As then, the overweight Rhonda is the target. Back at the parish school, at the class reunion, years after graduation. The former heartthrob Willfried Jones, called Wolf, is surrounded by his old clique. They make jokes. Smirking. As they lower their gaze to prayer, Rhonda drinks alternately from two cocktail glasses. In school, Wolf had sex with Rhonda, actually wanted to humiliate her, but he liked the sex. And it was her, "Fat Rhonda," who later recounted what Rhonda was being teased for, and wolf celebrated like a hero.
Her character is the only female whose interior opens Jamel Brinkley. In his debut "Outrageous Happiness", the New York author narrates in nine short stories the innermost thoughts of men who are not always supposed to trigger benevolent feelings. From the point of view of his black-skinned male figures, Brinkley creates in a few pages complex actions with equally complex relationships between the characters.
Brinkley, born in 1975 in New York, tells from the perspective of sons, brothers, fathers or best friends. Of men who move into the underground on the belly, who are secretly and tragically in love with their roommate, who never take off their mask and their second home is a bar. Of men, of all ages and stages of life.
The insight into the inner world of the female characters usually remains closed. The women are mothers who can not understand, daughters to whom there is little contact - or objects of desire. They are the excitatory thighs, the nipples under the tank top, the women on the student party, who dance madly.
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DISPLAY
Jamel Brinkley
Outrageous luck
Publishing company:
No buts
Pages:
336
Price:
EUR 22,00
Translated by:
Uda Strätling
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At "Wolf and Rhonda" Wolf wants to finally understand at the class reunion, why Rhonda had exposed the torments of classmates, also he wants to repeat their intimate experience. But Rhonda, who cared for her gravely ill mother at the time, whose tenth anniversary of death is just on the day of the class reunion, makes him flinch.
In Brinkley's stories there are no clear winners, no dazzling heroes, no simple division into good and evil. So, in "J'Ouvert, 1996" teenager Ty strikes the streets of Brooklyn at night with huge frustration, a spoiled haircut and a couple of cans of warm beer given to him by the men from the park. In tow his younger brother, whom he is to take care of. On the small Omari, who never takes off his bird mask and holds his invisible fantasy friend Angela by the hand, Ty lets out his displeasure: he beats, ignores, forgets him. Buy him but also with the only money potato chips. After her father is lost, her mother shares the bedroom with a new man, Ty is looking for his identity and a role model. A motif that runs through all nine short stories.
For some pages, a door opens
Or after another family, as in the short story about Freddy. A little boy who has the gift of turning himself into a robot in unpleasant situations. To be with a white host family, Freddy is on a trip for the first time. But instead of the years before in a big house of a white, rich family, where there is steak from the grill every day, this time it goes with the other children to a single woman. She is black. Freddy can not hide his disappointment. The woman, the house - everything reminds him of his own mother, his own home, his own identity. At all, what Freddy wanted to escape from the camp.
The characters and relationships are so intertwined that they do not run in a straight line. They are so complex that they seem to blur when juxtaposed. Every story has its own twist, its own longing. The figures are real. Authentic. But the complexity that is built on a few pages, the male point of view and a certain severity, they are similar to each other after all.
Arash Saedinia
Author Jamel Brinkley: His characters are finely designed
There is a trend towards female protagonists in the literary scene. That Brinkley so published a book that occupies almost exclusively the male perspective, may seem downright unusual. But the characters are finely designed, their sexualized view of women may not be politically correct, but sounds understandable.
Jamel Brinkley does not finish his stories with a happy ending, nor do they end tragically. It is as if he lets the reader into his characters, lets them penetrate on a few pages, but then closes the door again and lets the next story begin. Brinkley is currently writing short stories and a novel - with women and men. More is not revealed.