About the Book
'Luminous... a vibrant portrait of African-American life at the nation's crossroads' New York Times Book Review
'A rousing, inspired work, keenly observed and soulful... the novel sparkles with life, soaring with the loose flow of a jazzy improvisation' Boston Globe
Amerigo Jones grows up poor but surrounded by love in Jazz Age Kansas City. A precocious young dreamer, he longs for the college education that his parents could not have.
But as Amerigo begins to venture further away from his doting mother and father, he encounters a world marred by prejudice, where amid the bustle and the beauty, violence and injustice stalk the streets.
Such Sweet Thunder is a majestic and unforgettable child's-eye-view of Jim Crow America from a powerful chronicler of American family life.
Amerigo Jones grows up poor but surrounded by love in Jazz Age Kansas City. A precocious young dreamer, he longs for the college education that his parents could not have. But as Amerigo begins to venture further away from his doting mother and father, he encounters a world marred by prejudice, where amid the bustle and the beauty, violence and injustice stalk the streets. Such Sweet Thunder is a majestic and unforgettable child's-eye-view of Jim Crow America from a powerful chronicler of American family life.
About the Author :
Vincent O. Carter (1924-1983) was born in Kansas City where he was raised during the Great Depression. At seventeen he was drafted into the U.S. Army and took part in the Normandy invasion. After the war, he studied English at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. Carter then returned to Europe, spending time in Paris, Munich, and Amsterdam before settling in Bern. There he wrote fiction, painted, and worked as an English teacher. He is also the author of the autobiographical The Bern Book (1973).
Jesse McCarthy is an essayist, cultural critic, and the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities and of the Social Sciences at Harvard University. His writing on culture and politics has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Nation, Dissent, The New Republic and n+1. In 2022 he was the recipient of the Whiting Award for his essay collection Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul?. His most recent book, The Blue Period, establishes Such Sweet Thunder as a work to be read and taught alongside those of James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison
Review :
A vibrant portrait of African-American life at the nation's crossroads . . . belongs with other enduring documentaries of the dispossessed, like Cormac McCarthy's Suttree or Langston Hughes's novel Not Without Laughter
A rousing, inspired work, keenly observed and soulful . . . The novel sparkles with life, soaring with the loose flow of a jazzy improvisation. More akin in style to Charles Dickens than Richard Wright or James Baldwin, Carter writes prose that tingles with detail . . . a rich addition to our literary understanding of the 20th-century African-American experience
This hefty, astonishing novel by a Black American expatriate who died in 1983 tells - in electric modernist vernacular prose - the story of a black child's life in Jim Crow America . . .Through a steady accumulation of detail, sustained lyricism, flights of fancy and, especially, reams of swinging dialogue, Carter paints an uncommonly rich picture of Black American family life in the early 20th century. Like the composition it is named for, a Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn tribute to Shakespeare, it is a marvelous blend of jazz rhythms and high literary tradition
Sprawling and searching, it is Dickensian or even Joycean in scope . . .This novel is not only a Bildungsroman but also a road map - an atlas that points the way to both the heartland and the human heart
An extraordinarily honest and compassionate child's-eye view of a world too seldom seen in American fiction
Echoes of Faulkner, Twain and Joyce . . . For its lyrical rendering of a time and place long vanished, this is a book to savor, slowly
Dreamy, nostalgic, and lyrical writing . . . a stirring portrait of a young boy growing up
Infused with the sounds and spirit of Kansas City jazz, the author's gritty style was ahead of its time
Carter bridges Zora Neale Hurston's folkloric narratives and Toni Morrison's communal spirituals . . . Few works are so insistently frank about a boy's proto-sexual, innocent but instinctive yearnings
It is seldom that one comes across a book that dazzles and surprises, a book that will surely withstand the test of time. Such Sweet Thunder is such a book
A kaleidoscopic stream of events; a cacophony of sounds and voices, smells and sights; and a tapestry of sensuality
The book takes us into its arms and transports us back in time to a racially segregated Kansas City in the late 1920s . . . Seamlessly, gently, Such Sweet Thunder carries Amerigo and us through adolescence, first love and the edge of world war and its sad demands on the safe, secure world Amerigo had come to love . . . Carter connects all of our childhoods to Amerigo's, while making us feel intensely what made his childhood - Carter's childhood, presumably - as special as it was
Spiraling and powerful . . . Carter paints a rich, jazz-like portrait of pre-World War II life in Black America . . . By fusing the best European modernist literary traditions with African American ones, Carter weaves a colorful, distinctive tapestry of a seminal period in African American history
Such Sweet Thunder is Carter's Portrait of the Artist . . . Dedicated to musical giant Duke Ellington, the book is a jazz mix of sounds and sensations - the phonograph in the living room, the slamming of screen doors up and down his alley, trams clacking down the boulevard, the rhythms and rhymes of his young parents' enthusiastic speech.
