Octavia Butler, "Kindred"

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Octavia E. Butler, Kindred, Fledgling, Collected Stories (2020)

소설 Kindred, 자전적 에세이 Positive Obsession, 그리고 작가가 되기 위한 요령을 적은 에세이 Furor Scribendi를 재밌게 읽었다. 단편도 Crossover 한 편을 읽었다. 내 생각에도 Kindred은 걸작이다. 작가 Octavia Butler를 알게 되어 기쁘다. 소설 Fledgling, 그리고 다른 단편들과 에세이들은 안 읽기로 한다.

 

 

책 겉표지 안쪽에서:

 

An original and eerily prophetic writer, Octavia E. Butler, used the conventions of science fiction to explore the dangerous legacy of racism in America in harrowingly personal terms.... In 1995 she became the first science fiction writer to receive a MacArthur Fellowship, in recognition of her achievment in creating new aspirations for the genre and for American literature. This forst volume in the Library of America edition of Butler's collected works gathers her 1979 masterpiece, Kindred, one of the landmark American novels of the last half century, ... , and her collected short stories.

 

In Kindred, Dana, a black woman whose husband is white, is pulled back and forth between the California present and the pre-Civil War South, where she finds herself enslaved on the plantation of white ancestor whose life she must save in order to preserve her own, Gripping and suspenseful, the novel uses the conceit of time travel to plumb the mutilating structures of slavery and the terrible cost they continue to exact.

 

The Essential Octavia Butler by Stephen Kearse

 

본문에서:

 

     I talked Rufus into letting me teach Nigel's two older sons and the two children who served at the table along with Joe....

     Some of his neighbors found out what I was doing and offered him fatherly advice. It was dangerous to educate slaves, they warned. Education made blacks dissatisfied with slavery. it spoiled them for field work. The Methodist minister said it made them disobedient, made them want more than the Lord intended them to have. Another man said educationg slaves was illegal. When Rufus replied that he had checked and that it wasn't illegal in Maryland, the man said it should have been. -- in Kindred. (p. 243)

 

     I crept into my first bookstore full of vague fears. I had managed to save about five dollars, mostly in change. It was 1957. Five dollars was a lot of money for a ten-year-old. The public library had been my second home since I was six, and I owned a number of hand-me-down books. But now I wasnted a new book -- one I had chosen, one I could keep.

     "Can kids come in here?" I asked the woman at the cash register once I was inside. I meant could Black kids come in. My mother, born in rural Louisiana and raised amid strict racial segregation, had warned me that I might not be welcome everywhere, even in California.

     The cashier glanced at me. "Of course you can come in," she said. Then, as though it were an afterthought, she smiled. I relaxed.

     The first book I bought described the characteristics of different breeds of horses. The second described stars and planets, asteroids, moons and comets. -- in Positive Obsession. (p. 725)