CLAIRE ALLFREE
JAMES by Percival Everett (Mantle £20, 320pp)
EVERETT is the author of Erasure — the book on which the hit film American Fiction is based, which pitilessly lampoons a white publishing industry that scores a bestseller after it unwittingly publishes a spoof novel that revels in crass black stereotypes.
He throws another grenade into American literary culture with his new novel — a revisionist take on The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn.
This time it’s narrated by Jim, the slave who flees with Huck on a raft down the Mississippi. He is no uneducated illiterate but an autodidact whose greatest possession is the books he stole from Judge Thatcher.
Jim calls himself James, and disguises his ‘proper’ speaking voice from Huck in one of the many tricks Everett uses to expose the ways in which the language and voices of black people have been both co-opted and repressed by white majority culture. This being Everett, it’s fantastically entertaining, as James’s solo adventures take on a life that doesn’t so much rival the original as defiantly stand alone.
THE GENTLEMAN FROM PERU by Andre Aciman (Faber £12.99, 176pp)
ACIMAN is known most of all for his novel Call Me By Your Name, the story of a summer love affair between two young men in 1980s Italy, which was turned into a film starring Timothee Chalamet.
This novella trades in similar themes — it’s set on the Amalfi coast and centres on the emerging relationship between Raul, an elder enigmatic Peruvian, and Margot, a surly American stranded with her friends after their cruise ship runs into difficulties.
Raul seems to know an awful lot about Margot and her friends, in ways that might set serious alarm bells ringing for anyone not in an Aciman novel. As it is, the reader has to buy into a story that bends time and plausibility in the service of a journey into the deeper forms of knowledge that can lie beneath the surface.
The novel has a confected, supernatural-flavoured blend of whimsy and romantic nostalgia — but I didn’t believe a word of it.
UNTIL AUGUST by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, translated by Anne McLean (Viking, £16.99, 144pp)
MARQUEZ’S last novel, written while he was in the grip of dementia, is a curious and intriguing footnote to a titanic literary career.
A woman travels to a Caribbean island each year to pay her respects to her mother who lies buried there; every time, she seeks out a stranger with whom to spend the night.
The ensuing descriptions of sex do not rank among the most elegant passages. Yet, while Until August is flimsy and clumsy, it’s also an unexpectedly droll sexual comedy of manners.
Each time, Ana anticipates a night of transcendent no-strings-attached sexual oblivion; each time she has to wrestle with the more bathetic reality. It’s far from a masterpiece, but one wonders what it might have been had Marquez written it while at the height of his powers.