Jeffra Hays

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)

One of the things I like the most about CCLaP's liberal submission policy is that it occasionally produces books that I end up enjoying quite a lot, yet I would've never in a million years picked on my own for a little pleasure-reading; take for example Jeffra Hays' Cocoa Almond Darling, which might be best described as "Oprah Presents" meets Virginia Woolf, a book I suspect would highly satisfy the typical Tyler Perry fan while still being a smart, subversive piece of contemporary literature in its own right. Not exactly stream-of-consciousness, it nonetheless tells the Mrs. Dallowayesque tale of an elderly white woman looking back on her event-filled life in non-sequential order one random day, as she first runs away in her youth from a bad husband, finds work with a middle-aged and pot-bellied black tailor, and eventually falls in love with him and has a mixed-race baby out of wedlock, the narrative jumping from one milieu to the next with no advance warning, and adding up by the end to a dense, complex character study of willful independence against sometimes very challenging odds. Plus, while being a story that will appeal to older, more conservative readers, I have to admit that I'm impressed with the amount of smoldering eroticism Hays surprisingly works into this book, even more impressive for it being among the kinds of characters that usually don't inspire sexual stories; just take the cocoa-dusted almonds of the book's title for a good example, a local delicacy that eventually comes to represent the burning lust our two main protagonists learn to have for each other, subverted even more when it eventually becomes a favorite of their forbidden love child as well, a detail just dripping with the kind of symbolism that makes this book in general such a winner. A great novel for all you NPR nerds to take a random chance on, if you're feeling burned out on your usual "miserable slackers" reading diet and feel like taking on something completely from left field, Cocoa Almond Darling quickly blew past my initial low expectations to become one of my more surprisingly great reads so far of this young year, and it comes recommended in that specific spirit.

Out of 10: 9.0… (plus d'informations)