Brief History of Seven Killings (James) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
How to describe Marlon James's monumental new novel A Brief History of Seven Killings? It's like a Tarantino remake of The Harder They Come but with a soundtrack by Bob Marley and a script by Oliver Stone and William Faulkner, with maybe a little creative boost from some primo ganja. It's epic in every sense of that word: sweeping, mythic, over-the-top, colossal and dizzyingly complex. It's also raw, dense, violent, scalding, darkly comic, exhilarating and exhausting—a testament to Mr. James's vaulting ambition and prodigious talent.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times


There is always too much history to keep track of…and so a certain kind of novel has evolved to shape narratives out of such chaos, not to find answers, but to capture the way history feels, how it maims, bewilders, enmeshes us…[A Brief History of Seven Killings is] an epic of postcolonial fallout, in Jamaica and elsewhere, and America's participation in that history. In the end, the book is not only persuasive but tragic, though in its polyphony and scope it's more than that…Spoof, nightmare, blood bath, poem, A Brief History of Seven Killings eventually takes on a mesmerizing power. It makes its own kind of music, not like Marley's, but like the tumult he couldn't stop.
Zachary Lazar - New York Times Book Review


[A] tour de force… [an] audacious, demanding, inventive literary work.
Wall Street Journal


Exploding with violence and seething with arousal, the third novel by Marlon James cuts a swath across recent Jamaican history…This compelling, not-so-brief history brings off a social portrait worthy of Diego Rivera, antic and engagé, a fascinating tangle of the naked and the dead.
Washington Post


James has written a dangerous book, one full of lore and whispers and history… [a] great book... James nibbles at theories of who did what and why, and scripts Marley’s quest for revenge with the pace of a thriller. His achievement, however, goes far beyond opening up this terrible moment in the life of a great musician. He gives us the streets, the people, especially the desperate, the Jamaicans whom Marley exhorted to: "Open your eyes and look within:/ Are you satisfied with the life your living?"
Boston Globe


An impressive feat of storytelling: raw, uncompromising, panoramic yet meticulously detailed. The Jamaica portrayed here is one many people have heard songs about but have never seen rendered in such arresting specificity—and if they have, only briefly.
Chicago Tribune


Technically astounding… a wildly ambitious and brilliant book...this stunning counterfactual fiction evokes both the pungency of Faulkner’s Southern gothic Yoknapatawpha novels and the wild tabloid noir of James Ellroy’s White Jazz…[Marlon] James raises fiction's ante throughout this bravura novel.
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette


Brilliantly executed… The novel makes no compromises, but is cruelly and consummately a work of art.
Minneapolis Star Tribune


Thrilling, ambitious…Both intense and epic.
Los Angeles Times


A prismatic story of gang violence and Cold War politics in a turbulent post-independence Jamaica.
The New Yorker


Nothing short of awe-inspiring.
Entertainment Weekly


An excellent new work of historical fiction … part crime thriller, part oral history, part stream-of-consciousness monologue.
Rolling Stone


A strange and wonderful novel…Mr. James’s chronicle of late 20th-century Jamaican politics and gang wars manages consistently to shock and mesmerise at the same time.
Economist


The way James uses language is amazing….Vigorous, intricate and captivating, A Brief History of Seven Killings is hard to put down.
Ebony  


(Starred review.) Through more than a dozen voices.... [Bob Marley's attempted murder] is portrayed as the inevitable climax of a country shaken by gangs, poverty, and corruption.... [A]sweeping narrative....enables James to build an....indispensable and essential history of Jamaica’s troubled years. This novel should be required reading.
Publishers Weekly


James follows the violent 1976 invasion of Bob Marley's home and its aftermath: spanning countries, decades, and characters.
Library Journal


[T]he book is undeniably overstuffed, with...low-level thugs, CIA-agent banter and...ramblings about Jamaican culture.... [A] remarkable portrait of Jamaica in the 19th and 20th centuries, but the novel’s sprawl can be demanding. An ambitious and multivalent, if occasionally patience-testing, book.
Kirkus Reviews