Delicious Foods: A Novel
監獄のような農場と家族の崩壊を背景に、搾取と暴力が個人の尊厳をどう蝕むかを描く長編。複数の語り手が交差し、痛切さと奇妙なユーモアを併せ持つ。
作品情報
搾取と家族の崩壊をめぐる、痛切で不穏な長編。
搾取の現場に追い詰められた母と、彼女を探し続ける息子の視点を通して、暴力と依存がもたらす現実をえぐり出す。寓話的な奇妙さと社会派小説の切迫感が同居する作品。
レビュー要約
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読者は、社会批判の鋭さと物語の勢い、そして不穏な語り口の独自性を高く評価する。構成の特異さや重い主題に戸惑う声もあるが、読後に強い印象を残す作品として受け止められている。
書籍情報
- 出版社
- Little, Brown and Company
- 発売日
- 2015-03-17
- ページ数
- 384ページ
- 言語
- 英語
- サイズ
- 16.51 x 3.18 x 24.13 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9780316284943
- ISBN-10
- 9780316284943
- 価格
- 4091 JPY
- カテゴリ
- 洋書/Literature & Fiction/United States/Black & African American
Held captive by her employers -- and by her own demons -- on a mysterious farm, a widow struggles to reunite with her young son in this uniquely American story of freedom, perseverance, and survival. Darlene, once an exemplary wife and a loving mother to her young son, Eddie, finds herself devastated by the unforeseen death of her husband. Unable to cope with her grief, she turns to drugs, and quickly forms an addiction. One day she disappears without a trace. Unbeknownst to eleven-year-old Eddie, now left behind in a panic-stricken search for her, Darlene has been lured away with false promises of a good job and a rosy life. A shady company named Delicious Foods shuttles her to a remote farm, where she is held captive, performing hard labor in the fields to pay off the supposed debt for her food, lodging, and the constant stream of drugs the farm provides to her and the other unfortunates imprisoned there. In Delicious Foods , James Hannaham tells the gripping story of three unforgettable characters: a mother, her son, and the drug that threatens to destroy them. Through Darlene's haunted struggle to reunite with Eddie, through the efforts of both to triumph over those who would enslave them, and through the irreverent and mischievous voice of the drug that narrates Darlene's travails, Hannaham's daring and shape-shifting prose infuses this harrowing experience with grace and humor. The desperate circumstances that test the unshakeable bond between this mother and son unfold into myth, and Hannaham's treatment of their ordeal spills over with compassion. Along the way we experience a tale at once contemporary and historical that wrestles with timeless questions of love and freedom, forgiveness and redemption, tenacity and the will to survive.
James Hannaham is the author of the novel God Says No , which was honored by the American Library Association. He holds an MFA from the Michener Center at the University of Texas at Austin, and lives in Brooklyn, where he teaches creative writing at the Pratt Institute.
レビュー
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Version anglaise
Je ne savais pas que c'etait en anglais , puis je l'echanger contre une version en français ?
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Marvelous new author! Alert.
Life does not have to be nice, as this story reflects. This book grabs one and hardly let's go! It is cruel and chilling in part and those parts absorb the reader. Here is a terrific young author, James Hannaham, who we are going to hear about, and readers will wait for his next book, too. Some parts of this book tear at your heart plus cause you to think of the happenings long after you have closed the book for the night. The location of this produce farm in some-where South was like a prison. The people held there were brain washed to the point of belief that they needed to adopt the dreadful life the bosses handed out, day-to-day. Their ties were strong to the cause with little pay, drugs, and alcohol. It is unreal how those pathetic employees adapted to the horror handed out. They almost begged to be mishandled and fell right into line for the chicken-house life they lived. So sad but honest in what they marched to every day. It is a moving tale of human neglect. The characters are fascinating and simple, even the tie in with "Scotty" who had a very strong hold on Darlene. Marvelous read! Loved the book but not the ugly story! Beautiful in many ways yet heartbreaking side roads.
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Five Stars
Excellent condition
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Super read
This starts shockingly and continues to unravel the sad trail of events that drag people with nothing even further down. The joy comes with an unlikely child and the next generation.
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Unusual
The « Delicious Foods » of this novel is a company out of hell and its workers are living a nightmare at the hands of a ruthless boss and a sadistic foreman. Thanks to James Hannaham’s terrific writing this novel is a tour de force : a story about racial injustice, about people who have reached rock bottom and whose only solace is drugs, about a woman who can’t get over the murder of her activist husband and her son who tries to save her, about people who have given up all hope and are resigned to live as slaves and those that are willing to fight for their freedom
関連する文学賞
- PEN/Faulkner賞（フィクション部門） 第36回（2016年） ・Winner