Long Division
- Schrijver: Kiese Laymon (Verenigde Staten)
- Soort boek: Afro-Amerikaanse roman
- Taal: Engels
- Eerste druk: 2013
- Uitgever heruitgave: Scribner Books
- Verschijnt: 1 juni 2021
- Uitgave: paperback / ebook
Recensie en waardering van de roman van Kiese Laymon
- “A revised version of Laymon’s elliptical, time-folding work of metafiction about Southern racism… is effectively two novels, both potent yet often funny character studies. In style and structure, Laymon’s novel is an inheritor to Black postmodern literature of the 1960s and ’70s–Toni Morrison most famously but also Leon Forrest, Gayl Jones, and William Melvin Kelley. A sui generis.” (Kirkus)
- “In a multilayered, allusion-packed, time-traveling plot set in Mississippi, Long Division takes us, nesting-doll-style, from 2013 to 1985, 1964, and back, engaging complex questions of race, violence, gender, sexuality, and our relationship to history. More than anything, Laymon shows with surprising lucidity how American racialized inequality is persistent but mutable, that the past is not the present, but isn’t, either, entirely past.” (The Boston Review)
Flaptekst van de roman van Kiese Laymon
From Kiese Laymon, author of the critically acclaimed memoir Heavy, comes a “funny, astute, searching” (The Wall Street Journal) debut novel about Black teenagers that is a satirical exploration of celebrity, authorship, violence, religion, and coming of age in post-Katrina Mississippi.
Written in a voice that’s alternately humorous, lacerating, and wise, Long Division features two interwoven stories. In the first, it’s 2013: after an on-stage meltdown during a nationally televised quiz contest, fourteen-year-old Citoyen “City” Coldson becomes an overnight YouTube celebrity. The next day, he’s sent to stay with his grandmother in the small coastal community of Melahatchie, where a young girl named Baize Shephard has recently disappeared.
Before leaving, City is given a strange book without an author called Long Division. He learns that one of the book’s main characters is also named City Coldson–but Long Division is set in 1985. This 1985-version of City, along with his friend and love interest, Shalaya Crump, discovers a way to travel into the future, and steals a laptop and cellphone from an orphaned teenage rapper called…Baize Shephard. They ultimately take these items with them all the way back to 1964, to help another time-traveler they meet to protect his family from the Ku Klux Klan.