![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rydra_wongThis time, I managed to wait until the following morning to start searching frantically for other books by the same author, but that's only because I was too busy reading right through insomnia and a splitting headache for half of last night. All incoherencies in this post should therefore be excused on the grounds of sleep-deprivation and a blown mind.
This feels like my London (the one I can hear in M.I.A.'s "Galang"), and it's a shock and a joy to to find it in fiction.
In the acknowledgements, Evaristo (website at http://www.bevaristo.net) credits historian Peter Fryer's fantastic Staying Power: The History of Black People In Britain for telling her that there were Africans living in Britain during the Roman occupation.
The Emperor's Babe takes the historical facts and runs with them: it's set circa 211 AD and tells the story of Zuleika, the daughter of Sudanese immigrants, growing up in Londinium, married off at age 11 to a rich senator, dreaming of writing poetry and plotting to seduce the Libyan-born Emperor, Septimus Severus ...
But Evaristo tells it as a novel-in-verse, and not only is it jawdroppingly-ambitious, it contains some of the freshest poetry I've read in a while: a deliberately anachronistic, anarchic blend of formal diction, Latin and contemporary slang, historical authenticity and jarringly-modern detail (the Emperor wears a "purple Armani toga", and Zuleika buys flowers from a shop I know), funny and sexy and shrewd and passionate -- and, at the end, when the constricted and brutal realities of life for women in Roman society bite home, heart-shattering.
Zuleika's not just a Londinium It Girl, bubbly chick lit with a smattering of Latin; she's also a relative of Virginia Woolf's hypothetical Shakespeare's sister, born black and Roman. And she feels utterly real.
An extract:
( Read more... )
This feels like my London (the one I can hear in M.I.A.'s "Galang"), and it's a shock and a joy to to find it in fiction.
In the acknowledgements, Evaristo (website at http://www.bevaristo.net) credits historian Peter Fryer's fantastic Staying Power: The History of Black People In Britain for telling her that there were Africans living in Britain during the Roman occupation.
The Emperor's Babe takes the historical facts and runs with them: it's set circa 211 AD and tells the story of Zuleika, the daughter of Sudanese immigrants, growing up in Londinium, married off at age 11 to a rich senator, dreaming of writing poetry and plotting to seduce the Libyan-born Emperor, Septimus Severus ...
But Evaristo tells it as a novel-in-verse, and not only is it jawdroppingly-ambitious, it contains some of the freshest poetry I've read in a while: a deliberately anachronistic, anarchic blend of formal diction, Latin and contemporary slang, historical authenticity and jarringly-modern detail (the Emperor wears a "purple Armani toga", and Zuleika buys flowers from a shop I know), funny and sexy and shrewd and passionate -- and, at the end, when the constricted and brutal realities of life for women in Roman society bite home, heart-shattering.
Zuleika's not just a Londinium It Girl, bubbly chick lit with a smattering of Latin; she's also a relative of Virginia Woolf's hypothetical Shakespeare's sister, born black and Roman. And she feels utterly real.
An extract:
( Read more... )
