From Publishers Weekly
Launching the publisher's Callaloo series, dedicated to books by "writers of African descent," this corrosively funny and disquieting picaresque novel addresses the politics of identity and the racist brutality that marked America's westward expansion after the Civil War. Everett's ( Zulus ) vernacular narration is voiced by Curt Marder, an inveterate bigot and scamp whose "slender" education and conscience are brought into high relief when his house is burned and his wife kidnapped by bandits. Compelled to enlist a "tracker," an intrepid, mysteriously omniscient black man named Bubba, Marder sets off across God's country, a landscape of primeval beauty and frontier savagery. His episodic adventures in Native American camps and squalid cowboy towns, as well as an encounter with a cross-dressing Colonel Custer who eats raw meat and raves about "the Emasculation Proclamation," display the author's delight in the scoundrels and carnivalesque humor of the untamed frontier. The butt of countless practical jokes, Marder is dressed in war paint, tied to a stake and buried in the ground up to his neck, yet despite his affinities with other migratory and marginalized characters of the frontier, he suffers no crisis of conscience or moral maturity. For Everett is finally less concerned with psychological complexity than with the racist legacy of Manifest Destiny; shot through this novel's cartoonish surface, right up to its astonishing, larger-than-life denouement, his grave historical ruminations are less portentous and far more troubling.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.
From Library Journal
Continuing a tradition of writing somewhat offbeat novels, Everett (Zulus, Permanent Pr., 1990) offers this droll but confusing plunge into the Western genre. Curt Marder, Union Army deserter and indolent homesteader, watches from a safe distance as white renegades pillage his farm, carry off his wife, and, worst of all, kill his dog. After hiring a tracker, an ex-slave named Bubba, he sets off to recover a wife for whom he cares little. This antihero's odyssey is repeatedly sidetracked, bringing him into contact with a wild assortment of Western characters. Through it all, only Bubba, like Jim in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, retains a tenuous grasp on what is right, thus gaining Marder's grudging respect. Everett then turns that mildly noble development upside down in the novel's unsatisfying end. Though Bubba is an interesting character, the plot is convoluted and doesn't make a great deal of sense. Part of the publisher's series of books from authors of African descent, this is not a necessary purchase.
Robert Jordan, Univ. of Iowa, Iowa CityCopyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.