Romance in Marseille (Penguin Classics) by Claude McKay

Romance in Marseille (Penguin Classics) Reviews

• 
  Emily M

  4.5 stars
  
  Wide open in the shape of an enormous fan splashed with violent colors, Marseille lay bare to the glory of the meridian sun, like a fever consuming the senses, alluring and repelling, full of the unending pageantry of ships and men.
  
  I discovered this book through Lark’s group “Books Nobody Reads… But Should!”, a concept I am completely behind. I was intrigued enough by this one to pick it up, but I didn’t have high expectations. It was published posthumously, and the back cover sounded a bit… convenient. An exercise in box ticking by an editor trying to stay relevant.
  
  Anyway, I loved this book. Despite the posthumous publication, this was a finished, polished novel that just ruffled a few too many feathers to be published in the moment. And those elements that were unacceptable are the things we like about it now. The protagonist, Lafala, is a double amputee, but he’s neither saintly in his disability nor evil. He’s just trying to live his life, and as he’s been crossed before and he’s newly wealthy, he’s frequently suspicious and paranoid. He’s also pleasure-bent, and if he can’t dance as he used to in the bars of the old port of Marseille, he’ll still bed all the prostitutes and stand a few (but not too many) drinks. His main squeeze, Moroccan prostitute Aslima is sympathetic, but certainly doesn’t have a heart of gold. She’s prone to semi-magical visions, and she may or may not be out to double-cross Lafala again.
  
  Romance in Marseille gains, to my mind, from its breezy writing and structure (brief chapters) and its extended cast of unusual characters. There’s Big Blonde, an American who may be hiding out while he explores the open sexual pleasures of dock life. Petit Frère, his toy boy, gets some great lines when he faces off against a pathetic (but homophobic) beggar woman. St. Domingue, a Caribbean labour organizer, is something of a stand-in for the author. La Fleur is a devious fellow prostitute who is bad, bad, bad, but maybe not that bad. The structure is a little episodic but there is a plot running through here, it’s not just a bunch of characters drinking and dancing (though there’s plenty of that).
  
  I’m delighted this book was finally published because, though it’s a bit chaotic and tonally all over the place, it explores so many themes in such an interesting way. How much are black legs worth? How can a man be shipped to America as a slave one century, and entitled to compensation for losing his legs as a stowaway the next? All the usual questions like What is Love? And such a wonderful international cast. Truly international, not Americans in Paris, but West Africans, North Africans, Eastern Europeans, Caribbeans, Americans, French, all hanging out together in a seedy port town. I just loved it and the assured, blasé prose.
  
  Legs of ebony, legs of copper, legs of ivory moving pell-mell in columns against his imagination... Dancing on the toes, dancing on the heels, dancing flat-footed... His dancing legs would carry him over all....
  He buried his face in the pillow, his stump of a body twitching under the long white nightshirt.
  
  *The introduction was, to my mind, way too long, not terribly interesting, and gave away the whole plot without providing much of a critical reading. Definitely skip until after.
• 
  Jason Koivu

  I picked up Claude McKay's Romance in Marseille as a Black History Month read. It contains an extensive introduction in which the reader learns a great deal about McKay and this book's long and elusive path to publication, having been written in the early 1930s, but only just now being released for the first time.
  
  It's a turbulent story about redemption, revenge and strange loves gone astray. Touted as a forerunner of pro-disabled and LGBTQ literature, this may not satisfy the modern activist's mindset. While the main character's disability is the focal point of the book, any references to homosexuality are polite-society played down. This is certainly not as strident and explicit as a James Baldwin novel. But of course, this predates Baldwin by a few decades.
  
  Viewed from the literary standpoint, there are minor problems. Some of the characterizations are ham-fisted, slightly too two-dimensional. A bit more nuance would have done a world of good. Perhaps this would have been addressed if the full version of this book had made it to print. What we have here is a shorter version of the entire manuscript. It's all that has survived to print. It's a shame, but I'm thankful for what we do have. Romance in Marseille, the book and its journey to publication, is important to literature.
• 
  Diane Barnes

  "Interesting, offbeat little book", is how one reviewer described it. That's it exactly.
• 
  Doug

  3.5, rounded up.
  
  This is a very quirky little book, and is really like nothing else. Based on two actual cases of men who stowed away on ship, lost their legs, and then sued the shipping companies, it also is a vivid exploration of the very distinct Marseille demi-monde and citizenry. The novel itself is only 130 pages and is a relatively quick read, but there is a VERY long (though interesting) Introduction, as well as copious (and often redundant) endnotes.
  
  The 'queer' content, which was one of its selling points for me, is fairly benign and almost negligible ... but I suppose rather daring for the times. My only other quibble is that it seems rather disjointed and 'all over the map', which might be a result of it having gone through several 'start & stop' drafts in the 5 years it took the author to complete it.
• 
  Katie Lumsden

  Fascinating and well worth a read.
• 
  Jherane Patmore

  This isn't a Romance book. It's a fast-paced book about revenge, the working class, scamming, prostitution, living with a disability and experiencing the world through travel as a non-American black person. W. E. B. Du Bois would not like this book.
  
  Ok, I have so many mixed feelings and thoughts on this book... Let me keep it as succinct as possible.
  
  This book was written by Claude McKay, a Jamaican-born and well-travelled writer, who wrote this in the 1930s but it was deemed "too shocking to sell", so it was set aside. Now in 2020, this book is a mild Bel Paese compared to what we read in similar genres, so lower your expectations about discussions on queerness because it's very subtle, remind yourself that the language used around race is out-dated, and enjoy the ride.
  
  The thing I liked about the book was the pacing and that the main character was neither the forgiving nor nice about losing his legs, he stops just before crossing the line to the bitter person with a disability trope. The main character is bitter, but it's more along the lines of Rihanna's BBHMM. It was a short book filled with bitter misadventures.
  
  The thing that I don't think was ahead of its time was Claude's view on work and Marxism, about halfway through the book the subtle mentions of class becomes very overt and didactic, and it showed a lot of Claude's pedestrian understanding of gender and class. There are a lot of rants about work, and the working class, yet neither the author nor the characters were able to do a proper analysis of sex work. It's one thing to have a sex worker as the villain in your story, and that's fine it can be a cool story, it's another thing to write a sex worker with very little nuance.
  
  I think everyone should read this, #ForTheCulture, so we can have a critical discussion about what has and hasn't changed in our discussions on race, class, gender, disability etc etc.
  
  The book was indeed ahead of its time, and it's a great conversation starter.
• 
  Michael

  Zany and full of sudden twists, Claude McKay’s Romance in Marseille charts the misadventures of an eclectic bunch of social outcasts. Set in the port of Marseille at the height of the Jazz Age, the fast-paced picaresque story follows the African-born, legless Lafala as he brushes shoulders with idlers, communists, and queer folk while pursuing the love of Aslima, a Moroccan prostitute closely surveilled by her pimp. Written in the 1930s and now released for the first time, the novel, in three acts, gleefully rejects subtlety at every turn, with lurid episodes of conflict, sex, and betrayal piling atop each other and crescendoing toward an unforgettable end.
  
  
  Full review here
• 
  Lisa

  I picked up “Romance in Marseille” based on some buzzy reviews from LitHub and New Yorker—a lost classic from a giant of the Harlem Renaissance? Sign me up, man. After reading several pop lit titles in a row, I have to say Claude McKay’s writing was like a cool drink of water— I was a little worried that something pulled out of the archives unfinished after ninety years might have languished in obscurity for a reason, but I could put those fears to bed within the first five pages. This is a GREAT book. I don’t know that that it quite lives up to the breathless hype of the reviews, but it was a wonderful introduction to the work of a truly talented author and a brisk read at 90ish pages.
  
  "Romance in Marseille" opens with the amputation of protagonist Lafala’s lower legs and feet, which, way to start the book off with a bang. Originally from West Africa, Lafala was discovered as a stowaway on a French freighter bound for New York—the shipmen punitively locked him in an unheated lavatory for the remainder of the voyage, resulting in frostbite to his feet and their subsequent amputation. It says something about “what we’ve come to expect from protagonists” that I already started wondering if this was some kind of device, where Lafala might wake up and realize it was all a dream, but no, he actually goes through the entire book as a double amputee, and that’s one of the really interesting parts of this novel. In the (unnecessarily voluminous) introduction, there’s a quote from McKay about how he wanted to treat Lafala’s disability without the usually heavy strings and maudlin overtones. Lafala, soon outfitted with prosthetic limbs and crutches, is no Tiny Tim--thanks to an enormous settlement from the ship’s owners, he becomes attractive in his affluence and more envied sans feet than he was with them. While the subject of his legs is never all the way out of sight, it’s treated with a distinct lack of pity and so much more naturalness than the usual writer from this time period would handle a similar situation.
  
  After winning his lawsuit, Lafala returns to the port of call he initially stowed away from—Marseille. He picks back up with a prostitute, Aslima, who stole all his money the last time he was in town and instigated his departure in the first place. She has a change of heart towards him in his newly disabled state, feeling partially responsible for his misfortune, and refuses to take money from him like her other clients—they begin a kind of is-she-or-isn’t-she-going-to-rip-him-off-again pas de deux, a situation triangulated by Aslima’s white pimp, Titin. At the local café, Tout-va-Bien, a colorful assemblage of misfits pass in and out of focus— there’s a feeling of a more diverse, more French version of Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin, as gay and straight, black and white, middle class and poor figures mingle. Some of this gets a little too character-sketchy, where the flash portraits of new people get in the way of the narrative, which is essentially a story of Lafala and Aslima, but I think some of this could be chalked up to the book not being “finished” by McKay before its way-posthumous publication.
  
  My only real complaint with the book is the long, long, LONG introduction and the EVEN LONGER and even less useful explanatory notes presented in this edition. The introduction gives a bit of an overview of the history of the manuscript, contextualizes the idea of the “stowaway” narrative, draws connections to possible real life inspirations used by McKay to form the backbone of the novel and some of its characters, and presents some ideas on how forward thinking the themes were for their time. I appreciated being clued in on these concepts but it felt stretched for length and overly pedantic. What I said about the intro goes twice for the explanatory notes—I mean, it would be useful to know that a muezzin is a term for the person who recites the call to prayer in a mosque, but can I not Google that? Did they have to explain what a Morris chair is? Spoiler: it’s an Arts and Crafts movement style chair designed by William Morris—not that that has hardly any bearing on the narrative, it’s just a descriptive term used for a chair you would see in the time period of the book. It felt a little like the notes at the end of a Shakespeare play, where you really would be lost if you didn’t understand a particular Renaissance-era reference or word, except this is the 1920’s and you won’t die if you don’t know what a pianola is…you can infer based on the context that it’s some kind of musical instrument, and I didn’t really need them to tell me it was “a type of mechanical player piano, introduced in the 1880s, that lost ground to the gramophone beginning in the 1920’s.” I already knew that from reading a lot of books from the 1920’s, but if YOU didn’t, YOU would be fine, trust.
  
  Short and long of this—skip the introduction until after you've finished the book, skip the explanatory notes altogether, and dig your teeth into this lushly written novel by a somewhat forgotten, but hopefully not for much longer, voice of early 20th century African American literature.
• 
  Kusaimamekirai

  Of the many adjectives one could use to describe Claude McKay’s “Romance in Marseille”, dull is not among them.
  To make an attempt at a short list, it’s characters include a stowaway from West Africa locked in a freezer who has his legs amputated, a Moroccan prostitute, her bisexual rival, a burly, socialist, a white dockworker carrying on a homosexual affair with a young dwarf, communists, pimps, and...in just getting started.
  The backdrop to this motley assortment of souls are the docks of Marseille. McKay brings this world of dockworkers, gamblers, prostitutes and pimps to life in such a way that by the end of the story, one can hardly imagine it being set anywhere else.
  Ostensibly the plot is about African immigrant Lafala who in losing his legs is able to collect a large financial settlement that enables him to return to Marseille with wealth that instantly changes the relationships he had prior to his departure. He longs to return to Africa but his black friends and love interest the Moroccan prostitute, Aslima can’t understand the appeal of “living in the bushes” when the decadence of Marseille, Harada has it may be at times, is all around them. The novel raises issues of black identity, materialism, and how little value black bodies, even scarred ones, have to white people when it comes to money and power.
  That this novel written in the late 1920s and early 1930s was never published in McKay’s lifetime is, considering the daring social, political, and queer content, perhaps not surprising. It reads rather as something that is a product of something that reflects our current era.
  I can’t say that I always enjoyed it but I admire the boldness McKay attempted to present under represented but important themes.
  
  
• 
  S P

  Romance in Marseille is a posthumous novel that surely would have developed a cult-classic status over time had it been originally published nearly ninety years ago. Mckay's vibrant, biting satire follows Lafala, a West African stowaway, after he loses both legs on a transatlantic voyage. However, a large settlement from the shipping company at fault ensures the return of the newly minted Lafala to Marseille - a city "lay bare to the glory of the meridian sun, like a fever consuming the senses" - in order to resume his affair with Aslima. In Marseille's Quayside neighbourhood Lafala dances and mingles with Caribbean Marxists, Moroccan courtesans, Corsican pimps amongst a motley cast of pulpy characters. Queer subculture is accepted unapologetically in Quayside, and it is refreshing to see queer desire and intimacy as an intrinsic, unsentimental background of the social fabric. However, the novel is definitely choppy and imperfect, evidence of the book's tortuous publishing history; and it's difficult to ignore the cruder representations of women, Jewish and Muslim characters. Although Lafala is disabled, the book is not really about disability studies in a contemporary sense, even if the metaphor of the impaired Black body in relation to the body politics of the slave trade and European savagery is key to understanding Lafala's positionality. This transgressive novel of outcasts and vagabonds deserves its place in the canon, and I hope it gets a readership long overdue. [This edition also has a really useful, if somewhat long, introduction to contextualise the history of the book.]
• 
  Jonathan

  Very interesting in terms of the subject matter, and in particular the way in which queerness, race and disability are dealt with, but the prose was a little too dry and Hemingwayesque for my taste.
• 
  Mary

  Interesting, offbeat little book quite unlike anything I can compare it to. Loved the setting, energy, frenzied pace, and sinister tone.
• 
  Starlah

  This story follows the misadventures of an eclectic group of social outcasts, set in the port of Marseille at the height of the Jazz Age. It's a fast-paced story that follows African-born Lafala and how he loses his feet/legs and his pursuit of love to Aslima, a Moroccan prostitute who is very closely surveilled by her pimp. Along the way, Lafala runs into an assortment of people including communists, queer folks, and more.
  
  I really enjoyed the introduction in this book that explains McKay - a Black, Jamaican-born author and poet - and this book's long journey of being originally written in the 1930s, but only recently being released for the first time.
  
  This is a story about redemption and revenge and love gone astray. Lafala's physical disability is the main point of the book. The queer aspects are in it as well, but they're not very explicit. Not as explicit as like a James Baldwin book - not that I love those books - but also this book does precede Baldwin by a couple of decades. There are some topics - like race, sexuality, and disability - that aren't handled equal to modern-day sensitivities, but for its time, it's definitely an interesting read.
  
  I feel odd criticizing the writing of this novel, especially after reading the introduction and learning of McKay's journey with this. I believe if he has the opportunity, he would have fleshed it out more and created more scenes with greater humanity and insight into these topics and themes. I absolutely think if this novel would have been allowed to be published when it was written, it could have a sort of cult-classic status nowadays that many other classics do.
  
  If you're going to read this, I would say to go into it with the same mindset you'd go into most classics with. Not everything in this book I personally agree with, but it does tackle a handful of things and I think it's a thought-provoking, interesting read.
• 
  Caroline Søgaard

  I enjoyed the social and political descriptions and different conversations. And I like the notes on the boom and about Claude McKay. I just didn’t really enjoy the story line and was just not it for me:/
• 
  Deanna

  I appreciated this book for its multi-faceted daring and diversity. Still, the story and characters never settled on me.
  
  More than that, I found the plot, characters, and writing so energetically dramatic that I just wanted to escape the uproar. My reading energy and the book failed to align.
• 
  Alvin

  The way RIM blended realistic social description with romantic melodrama put me in mind of certain pre-code movies; though it's certainly more explicit and thoughtful about racial issues and politics than old Hollywood ever was. Thought the plot hums along at a brisk pace, the writing is definitely a little choppy and the characters (especially of the female variety) are rather flat. I'd judge the book to be less of interest as a work of literature than as a historical artifact offering a rather atypical glimpse of life amongst the downtrodden.
• 
  Samuel Gordon

  Like the best novels of the Harlem Renaissance, especially those of Nella Larsen's, Claude McKay's work is so insightful and rich with subtext and stradles two continents. I'm so glad I stumbled on his books. This small novel of 170 something pages captures the complexities of what it means to be a Person of Color and an immigrant in Post-WWI Marseille. Loved reading the footnotes in this edition, they really helped shed light on terms I would surely have otherwise missed.
• 
  Drianne

  Claude McKay was one of the most important writers of the Harlem Renaissance, despite spending a fairly limited amount of time actually in NYC. A bisexual man from Jamaica, he lived in France for many years, and his creation/evocation of Marseilles as a space for a community of queer people of color both reflects his own desires and experiences there.
  
  In this novel, the main character, who stows away from Africa to New York, attains a dream of reparations when he loses his legs due to the cruelty of the steamship's crew. He takes his settlement and moves back to Marseilles, where he is part of an international community of sailors, sex workers, and demimondaine figures, some of whom are openly (and more or less acceptedly) queer.
  
  This is a modernist novel in style, and it is fascinating as an artifact of the 1930s deemed unpublishable at the time.
  
  Content notes for period-typical racism and language.
• 
  Megan

  So much packed into 120 pages! A satirical tragicomedy, anti-sentimental and thumbing its nose at respectability politics. The plot is farcical, picaresque (albeit based on the actual story of one of McKay's friends): Lafala, the West African protagonist, has gotten caught as a stowaway on a French ship, was imprisoned in a freezing bathroom, and lost both his legs to frostbite. On US soil, he wins a large settlement and heads back to Marseille with prosthetic legs and a lot of money. Hijinks ensue. The book is steeped in the cultural milieu of Marseille's Quayside community and as such is captivating as an historical document of that time and place, esp as seen through McKay's blunt, winking, critical worldview. Really compact, smart, idiosyncratic interwar novel with a mean streak.
• 
  Garrett Zecker

  If there was a way to somehow imbue the energy, schemes, and urban underground with the free spirit and lyricism of the best works of the Harlem Renaissance, and the political commentary of centuries that led to the Black Lives Matter movement, you would get Claude McKay’s Romance in Marseille. In a mere hundred and thirty pages, McKay has created a vibrant portrait of the somewhat seedy underbelly of the early twentieth century’s seaside life, and its energetic Black culture. But it doesn’t stop there – the characters and topics careen from the central portrait of a disabled man, the rights and violence of sex work, the personal nature of art and ability, the politics of Marxism, the inconsistent justice and unfairness of the legal system, and the way in which Black bodies take up space in all of these varied arenas and geographical locales from the United States to Morocco to Marseilles.
  
  McKay tells the story of the joyful dancer Lafala at the height of the Jazz era. After he stows away on a ship and is caught, he is thrown into the dingiest water closet on the ship as a makeshift brig for the remainder of the journey. When they dock, his legs need to be amputated due to the injuries sustained from the major infection he catches. He is then embroiled in a legal battle for the value of his legs post-amputation, a battle for the literal value of Black flesh in America. For the remainder of the book, this argument of the value of flesh seems to be a great deal more litigiously fantastic in the short time span of the novel than the horrific truth of Black history. When his fortunes are tied to deportation, Lafala returns to Marseille and falls in love with Aslima, a Moroccan prostitute. They plan to escape to Africa together. But things become complicated when the value of Black flesh, and black lives, can go from priceless to meaningless depending on who is setting the price and how much they can profit from others misfortunes.
  
  This book was a revelatory reading experience. McKay’s prose is breezy and packs a tremendous of energy and momentum into the story with each sentence. Furthermore, there is a shocking yet beautiful vulgarity that seems to run through the language, people, and events of this novel. This very vulgarity, and the topics that seem much too taboo for the early twentieth century, are certainly why this novel is first coming to light today. More on that soon. But like Brecht’s Threepenny Opera that was contemporary to McKay’s novel, the characters of this novel take to their stage of prostitution, wheeling and dealing, violence, and revolution to present a story that is totally endearing and heartfelt despite their lives and the subject matter. In this way, McKay has built a disruptive and beautiful queer novel through which the outsiders and vagabonds are the heroes, and doing their best to scrape some true happiness in their lives regardless of the hands they were dealt. We heartily cheer them on.
  
  McKay’s portrayal of otherness is monumental in this novel. It is a novel of disability, as much as it is a novel of the Black experience, as much as it is a novel of economic and legal opposites, as much as it is a comedy, drama, and love story. What it is most is a great work of Black art from a talented and visionary member of the Harlem Renaissance. The opening fifty pages of the edition I read is a history of the publication of the novel and how it came to finally be published in 2020. It tells the story of how the one complete privately owned copy was almost destroyed, various other portions were lost in three different archives, and the story of how scraps of the piece changed hands, locations, and various versions of different names and forms of the piece led to a century of confusion. The one thing that I learned, though, is that regardless of how puritanical the audience was in the 1920s, preventing the piece from being published and widely read, the portrayal of the Black experience as it is read a hundred years later is just as relevant.
  
  This is one of my favorite books I have read this year, and will remain a widely recommended title to everyone I know. McKay’s work is dynamic, and the politics, themes, motifs, comedy, and drama in its short hundred and thirty pages is nothing short of brilliant.
• 
  Christopher Louderback

  A wild, gritty road novel that you are simply not prepared for! Dizzying in its frenetic prose, devastating in its turns of fate, and somehow still darkly hilarious, this novel is a rush of insane occurrences and one of the earliest explorations of queer character writing in black literature. It ends with a bang! — and can easily be considered in “conversation” with books by Baldwin, Faulkner, O’Connor, and McCarthy.
• 
  evelyn

  I really really loved this. Its fast paced short novel following the lives of those who congregate around the port of Marseille. Although the plot (?) was choppy at times i really enjoyed romance in marseille and i think despite it not being as overtly queer as it was described before i read it, it's certainly one of the most unabashed books from its time.
• 
  Gibson

  Romantica Marsiglia?
  
  La storia del romanzo, inedito per circa novant'anni a causa dei suoi temi quali il razzismo, la disabilità, l'omosessualità, le ingiustizie sociali, che certo a quei tempi non facevano le gioie degli editori - per di più se portati avanti da un uomo di colore -, è presa da quella vera di un nigeriano, Nelson Simeon Dede, incontrato dall'autore in quel di Marsiglia.
  
  Proprio da Marsiglia il protagonista di queste pagine, un marinaio africano di nome Lafala, a causa di una disavventura 'amorosa' con una prostituta marocchina che lo deruba di tutto per poi darsi alla macchia, decide di imbarcarsi clandestinamente su una nave diretta a New York.
  Scovato, viene sbattuto in un locale della nave così gelido da procurargli l'amputazione degli arti inferiori una volta sbarcato a destinazione.
  Con l'aiuto di un avvocato riesce a intentare causa alla compagnia navale e a ricevere un cospicuo risarcimento, potendo così far rientro a Marsiglia per vendicarsi della prostituta.
  
  Sulla carta il romanzo aveva le potenzialità per piacermi, ma così non è stato. Come si dice in questi casi, forse non era il momento giusto.
  Con me ha funzionato solo la prima parte, da Marsiglia a New York, che in ultima analisi è però quella meno significativa. È infatti solo con la seconda che si entra nell'umore della Marsiglia dei tempi, crogiolo di malavita e prostituzione e sfruttamenti vari, ricca di lingue e identità varie, ma che purtroppo mi ha annoiato a causa dello stile, affossando di fatto la mia attenzione.
  
• 
  Virgowriter (Brad Windhauser)

  Okay story, but choppy in places. Huge plot point gets main character stowing away on ship to US, loses his feet’s due to mistreatment on ship, get to US, loses feet as a result of mistreatment, recovers, sues ship company, gets big settlement, then leave US—this is in the first 30 pages or so. So not much investment in this section. Also, the back of the book tours all this overt queer content—a handful of sentences suggest this but there’s zero developing of ANY queer content—which is not the book’s fault, but it is misleading from the publisher.
• 
  Mark

  Not just an excellent and fascinating novel, but a superb edition. Hats off to Penguin Classics for producing such a well-supported edition, with a detailed introduction, copious explanatory notes, and a full bibliography. Highly recommended for anyone interested in the literature of the Harlem Renaissance, Claude McKay, and France in the inter-war years.
• 
  Michael Howley

  One that I wish I could mark with rating. It's very clearly an unfinished manuscript. I'm glad it exists, it's casually queer, refreshingly non-American centered, and full of promise for something more than 100 years old. But it's not a finished book.
• 
  Andrea

  Uhh I need to change my reviewing system because I haven’t rated anything less than three stars all year and their were books I enjoyed much less than this (cough Hemingway cough). I enjoyed this overall, though I do feel like it lost momentum in the last third and I had to convince myself to continue. For whatever they market the book as, this is not a romance, nor is it very queer (a big point of advertisement is the explicit queerness which was unprecedented in Black American literature of the time period), but instead it is a story about disability, class, and the lives of the working class people of Marseille, particularly the lives of sex workers and the men who elicit their services. All of this perspective and commentary was interesting, and the themes McKay discusses have convinced me to read some of his other works (he spends a lot of time critiquing the ways that educated communists attempt to infiltrate and organize black working class communities, and this seems to be a theme in his other books as well), but I think this book suffers from too-many-irrelevant-characters syndrome. When characters are introduced late in the novel, or early and then largely ignored, and are never developed beyond being a part of an ensemble cast, their random scenes feel unimportant and distracting from the main story, and that was what caused me to lose interest by the end. Nonetheless, I enjoyed the main characters and was eager to follow their stories and see where they would go; Lafala himself is a compelling protagonist and easy to become invested in.
• 
  Ygraine

  am going to read the introduction tomorrow, w fresh eyes: my initial impression is that this is Zippy & Crackly & Abrupt and i like it. there's something abt the tone that reminded me of giovanni's room while i was reading, although i can't put my finger on exactly What -- maybe the sort of dynamic tension between aloofness & tenderness of voice, the half-repulsed, half-marvelling way of seeing ? they're not the Same in any substantive way & like. that book works on a structural level that this one doesn't, quite, i just kept noticing the tug of my brain.
  
  anyway, i think there are subtleties i absolutely missed, because i was so caught up in the energy of the writing & i did Not go into this w any real knowledge of mckay, his politics or the historical context he was writing in, but like. time enough for that now !
• 
  Joanne Adams

  I think this book was interesting because of the time frame that it was written. This book was published in the 1930’s by a black author whose main character is a disabled man. The main story provides topics and characters that deal with race, disability, gender, friendship and love. I find it fascinating because the story does not have a perfect, happy ending. I found the story interesting because I thought it was a great snapshot of time. The story is based on actual events and I felt like this story could be placed in current times.
• 
  ColumbusReads

  3.5 stars