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Review - Mahagony

Mahagony: A Novel

I received an electronic ARC of this book via NetGalley.

This is not an easy book to assign a star rating.

It's beautifully written--the language is poetic, and as the story and characters shift through time and perspective, the writing itself reflects this. This is a credit to both Glissant and to translator Betsy Wing.

The book itself is not always pleasant--but that is part of the point. The narrative dips back and forth through time, and deals with themes of slavery, colonization, sexual exploitation, etc. in Martinique. The shifting narrators and time periods can become somewhat confusing to the reader, and I think it is this more than anything else that made this relatively short book take me a fairly long time to read--that, along with the extended discussion of narrator vs. author toward the beginning of the novel.

It was worth reading. It would be worth reading again, with a little more background on Glissant's other work and the history of Martinique, topics of which I am rather woefully ignorant. It's the kind of book that I suspect I would enjoy greatly in a literature class, with the guidance and additional context such a setting would provide.

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