Romance in Marseille (Penguin Classics)

A phenomenal book. Claude McKay's writing is so crisp and pleasurable to read. The book is an incredible snapshot of history and race. It's exquisite.

I picked up Claude McKay's Romance in Marseille as a Black History Month read. It contains an extensive introduction in which the reader learns a great deal about McKay and this book's long and elusive path to publication, having been written in the early 1930s, but only just now being released for the first time.It's a turbulent story about redemption, revenge and strange loves gone astray. Touted as a forerunner of pro-disabled and LGBTQ literature, this may not satisfy the modern activist's mindset. While the main character's disability is the focal point of the book, any references to homosexuality are polite-society played down. This is certainly not as strident and explicit as a James Baldwin novel. But of course, this predates Baldwin by a few decades.Viewed from the literary standpoint, there are minor problems. Some of the characterizations are ham-fisted, slightly too two-dimensional. A bit more nuance would have done a world of good. Perhaps this would have been addressed if the full version of this book had made it to print. What we have here is a shorter version of the entire manuscript. It's all that has survived to print. It's a shame, but I'm thankful for what we do have. Romance in Marseille, the book and its journey to publication, is important to literature.

If there was a way to somehow imbue the energy, schemes, and urban underground with the free spirit and lyricism of the best works of the Harlem Renaissance, and the political commentary of centuries that led to the Black Lives Matter movement, you would get Claude McKay’s Romance in Marseille. In a mere hundred and thirty pages, McKay has created a vibrant portrait of the somewhat seedy underbelly of the early twentieth century’s seaside life, and its energetic Black culture. But it doesn’t stop there – the characters and topics careen from the central portrait of a disabled man, the rights and violence of sex work, the personal nature of art and ability, the politics of Marxism, the inconsistent justice and unfairness of the legal system, and the way in which Black bodies take up space in all of these varied arenas and geographical locales from the United States to Morocco to Marseilles.McKay tells the story of the joyful dancer Lafala at the height of the Jazz era. After he stows away on a ship and is caught, he is thrown into the dingiest water closet on the ship as a makeshift brig for the remainder of the journey. When they dock, his legs need to be amputated due to the injuries sustained from the major infection he catches. He is then embroiled in a legal battle for the value of his legs post-amputation, a battle for the literal value of Black flesh in America. For the remainder of the book, this argument of the value of flesh seems to be a great deal more litigiously fantastic in the short time span of the novel than the horrific truth of Black history. When his fortunes are tied to deportation, Lafala returns to Marseille and falls in love with Aslima, a Moroccan prostitute. They plan to escape to Africa together. But things become complicated when the value of Black flesh, and black lives, can go from priceless to meaningless depending on who is setting the price and how much they can profit from others misfortunes.This book was a revelatory reading experience. McKay’s prose is breezy and packs a tremendous of energy and momentum into the story with each sentence. Furthermore, there is a shocking yet beautiful vulgarity that seems to run through the language, people, and events of this novel. This very vulgarity, and the topics that seem much too taboo for the early twentieth century, are certainly why this novel is first coming to light today. More on that soon. But like Brecht’s Threepenny Opera that was contemporary to McKay’s novel, the characters of this novel take to their stage of prostitution, wheeling and dealing, violence, and revolution to present a story that is totally endearing and heartfelt despite their lives and the subject matter. In this way, McKay has built a disruptive and beautiful queer novel through which the outsiders and vagabonds are the heroes, and doing their best to scrape some true happiness in their lives regardless of the hands they were dealt. We heartily cheer them on.McKay’s portrayal of otherness is monumental in this novel. It is a novel of disability, as much as it is a novel of the Black experience, as much as it is a novel of economic and legal opposites, as much as it is a comedy, drama, and love story. What it is most is a great work of Black art from a talented and visionary member of the Harlem Renaissance. The opening fifty pages of the edition I read is a history of the publication of the novel and how it came to finally be published in 2020. It tells the story of how the one complete privately owned copy was almost destroyed, various other portions were lost in three different archives, and the story of how scraps of the piece changed hands, locations, and various versions of different names and forms of the piece led to a century of confusion. The one thing that I learned, though, is that regardless of how puritanical the audience was in the 1920s, preventing the piece from being published and widely read, the portrayal of the Black experience as it is read a hundred years later is just as relevant.This is one of my favorite books I have read this year, and will remain a widely recommended title to everyone I know. McKay’s work is dynamic, and the politics, themes, motifs, comedy, and drama in its short hundred and thirty pages is nothing short of brilliant.

First, do not be fooled by the duration. Much of the audiobook is simply a lengthy, boring, self-important introduction. The novel itself is more of a novella.Next, the writing, when viewed independently of plot and character development, is quite nice. Pretty words, phrases, sentences—even paragraphs. But when looked at as a whole, Mckay really had nothing to say and nobody to say it about. The plot is thin at best. And there is not a single character—including Lafala—in whom the reader (or listener) would want to invest any time or emotion. We see some actions, but we understand nothing of who any of these people are. We just stumble from one incident to the next, not caring how or why.Third, the end of this book is deeply frustrating, unsatisfying, and pointless.Finally, the narration, at least, fits the book. Graham's voice is difficult to understand—often whispery, often rushed—and his mimicking of female voices borders on the ridiculous.All in all, I cannot recommend this work to anyone.