Getting Mother’s Body
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- ¥600
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- ¥600
発行者による作品情報
The debut novel from Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks is a gutsy, funny, tragic and completely original work for fans of William Faulkner and Alice Walker.
In the 1950s, in a small southern town in the US, the Beedes are the lowest of the low. Always struggling, they remain shackled by poverty and their own lack of ambition. Everyone, but sixteen-year-old Billie Beede.
Billy Beede has big ideas about her life. She's had the Beede misfortune to get pregnant by an itinerant coffin salesman. And when he proves to have a wife and seven kids in another town, she determines to try her luck elsewhere. The answer seems to be in the hem of her mother's dress, her mother who died ten years ago. The rumour is that Willa Mae – a Billie Holiday look-alike – was the only Beede who made good, and was buried with a pearl necklace and a diamond ring sewn into the hem of her dress.
Billie – and all her relatives – aim to get their hands on this treasure and make something of themselves. What follows is a mad road trip that evokes shades of Faulkner – in its potent earthiness – but also has the approachability and warmth of novels like The Colour Purple. This is a fantastic debut novel from an accomplished and well-loved American playwright.
Reviews
‘Full, farcical…this tale offers a Toni Morrison-style take on the 1960s Black American South.’ Guardian
‘It's not only the plot that subversively echoes Faulkner's masterpiece As I Lay Dying. Like Faulkner, Parks tells her story through a multiplicity of voices; as many as 20 characters give their slewed versions of the fugitive truth. She has an ultra-sensitive ear for dialogue, though, as you would expect from a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright…Much of the novel demands to be read aloud throatily, between large swigs of bourbon.' Christopher Hart, Daily Telegraph
'Parks wraps the bristling comic touch of Chester Himes and the lyrical mournfulness of Toni Morrison into a tale that touches on the worst of human failings but maintains a deep compassion for its protagonists at the same time.'
Metro
About the author
Suzan-Lori Parks is a well-known US playwright. She has won various awards for her plays, including a Pulitzer Prize, and was also the recipient of a MacArthur "Genius" Grant. She currently lives in New York. This is her first novel.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Parks, winner of the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for her play Topdog/Underdog, puts her dramatic skills to good use in this fluid, assured debut novel, the story of a sweaty road trip from Texas to Arizona in July 1963. When stubborn 16-year-old Billy Beede gets knocked up and jilted by her sweet-talking, coffin-salesman lover, she needs money for an abortion. Her wild mother, Willa Mae, died when Billy was 10, and Billy lives with her "childless churchless minister Uncle and one-legged church-hopping Aunt" in a mobile home behind their rural Texas gas station. Billy's only hope for serious cash is to dig up her mother's body from its grave in LaJunta, Ariz., where Willa Mae was buried wearing a diamond ring and a pearl necklace. That, at least, is the story told by Willa Mae's one-time lover, Dill, a six-foot-tall "bulldagger, dyke, lezzy, what-have-you." Billy steals Dill's truck and, together with her aunt and uncle, embarks on a trip to Arizona to find her mother's body, her mother's treasure and her mother's memory. With disgruntled Dill in hot pursuit (chauffeured by Billy's dogged suitor, Laz, misfit son of the local funeral parlor owner), the three travel through the racist Southwest, meeting up with relatives, friends and foes. Parks narrates her brief chapters from the point of view of different characters, giving each a distinctive voice; blues songs are interwoven with the text. Parks's influences are evident among them Zora Neale Hurston and Faulkner's As I Lay Dying but the novel's easy grace and infectious rhythms are all her own. Fueled by irresistible, infectious talk and prose that swings like speech, this novel begs (no surprise) to be read aloud.
