Brilliant Retelling of Huck Finn
Don’t let the reviews fool you. This isn’t, as some suggest, a hilarious book, but a brilliant, satirical retelling of a satirical book. There are moments when I gasped at the inventiveness of the language and the courage of both James and the author, though.
I’m not completely sure that the novel earned its twist at the end and wonder about the decision to deviate from the narrative of Huck Finn near the end, but those are small concerns given the brilliance of the rest of the book.
Highly recommended!
Seven Essential Quotes
As I said it, that wave of fear washed over me again. I might have been better off drowning in the river or freezing to death in the night. One thing was certain: I had to make sure Huck didn’t become the corpse they were looking for. More to the point, I had to make certain I didn’t become the corpse they were looking for.
I am called Jim. I have yet to choose a name. In the religious preachings of my white captors I am a victim of the Curse of Ham. The white so-called masters cannot embrace their cruelty and greed, but must look to that lying Dominican friar for religious justification. But I will not let this condition define me. I will not let myself, my mind, drown in fear and outrage. I will be outraged as a matter of course. But my interest is in how these marks that I am scratching on this page can mean anything at all. If they can have meaning, then life can have meaning, then I can have meaning.
At that moment the power of reading made itself clear and real to me. If I could see the words, then no one could control them or what I got from them. They couldn’t even know if I was merely seeing them or reading them, sounding them out or comprehending them. It was a completely private affair and completely free and, therefore, completely subversive.
I can tell you that I am a man who is cognizant of his world, a man who has a family, who loves a family, who has been torn from his family, a man who can read and write, a man who will not let his story be self-related, but self-written.
I could see that the business with the warring families had troubled him. Killing is hard to see up close. Especially for a child. To tell the truth, I hadn’t seen much killing myself, except that I lived with it daily, the threat, the promise of it. Seeing one lynching was to see ten. Seeing ten was to see a hundred, with that signature posture of death, the angle of the head, the crossing of the feet.
And yet, with all that running, no place appeared like a new place. Perhaps that was the nature of escape.
No, they were not chasing me now, but there was no doubt that pursuit would come, with the theft of the notebook added to my continually lengthening list of crimes.
Hope? Hope is funny. Hope is not a plan. Actually, it’s just a trick. A ruse.”
