narrator, a thirty-five-year-old college professor from New Hampshire, goes to Jamaica to write a novel and soon becomes embroiled in the struggles between whites and Blacks. He is especially interested in an ancient tribe called the Maroons, descendants of the Ashanti, who had been enslaved by the Spanish and then fought the British in a hundred-year war. Despite this history of oppression, the Maroons have managed to maintain a relatively autonomous existence in Jamaica. Partly out of guilt and an intellectual sense of social responsibility, Banks' narrator gets involved in reuniting two clans who have been feuding for generations. Unfortunately, his attempt ends in disaster, and the narrator must deal with his feelings of alienation, isolation, and failure.
Avg Rating
3.55
Number of Ratings
329
5 STARS
19%
4 STARS
30%
3 STARS
39%
2 STARS
9%
1 STARS
2%
goodreads
Author
Russell Banks
Author · 28 books
Russell Banks was a member of the International Parliament of Writers and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His work has been translated into twenty languages and has received numerous international prizes and awards. He has written fiction, and more recently, non-fiction, with Dreaming up America. His main works include the novels Continental Drift, Rule of the Bone, Cloudsplitter, The Sweet Hereafter, and Affliction. The latter two novels were each made into feature films in 1997.
