The Book of Jamaica, Russell Banks
The Book of Jamaica, Russell Banks
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The Book of Jamaica

Author: Russell Banks

Narrator: Norman Dietz

Unabridged: 11 hr 34 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 11/12/2013

Synopsis

""A truly excellent novel. . . . The morbidly fascinating little twists of human existence are all here: love, sex, life and death, beauty and horror—the works."" — Chicago Sun-TimesIn 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's 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.

About Russell Banks

Russell Banks, twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, was one of America’s most prestigious fiction writers, a past president 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 he received numerous prizes and awards, including the Common Wealth Award for Literature. He died in January 2023 at the age of eighty-two.  

Reviews

Goodreads review by Nina on February 02, 2011

Russell Banks' The Book of Jamaica is a strange and mesmerizing mixture of fact and fiction. Set in the 1970s, a decade after Jamaica's independence from Great Britain, it is the story of conflicting cultures and one man's journey to understand where similarities lay and where differences abide. He......more

Goodreads review by Duane on March 05, 2024

This is a difficult book to comment on; Russell is an amazing prose writer, and some of his other books are genuine masterpieces. This is an uncomfortable book to read..it's written in a kind of experimental post-modernist style, with the person of the narrator and his name as well as the names of s......more

Goodreads review by Kelly on March 09, 2023

Read this while in Jamaica traveling to and through many of the places in which these tales were set, which made for relevant and interesting fare. Just spent time in Port Antonio and do wish I knew how much of the Eroll Flynn story is true. Learned from reading this that Russell Banks, who recently......more

Goodreads review by Jessica on April 11, 2021

This novel tells the story of an author from new England who goes to jamaica to write a novel. While the book is a great lesson about the history and politics of jamaica, it really felt like yet another riff on the old Heart of Darkness theme, which made me want to read something by a Jamaican next......more

Goodreads review by Norman on October 11, 2018

This was a very informative read, I learned a lot about Jamaican culture and politics. As a novel, it was a good read as well as being informative. I recommend it to anyone with an interest in the history and culture of Jamaica as well as the people who live there or used to live there.......more

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