Divine Days

By Leon Forrest

Book Overview

Fabulous, wildly comic, and Ulysses-like, Divine Days explores the mythical world of Leon Forrest's literary kingdom, Forest County. It is a huge oratorio of the sacred and the profane, set in bars, churches, and barbershops over a crucial seven-day period in the life of would-be playwright Joubert Jones during February 1966. Divine Days creates a profound microcosm of African-American life. It is the most prodigious literary creation since Ellison's Invisible Man forty years ago. Joubert Jones - playwright, journalist, bartender, lover - confronts and transcends the power of a fantastic group of bar denizens whose personalities run the gamut of classical myths, Shakespearean heros, Shakespearean villains, religious true-believers, and ghetto dwellers. Joubert is evolving a memory from the yeasty material of his friend and mentor Sugar-Groove into a play. Sugar-Groove is a world traveler, a mythical lover, who has twenty nicknames connected with his prowess. He is trickster-as-angel. Joubert's volatile and fragile girlfriend, Imani, is desperately searching for her abandoned siblings, a meaningful self-definition of her Blackness, and a place to settle her warring spirit. Joubert also encounters the powerful presence of his Aunt Eloise and the ever-haunting phantasmagoric W. A. D. Ford, the demonic trickster and manipulator of bodies and souls. Ford is the Mephistopheles of Forest County, and he comes to represent the forces of cosmic evil in the world. The neighborhood of Joubert's imagination becomes a theater enraptured with the voices of the living and the dead, acted out in Aunt Eloise's Night Light Lounge. The critic John Cawelti has called this novel: "the Ulysses of the SouthSide". In the tradition of Joyce's Dedalus, Ellison's invisible narrator, Bellow's Augie March, and Heller's Yossarian, Joubert's voice emerges clearly upon Divine Days's ebullient stage.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393312216
• ISBN13: 9780393312218
• Release Date: January 1995
• Publisher: Norton & Company, Incorporated, W. W.
• Length: 1144 Pages
• Weight: 3.34 lbs.
• Dimensions: 2.0" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

A wonderful read!

This was such a good read, you get caught up in all the stories of all these wonderful characters. It is a big book but it reads so quickly. I know you will be glad to pick this up

please read this book

Divine Days is as beautifully written as it is challenging. It is massive, complex, and wonderful. Leon Forrest is truly one of the great writers of the 20th century. History may look back and place Forrest in the Canon along with the likes of Ellison, Faulkner, and Morrison. On the other hand, the book may continue to be overlooked. Either way, do yourself a favor and read this book. You'll be glad you did.

jazz, stories, history- it doesn't get any better than this!

Written in the free-form style of jazz music, Leon Forrest's novel captures the pride, woe and miracle of a people and of a generation. There will never be a more human, more complete, more whole celebration of storytelling and history than Divine Days!!!