What do you think?
Rate this book
Forrest County
There Is a Tree More Ancient Than Eden
Set in rural Mississippi, this novel follows young Nathaniel Witherspoon as he journeys home for his mother's funeral and ends up pondering not only her untimely death but also the origins of his own existence. Told through a series of painful yet vivid reminiscences, it is a story that provides a breathtaking view of the human experience, filled with humor and pathos.
214 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1973
About the author
Leon Forrest
9 books40 followersLeon Richard Forrest was an African-American novelist. His novels concerned mythology, history, and Chicago.
His first novel, There is a Tree More Ancient than Eden, was published in 1973, and included an introduction from Ralph Ellison. Nobel Prize Laureate Toni Morrison served as publisher's editor for There is a Tree More Ancient than Eden, and his next two novels The Bloodworth Orphans, and Two Wings to Veil My Face. These three novels were known as the Forest County Trilogy. He cited Charlie Parker, Dylan Thomas, William Faulkner, Eugene O'Neill, Ralph Ellison, and his parents' religions as inspiration.
His first novel, There is a Tree More Ancient than Eden, was published in 1973, and included an introduction from Ralph Ellison. Nobel Prize Laureate Toni Morrison served as publisher's editor for There is a Tree More Ancient than Eden, and his next two novels The Bloodworth Orphans, and Two Wings to Veil My Face. These three novels were known as the Forest County Trilogy. He cited Charlie Parker, Dylan Thomas, William Faulkner, Eugene O'Neill, Ralph Ellison, and his parents' religions as inspiration.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews
June 10, 2015
Beautifully furious.
Burning with Biblical vision.
Blue and Black and Black and Blue.
Born from bottomless sorrow.
Built from butchery and belief.
Blood-flooded.
Blood-burnished.
Bereaved.
Brokenhearted.
Blazing.
Read
February 7, 2016It happens only infrequently. That as a reader you discover again something which takes it all to an entirely higher plane. Women and Men. Miss MacIntosh, My Darling. Gass’s The Tunnel. What Federman does. And Leon Forrest, writing something that simply floors me. And I hear as an analogy not the jazz, but the baroque, and specifically Bach’s unaccompanied works for cello or violin ; harmony upon a mere four strings ; as words follow upon one another temporally, but spacially resound and harmonize, they sing. I don’t know what the book is about, but I can listen to it all day. Another indictment of our literary culture, brought to you by yet another BURIED author.
February 22, 2017
The greatest song of rage and salvation I've encountered in years. The Sermon on the Mount got nothin' on Leon Forrest. Repent, sinners! Read and repent!
July 22, 2024
This will be my first—and hopefully last—interactive review. For this indescribable cry of pain-cum-novel, my attempts at getting even the slightest soupçon of its impact and import across to you have amounted to nothing. I’m not equal to the task. Thus, I am turning you over to the hands of another master to accomplish where I’ve failed.
In the below video, I implore you to fast-forward/scrub to the 03:30 mark and stay with it until 04:10—that’s only 40 seconds of your life. The part that I beg you to pay closest attention to is the passage between 03:51-04:03, when Coltrane’s dizzying runs give way to a monstrous primal scream that could have only been more harrowing had he upended the sax and howled into the fucking bell. It really isn’t much of a commitment to make, but I promise you that it is the closest you can ever come to having this impossibly beautiful book imparted to you if you’ve not read it (and reminded if you have).
The hyper-articulation, the multi-tonal skronk, the pure human plea for salvation is found in both works. Yes, There Is a Tree More Ancient Than Eden is blood, but it is also sweat; it pours off the page in torrents of silver. These few ecclesiastical bars in the service of God are the only way I know how to share with you what Forrest accomplished. Please take the journey, my friends:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qagOb...
In the below video, I implore you to fast-forward/scrub to the 03:30 mark and stay with it until 04:10—that’s only 40 seconds of your life. The part that I beg you to pay closest attention to is the passage between 03:51-04:03, when Coltrane’s dizzying runs give way to a monstrous primal scream that could have only been more harrowing had he upended the sax and howled into the fucking bell. It really isn’t much of a commitment to make, but I promise you that it is the closest you can ever come to having this impossibly beautiful book imparted to you if you’ve not read it (and reminded if you have).
The hyper-articulation, the multi-tonal skronk, the pure human plea for salvation is found in both works. Yes, There Is a Tree More Ancient Than Eden is blood, but it is also sweat; it pours off the page in torrents of silver. These few ecclesiastical bars in the service of God are the only way I know how to share with you what Forrest accomplished. Please take the journey, my friends:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qagOb...
Read
August 16, 2014Stating the obvious words only signify the objects they have been created to explain. They are not these real things. If I look at something however, trying to keep my mind clear of interfering words they come rushing and clashing in, fighting for preferential treatment and to have the last say.
I would never attempt to review this book because all I have is words. This book, in its own style and art has come closer to that burning reality than anything I have read or possibly will read. My words would amount to a desecration and a further level of distancing. Rating it according to a star or any system seems ludicrous.
It was not an enjoyable book. There was nothing fun about reading it. A difficult read is what it is. Up to this point in my reading life this is the best book I have read based on, the level of creation, relevance, significance of experience.
There are no amount of thank you's that can reach what I feel to GR Friend Ali for bringing this book to me and helping with my reading through it.
Now it's time to press my fingers to my lips and say no more.
I would never attempt to review this book because all I have is words. This book, in its own style and art has come closer to that burning reality than anything I have read or possibly will read. My words would amount to a desecration and a further level of distancing. Rating it according to a star or any system seems ludicrous.
It was not an enjoyable book. There was nothing fun about reading it. A difficult read is what it is. Up to this point in my reading life this is the best book I have read based on, the level of creation, relevance, significance of experience.
There are no amount of thank you's that can reach what I feel to GR Friend Ali for bringing this book to me and helping with my reading through it.
Now it's time to press my fingers to my lips and say no more.
January 24, 2016
"Southern trees bearing strange fruit--
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root"
-Miss Billie Holiday
April 20, 1939
I can't call this enjoyable in the conventional sense of the term. I can say it is evocative and raw and fresh feeling, astounding prose.
It's probably overused, but yes, this prose is poetry, it's fragmented images stick in your rose-gray madder; you have to listen and you have to feel and it's that discomfort that reminds you are alive and have inherited a legacy that you can't just ignore without perpetuating ancestral crimes.
Be prepared to put on your intertextual vest and hallucinate sermons which are working on the problem of evil, the problem of getting a job while being a Job. Forrest does his job here like a postmodern grand inquisitor.
Suck it up now because all you have to do is read it; you don't have to live it: that blood has already been spilt.
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root"
-Miss Billie Holiday
April 20, 1939
I can't call this enjoyable in the conventional sense of the term. I can say it is evocative and raw and fresh feeling, astounding prose.
It's probably overused, but yes, this prose is poetry, it's fragmented images stick in your rose-gray madder; you have to listen and you have to feel and it's that discomfort that reminds you are alive and have inherited a legacy that you can't just ignore without perpetuating ancestral crimes.
Be prepared to put on your intertextual vest and hallucinate sermons which are working on the problem of evil, the problem of getting a job while being a Job. Forrest does his job here like a postmodern grand inquisitor.
Suck it up now because all you have to do is read it; you don't have to live it: that blood has already been spilt.
March 20, 2016
(***Updated review for reread in 2016***)
This is a powerful, unique, truly special book - it's stunning this was Forrest's first novel, as it is utterly wild, frenetic, raging, lyrical, and brutal, yet it also precise and crystalline in a measured way that is typically only seen in later works of great authors. His prose is a true wonder, it is a joy to read while at the same time it is a labor to read, as it is an endurance-demanding 200 pages of rage, anguish, betrayal, and tragic grief. It encompasses the amalgamated trials and tribulations of centuries of slavery and insistence that one is lesser, but looks past it and brings in the hardships of the day-to-day struggle under Jim Crow laws, and the continued subjugation through gentrification and prejudice that culminates in backbreaking poverty; and it's told through meandering conversations, through dreams, through visions, through agonizing small details that reach out and break your heart in two.
(***prior review follows***)
If you want a trustworthy recommendation for this book, look no further than the Forward provided by none other than Ralph Ellison.
Pity, you think so little of me .... But this is your horrendous detachment, howling down the corridors of the night, that sours me, for you are missing the uniqueness of our history, and I think that history of uniqueness ---- But leaving that aside for a moment, tell me, school me, inform me, just how much is the full sea-scroll measure-how much is demanded in escrow, in terms of forbearance, when a people’s total soul has been ripped off, whored upon, misused, wracked, raped, ruptured, and mangled, and they are left with their asses set afire in the grass, and their names gutted with a protoplasm soaked in dung and urine, their breath choked off on the gallows and their sex spread and split down upon rust-bloodied hooks, like sausages; and their not quite dead bodies picked and swept from Southern towns to Northern universities to be plucked by cattle-prodding tools-and prayerfully studied over--in order to save the bodies of the ENEMY’s posterity. . . .I'll leave my thoughts from my first read down below this new review (of sorts, more like rumination, I rarely feel capable of properly reviewing a book, especially one as powerful as this), even though I'll likely hit some of the same high points.
This is a powerful, unique, truly special book - it's stunning this was Forrest's first novel, as it is utterly wild, frenetic, raging, lyrical, and brutal, yet it also precise and crystalline in a measured way that is typically only seen in later works of great authors. His prose is a true wonder, it is a joy to read while at the same time it is a labor to read, as it is an endurance-demanding 200 pages of rage, anguish, betrayal, and tragic grief. It encompasses the amalgamated trials and tribulations of centuries of slavery and insistence that one is lesser, but looks past it and brings in the hardships of the day-to-day struggle under Jim Crow laws, and the continued subjugation through gentrification and prejudice that culminates in backbreaking poverty; and it's told through meandering conversations, through dreams, through visions, through agonizing small details that reach out and break your heart in two.
And that’s how the old man comes in and found the house late that near Christmas evening: all mucked up; just like the way the world done looked to him, all his natural life, I guess . . . . They commenced to lighting. . . . And me being the oldest, I tries to stop ’em and gets caught. with a baby bottle upsides my natural head. . . . Bottle filled with hot water, ’cause we ain’t got no milk for the baby. . . .It is also -importantly, seeing as this is the first of what is considered a trilogy focusing on Nathaniel West and relations - concerned with family and the ties that bind and divide us. The family relations in the book are complicated by the various approaches and reactions to ones blackness and either the acceptance or rejection of said blackness.
Myself--remembering those parties where uncles and aunts and cousins as well, whose several ancestors had made and developed a small fortune on special white lightning bleaching creme, and whose grandparents had owned and sold slaves and educated all of the children-except Uncle DuPont who was my father’s fifth cousin and mother’s second cousin-at the Sorbonne, from monies accruing from those two self-serving enterprises; all of whom hated my father for remaining a fourth cook ....But overall the book feels as if it is weaving its own mythology, one that incorporates fire and brimstone Christianity, word of mouth slave tales, history - ancient, recent and modern; King's martyrdom mixes with Christ's crucifixion, tumbles into a combination lynching and slave auction in one breathtakingly amazing section - along with a mythification of the day to day; all focusing on the falling down and the rising up; the notions of downfall and redemption; harkening back to the descent of lucifer and the downfall of man; weeping for a paradise lost and yet still yearning for the possibility of a paradise found.
And him, Father, rather than “becoming anything” became nothing if he couldn’t be everything-but became everything to me, even as he trained and demanded that I try to catch the stars in orbit, without expostulation; yes, and how to appreciate a flower and to listen to a poem, and how to switch-hit and how to love and yes, something of hate as well ....
(***prior review follows***)
If you want a trustworthy recommendation for this book, look no further than the Forward provided by none other than Ralph Ellison.
What a tortured, history-wracked, anguished, Hound-of-Heaven-pursued, Ham-and-Oedipus-cursed, Blake-visioned, apocalypse-prone projection of the human predicament! […] Yes, but how furiously eloquent is this man Forrest’s prose, how zestful his jazz-like invention, his parody, his reference to the classics and commonplaces of literature, folklore, tall-tale and slum-street jive! How admirable the manner in which the great themes of life and literature are revealed in the black-white American-ness of his characters as dramatized in the cathedral-high and cloaca-low limits of his imaginative rangingIn fact, I’m going to mostly leave it there, as not only does he accurately praise this work, he does one better and – almost unbelievably – captures the nuance of the prose with its the sharp corner-turns and its fractured but ultimately so complete method of storytelling. And, if in reading the quote above, you can’t wrap your head around how all that will play out, how it will read on the page itself, well to that I say: Yes. You can’t, there really isn’t way you can, without reading the text itself. It is utterly singular – Faulkner-at-his-most-complex comes close, but this is more modern: it has ingested Faulkner and Fire-and-Brimstone sermons and modern history and chaotic freewheeling jazz insanity and managed to cram into that the first 70 years of the 20th century all furious and anguished and caustic and wailing. It is not easy, it is not forgiving, but it is damn well worth the time of those readers who don’t mind – positively goddamn-well relish – the challenge (and reward) of difficult prose. It has both in equal measure, with heaping –overflowing – doses of each.
July 16, 2019
Astounding language and structure here—if you've made it to this review read this book. I feel like I only need to read it about two more times to write a real critical response to something so monumental that manages at just around 200 pages.
June 27, 2017
Another book so astounding that [I] can mount no adequate summation other than it deserves to be read by any thinking/caring/conscious citizen of this present day divided populace where loud/obnoxiousness stands for being heard above, far above the bedrock of considered opinion. I began somewhere in the middle of this book to read aloud to myself knowing that each pithy sentence though beyond mostly my ken did, reveal profundity when heard not just read. This, too, might be a fab. book to do just that in group setting, taking turns of different voices spilling the guts of this shroud in auditory fashion letting the word combinations fall like rain on parched ears and let the puddles form where they may to glisten with the come again sun of redemption. LF is a giant voice from the not-so-distant past whose words will vector on indefinitely.
March 23, 2021
i don't know if i've felt so completely disoriented by a writer since i first read joseph mcelroy. what do you call this? where does it fit? the beautiful opening paragraph seems to set up some kind of straightforward narrative, and then it immediately slips away. so much of this novel is furious, beautiful, blood-soaked, and i lost my footing on nearly every page. it's the kind of book that demands to be read twice. but despite how crazed forrest's writing feels, and despite being borderline incomprehensible as a novel (if it can be thought of in that way), it's exhilarating to read something so raw and sprawling, something so totally unconcerned with what the reader will think of it. forrest claims charlie parker as an influence, but to me it felt more like horace tapscott or anthony braxton.. just unrelenting, dark, chaotic, discordant, but always locked into history. forrest's writing is like a performance on the page rather than a closed off text in itself. that's the only way i can describe what the experience of reading this book is like. a fucking crime that this and divine days are out of print.
July 7, 2016
one good reason to read this book is that it's full of really beautiful prose in the best tradition of high modernism. another reason is that he's really obscure so all two of your friends will think you're very cool when you say you're reading him
January 20, 2020
very cool righteous primal fury
October 5, 2015
"Sometimes a soul get lost on they own camping ground, once they puts down they useta-be ways. . . ."A young man invokes the collective voices of his ancestral past in searching for a new spiritual identity after the death of his mother. It's a difficult read, ambitious in form (with an intense vernacular focus on language, music, and religion) and centered on the grim legacy of racial injustice in the United States. But more remarkably, Forrest's voice –reverent and florid– is one of the most unique in modern fiction.
And i shuddered and trembled as we fairly floated past this building from which they had flown off into space: rocketed, sacrificed, yoked and bedazzled, raggedy, transfixed, auctioned, looted and howling scarecrows into the breathing jungles of this soft and easy stormy-out-of-eden country, funky-jawed and joy ripping, grease trapped, babbling wind . . . and in the extreme right corner two mammoth bloodhounds lapped, tongued and gnawed down the bony skeletons and the nostril-gutting spoils of this building's bowels bursting like water bags, cast away from its moorings to land-lostness and humpback prayers spinning amid hovels and clapboard whispers of dreams and citadels, psalms, bales of cotton–laughing to mouth down the bad yoke, which weaved its way through the house built upon the pale riggings of a vessel afire in a docking bay, which had become a castle for rats, making potlicker of the blood, fresh, feces, skeletons, eyes, ears and throat and tongue of the looted, discarded shipwrecked spoils in the bowels of the swinish hole . . . ah but the little children pied-pipered in their pitch, from where they knew not/whereof and plunged down singing as if they were back in the low red-clay country and stealing up now and winging off, and then vaulting over the pale ghost of a harpooned yet thunderously devouring sun in flight–as if even in their looted youth they were possessed by wings. . . .
November 3, 2021
Some of the most insanely adept wordsmithery I've ever encountered with a structure that obfuscates any and all sense of clarity to the point that I was periodically bored out of my mind and skimmed sections and then immediately was stupefied by the level of language that Forrest employs to attempt to tackle the brutality of American history and the continuing hope (and mistrust of) reparation processes that are few and far between. I cannot describe what this book is offhand. It is so experiential in a very post-Faulkner manner.
April 18, 2019
This was a great joy to read, although I'm not really satisfied by my reading of it. The writing is very dense with symbolism and metaphor and I wasn't really prepared to give it the thorough reading I think it deserves and necessitates. I think I would need a set of good annotations and maybe a notebook, as well as much longer periods of undivided attention than I did. Still, the parts of the book that I feel like I followed to my satisfaction (however splintered from the whole) were really incredible.
The book appears to me as an extended meditation on the relationship between blackness and christianity, and the density of the writing paints an incredibly nuanced picture of this relationship that often stunned me with its depth of insight given the length of the novel (around 200 pages).
I feel weird giving it a rating since I don't really feel that confident in having synthesized a coherent picture of what it was going for, but it the rating reflects more how much I enjoyed reading it.
The book appears to me as an extended meditation on the relationship between blackness and christianity, and the density of the writing paints an incredibly nuanced picture of this relationship that often stunned me with its depth of insight given the length of the novel (around 200 pages).
I feel weird giving it a rating since I don't really feel that confident in having synthesized a coherent picture of what it was going for, but it the rating reflects more how much I enjoyed reading it.
April 15, 2024
Marvelous thing this is... if there ever was a quote most misused in the case of analyzing art, it would have to have been W.W in the W.H after seeing Birth of a Nation for the first time in 1915 -
"It's like writing history with lightning"
If redemption, justice, or righteous charity is to be set for anything, ever, it would be to award this same quote to the fiery, hellish prose of Leon Forrest in sole catalyst and authorial attribution.
Like a radiant arc-light, striking with deafening roar into the singed and sundered pulp of elms and aged poplars, sending forth a most resounding ring within the grottos of our most prestigiously forgotten authors, let this bolt reverberate for miles upon miles upon miles upon miles around, that this author may rise rise rise forth, onward and upward, in like lightness for all those to see - like placard sign sun shining forth to all those who read and write - that here lies a fiery diamond forged in the eschaton of America's original sin...
Read. This. Book.
If like Rebirthed the exhumed remains of the reverent Faulkner in swirled mixture with the illustrious James Baldwin's poeticisms, he who would set out to write an, in every sense of the word, Biblical deluge of washy memories, generational trauma, 21st century malaise, and various spiritual archetypes upholding themselves in the most admonished fashion for what new histories must be etched as we preserve the annals of old for sake of redemption.
Seriously has, in a some 200 or so page scorcher, become a new personal favorite American author. Up there in the ranks with the divine McCarthy, Gass, Whitman, and Melville - if only the rest of the reading and academic world would take notice of this wickedly neglected author. For shame!
"It's like writing history with lightning"
If redemption, justice, or righteous charity is to be set for anything, ever, it would be to award this same quote to the fiery, hellish prose of Leon Forrest in sole catalyst and authorial attribution.
Like a radiant arc-light, striking with deafening roar into the singed and sundered pulp of elms and aged poplars, sending forth a most resounding ring within the grottos of our most prestigiously forgotten authors, let this bolt reverberate for miles upon miles upon miles upon miles around, that this author may rise rise rise forth, onward and upward, in like lightness for all those to see - like placard sign sun shining forth to all those who read and write - that here lies a fiery diamond forged in the eschaton of America's original sin...
Read. This. Book.
If like Rebirthed the exhumed remains of the reverent Faulkner in swirled mixture with the illustrious James Baldwin's poeticisms, he who would set out to write an, in every sense of the word, Biblical deluge of washy memories, generational trauma, 21st century malaise, and various spiritual archetypes upholding themselves in the most admonished fashion for what new histories must be etched as we preserve the annals of old for sake of redemption.
Seriously has, in a some 200 or so page scorcher, become a new personal favorite American author. Up there in the ranks with the divine McCarthy, Gass, Whitman, and Melville - if only the rest of the reading and academic world would take notice of this wickedly neglected author. For shame!
January 21, 2019
Leon Forrest's There Is a Tree More Ancient Than Eden, which I just finished rereading, is among the greatest books ever published, a book that, along with the other two volumes of the Forest County Trilogy, not to mention the standalone novel Divine Days, profoundly demonstrates what can be done with and within the form of the novel, how the novel's form can be dismantled, subverted, reimagined, etc. Its final chapter is a transcription of an imagined sermon reflecting on the life and death of Dr. MLK, Jr., which is, as described in the text, "a wild talk fest, filled with curses, and moments of celebration; hyperbole, wild jokes, laconic speil, tall tales, horror stories..." Like the rest of the novel, it features many extraordinary passages like the following: "'Ambassador of healing and agony and wonder. Wall-wailer-warrior who bowed to Nobody but a witness. Had a floating, oscillating price upon his marching, climbing, prize-fighter's pride-filled shoulders; winging through this crap game of a dream Come-Kingdom-Con. Fixed about his head: an enchaining Eagle's wings shuddered at mountain-peak pitch; he found tuneless, stuttering justice (rolling backwards as an oscillating wheel within a starry-snake-eyed crown; a tambourine, the spokes crackling, a babe at Mountain's bottom). A foundling, outcast barely breathing, naturally inarticulate (oh most articulate, harpooned Bard) marked up in a shroud, abandoned in a dream within a nightmare. Did this old whorehouse, once new with children, craft Golgotha upon the balcony altar long before his mission ended? Oh were you there when they pierced Him in the sides?'"
September 3, 2023
The novel starts with a lyric from Billie Holiday and a quote from William Faulkner. And damn if Forrest has not warned you from the start what is coming: free flowing jazz jumping lyrical sentences of chaos and fury. Truly original.
July 29, 2021
A glossolalic odyssey into Leon Forrest's American South. Amazing; some of the most virtuosic word-spinning this side of Joyce.
February 21, 2024
Not since Barnes’ ‘Nightwood’ for me has prose been the equivalent of a radiation chamber of lyrical beauty.
April 17, 2022
This is one of those books that is experienced, not read. You must surrender yourself to its inscrutability and simply enjoy the imagery and language. The obvious comparison is to Faulkner, but Forrest's writing takes it further, feeling like pure emotion transferred to the page. It is replete with biblical imagery, including a lengthy lynching scene that is also a crucifixion. It's linguistically inventive, prose poetry that utilizes different structures and formats, even different fonts, to great effect. Nothing I write here can do it justice. You just have to go read it. I think you could read it a dozen times and still not comprehend everything, but it would be worth it.
—But how much of our blood must be cast upon the altar, in the name of universal suffering, before you see the uniqueness of their holocaust; before you allow yourself to zero in on the havoc in our history. . . While those who bathe in the aftermath of our blood devouringly drink the soul-like essence of the bloody wine cup, after carefully washing their hands in name of redemption and purity. . . . Some fucking redemption. . . . But they were there, they were there in Virginia, they saw the bloody deed. I can't accept their ignorance, their silence affirms Virginia, and their silence affirms the holocaust of burning babies in the inferno of cities. . . . How can I forgive the son, when he affirms the father's affirming silence. . .? That memory is indeed universally ours. . . .
Suffice to say, it's not for the faint of heart. It's not surprising something so inaccessible has faded into obscurity--but it's a shame.
—But how much of our blood must be cast upon the altar, in the name of universal suffering, before you see the uniqueness of their holocaust; before you allow yourself to zero in on the havoc in our history. . . While those who bathe in the aftermath of our blood devouringly drink the soul-like essence of the bloody wine cup, after carefully washing their hands in name of redemption and purity. . . . Some fucking redemption. . . . But they were there, they were there in Virginia, they saw the bloody deed. I can't accept their ignorance, their silence affirms Virginia, and their silence affirms the holocaust of burning babies in the inferno of cities. . . . How can I forgive the son, when he affirms the father's affirming silence. . .? That memory is indeed universally ours. . . .
Suffice to say, it's not for the faint of heart. It's not surprising something so inaccessible has faded into obscurity--but it's a shame.
July 15, 2015
I went from thinking this was the African-American "Howl" set in prose, an amalgation of Faulkner and Derek Walcott, to thinking Forrest was a raving madman, unconcerned if this book made a lick of sense in sections. At times the book is all over the place with little to no narrative thread and almost incomprehensible. Yet, the language and imagery are exquisite (just turn to any page), and after the newly added "Transformation" chapter, in which a wily centenarian writes LBJ on the real state-of-the-Union, I was heading over to the virtual store for purchase.
July 28, 2014
This book was fine but not as enjoyable as "The Bloodworth Orphans," my introduction to Leon Forrest. I liked the Faulknerian style (in fact, I think Dr. Forrest was trying to outdo the Nobel Laureate in this book) but at times the plot got muddled in the complex sentence structure. I appreciated what the author was striving for, but would have preferred a little more clarity.
Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews