She is one of the night women, six half-sisters - all the progeny of that first overseer, the brutal Jack Wilkins. By the end of the novel, Lilith has become Lovey, the pet name she receives from another overseer, Robert Quinn.īut Lilith is never lovey. On the opening page, the narrator describes a baby girl named Lilith, born to a dying 13-year-old slave raped by a white overseer. It is a canticle of love and hate: “Still, though, hate and love be closer cousin than like and dislike,” says Homer, the most powerful woman on Montpelier, where slaves are given fanciful Greek names by their British owners. It is a book as heavily peopled and dark as the night in this isolated and brutal place. “The Book of Night Women” is not merely a historical novel. “People say that Montpelier Estate was so huge that you could tell you’re there as soon as the wind start blowing to the east,” declares the narrator of Marlon James’ second novel, “The Book of Night Women.” The plantation of which James writes, on the east coast of Jamaica, is populated by thousands of slaves, some from Africa, some Jamaica-born, and some women whose bodies are the living chronicle of rape and power.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |