James by Percival Everett

My habit of reading the Booker Prize long list for bringing this author to my attention--his work is nothing short of brilliant and thrilling, and also deeply thought and expressed, and, it seems to be, also satirical. So I am not entirely new to him, and yet the masterful telling of the Huckleberry Finn story through Jim's eyes still managed to astound me. It is breath-taking, and while the Cliff notes version would be that it is a retelling of a complicated classic that has fared more poorly in the estimation of people the further we move from the Civil War, that would sell it short, because it is also a meditation on what racial identity is and how we arrived at a deeply hypocritical constructed view of race, as well as what I see as the author's pervasive use of satire to hold a mirror up to our own inconsistencies when it comes to race. I think it is likely that if you do a more-or-less direct comparison between the "original" and this that there will be fruitful discussions forevermore, but for me it is the highlighting of the widespread practice of white slaveowning men raping black women to produce offspring that were in every way their children, whom they explicitely produced for the purpose of enslaving them. There is absolutely no way to sugar coat that which was a pre-Civil War cultural norm and one that the south was so intent on preserving. The very definition of what is deeply wrong and hypocritical about white supremacy: white men creating children they then treated as subservient. Bravo, this is almost certainly the book of the year.