I understand where those comparisons come from, the publicity strategies that underly them, but they are wildly inaccurate to the experience of reading this book, which is more like if Toni Morrison had written Ovid's Metamorphoses: Painful and strange, full of bodies shifting from personhood into meat, and somehow, always, still, upsettingly beautiful. Reading 'Black Leopard, Red Wolf' was like being slowly eaten by a bear, one inviting me to feel every pressure of tooth and claw tearing into me. But in reality Tracker's voice is a magnetic field around the compass of plot, shifting and distorting, making its needle spin and spin and spin through interlocking stories told by a Leopard, witches and anti-witches, demons, slavers, a prefect, a queen.
The plot is ostensibly Tracker telling first the story of his life, and then the story of the quest to find this child not once, but twice. From there the narrative folds and unfolds into different shapes: The inquisitor makes Tracker read a transcript of their exchange for confirmation, giving us access to outside voices, and later the inquisitor brings a griot, a singer-storyteller, to add testimony about a portion of Tracker's life he refuses to describe. A man called Tracker - the titular Red Wolf - is in prison, being interrogated about that child's murder, and we are witness to his one-sided conversation with his inquisitor. There is nothing left to know" - a statement impressively belied by the book's subsequent 620 pages. There are things in one's life that are best appreciated from a distance, and this book is one of them.īlack Leopard, Red Wolf opens with the lines "The child is dead. Excited, I pulled the car up and parked near where I saw the bear vanish, and had my hand on the door before I came back to myself and thought, what am I doing? It's a bear! I drove away unharmed.
I saw a black bear cross the road, from fields on the left to the mountain on the right. I was once driving, alone and at dusk, down a dark and winding road that hugged a mountain thick with woods. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title Black Leopard, Red Wolf Author Marlon James
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