Nov 09, 2022 08:40 PM
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I teetered between 1 and 2 stars for this Booker Prize winner. The fact of its winning has no effect on my thinking that the book isn't all that great. The problem with so many works of historical fiction is the tendency of authors to show off their exhaustive research by dumping swaths of information into the narrative that ultimately makes the story dusty and stale.
The big message of the story is pretty straightforward: the slave trade being written off as a means to an end, a pursuit of profit, and therefore unaffected by questions of moralilty and bearing no weight on the consciences of the men involved. As a black man, I don't need to be told how horrible these white people were, or how brutal the "business" was for everyone involved, and especially for those millions of people captured and enslaved. It pisses me off just to think about it slavery's effects are still very much evident in 2018, no matter how many times racists want to yell about slavery being too long ago for us to still be talking about. No sis.
Anyway, the musty old language and detail(the author showing off his research) made the story drag on for hundreds of pages that I truly struggled through.
