Cahokia Jazz

av ,

Inbunden, 496 sidor

På English

Publicerades 4 oktober 2023 av Faber & Faber.

ISBN:
978-0-571-38141-8
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(3 recensioner)

In a city that never was, in an America that never was, on a snowy night at the end of winter, two detectives find a body on the roof of a skyscraper.

It’s 1922, and Americans are drinking in speakeasies, dancing to jazz, stepping quickly to the tempo of modern times. Beside the Mississippi, the ancient city of Cahokia lives on – a teeming industrial metropolis, containing every race and creed. Among them, peace holds. Just about. But that body on the roof is about to spark off a week that will spill the city’s secrets, and bring it, against a soundtrack of wailing clarinets and gunfire, either to destruction or rebirth.

5 utgåvor

recenserade Cahokia Jazz av Francis Spufford

Astonishing masterpiece

This book does so many things, and all outstandingly. It's a portrait of a Cahokia that in our timeline was never allowed to exist. It's a noir detective thriller. It's an intense character study of a deeply relatable protagonist. It's a love poem to 1920s jazz--the music and the cultural space it created.

I'm having difficulty actually talking about it coherently without massive spoilers. So just go on and read this book.

recenserade Cahokia Jazz av Francis Spufford

No small accomplishment

A tad overstuffed, but (because of this?) succeeds as (all of) hardboiled noir, speculative anthropology, and cathartic routing of white supremacy, which is no small accomplishment. Could have done with a more low-key ending, in my opinion, for some light and shade, but superb writing and characterisation throughout, with more than a few lines that elicited audibly-impressed noises. This alt-history nerd left happy.

recenserade Cahokia Jazz av Francis Spufford

None

Now this was just endlessly entertaining. Alternate history liberally sprinkled with jazz, linguistics, power structures, hardboiled detectives and some really neat worldbuilding, that's just a great way to start the reading year. Is it THE most indepth, hard-hitting look at race and class relations in the (OK, a) US? No. But it uses its narrative and the world it creates to create a utopia of what might be without making it all too simple. I'm sure you can ask whether a white Brit is the one who should be telling this story, but it IS a world that never got to be, so nobody's lived in it; just the ones who read this story. And it's a story that keeps finding new stones to turn over. Cue up a good prohibition-era playlist, pour yourself a gimlet and dig in.

Ämnen

  • English literature