A Brief History of Seven Killings -

[Mark Kohut]

Brief History had a powerful, original style in the beginning section I read and I am sure you are right. It was a busy time for me, I had it from a library and could not continue but will. 

I will add Submission, a book that satirizes as slyly as examples fail me. I will give one sorta thematic spoiler related to early TRP. The narrator goes to a monastery dedicated to the Virgin, in a town which still might be seen to nostalgically embody the ethos of medieval Christianity, which is presented as essentially Maryology. One might think of Adams' Mont-Saint Michel and Chartres and, of course, the Virgin and the Dynamo. 

that value is dead, as Pynchon seemed to imply at the end of V. 

 And, a more particular SPOILER ( if you want to read it) is brilliant in my opinion. In his monkish room, there is a sensitive smoke detector, so he cannot. ( We have hardly learned he smokes, earlier in a book devoted to presenting sensual pleasures and habits, but now, of course it is
Almost all he can think of). that smoke detector as a metaphor for how the surveillance society detects even in a monk's cell in an old-fashioned French town struck me) 

As much else did. Only read one other by him but he's the real deal, it seems to me. ( easy to say after two Goncourts and such intelligent praise as well as division) 



Sent from my iPad

> On Dec 29, 2015, at 9:40 PM, Becky Lindroos <bekker2 at icloud.com> wrote:
> 
> Imo,  the one book p-listers might enjoy most from this year’s offerings is A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James.  It’s quite violent but the structure and language are brilliant.  A fictional retelling of the attempted assassination of Bob Marley but a lot of the story is what transpired later and how it related to what went before. 
> 
> Also excellent: 
> City on Fire by Garth Risk Hallberg / New York City circa 1977 
> Career of Evil by Robert Galbraith / crime - Blue Oyster Cult 
> The Cartel by Don Winslow / crime -  drug lords in Mexico 
> Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates  /  nonfiction - race relations
> 
> Bek -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l