The Celestial Jukebox: A Novel - Hardcover

Shearer, Cynthia

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1593760523 ISBN 13: 9781593760526

Publisher: Counterpoint, 2004

Synopsis

The Celestial Jukebox is set in the invented Mississippi Delta town of Madagascar. Cynthia Shearer's rural south is dependent on the rather less attractive fruits of capitalism, including agribusiness, gambling, and the dwindling vices surrounding the retail trades. The mood, the emotional weather these days, feels like a very humid melancholy. Into this weather comes Boubacar, a 15-year-old by from Africa, joining friends from Mauritania already living in the area, new African blacks not especially noteworthy in a small town filled with Chinese emigrants, African Americans within memory of slavery, straggling members of the original white families of the area, and unsorted others.
In America, Boubacar sees a shining National Steel guitar in the window of a pawn shop in town and visits The Celestial Grocery, the virtual city center presided over by a cranky second-generation Chinese proprietor and his equally cranky jukebox that often hoards its treasure of Slim Harpo, Sam Cooke, and Wanda Jackson, stuck on the same sad Louvin Brothers song. The tie that binds all these lives is American popular music, its origins and its power.
The purity and beauty of the writing marks this book as that most rare novel, filled with music, struggle, and spontaneous joy.

About this title

About the Author:

Cynthia Shearer is the former curator of Rowan Oak, the home of William Faulkner, and holds a M.A. in English from the University of Mississippi. She has been the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. Her first novel, The Wonder Book of the Air, received the 1996 prize for fiction from the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters.

From Publishers Weekly:

A crotchety old Chinese-American man sweeps up brilliant pink blossoms as cats weave about his skinny legs, and dreams of a dance with a Honduran lady in white keds; a middle-aged farmer fights the onslaught of what passes for progress and examines what may be the end of his marriage; a young woman of color examines her past and seeks to capture the sad music of the Delta on film; a young Mauritanian man, freely come to Mississippi from Africa, finds both wonder and confusion in this loud, bright new land, as he longs after an old steel guitar in a pawn-shop window and falls further in love with the blues of the American kaffir. A no-longer-so-young mother fights her sense of invisibility in her family's life and is suddenly visible to someone forbidden. The damaged, fey Bebe Marie crafts her birdhouses of bottlecaps and fills her crumbling walls with images and poetry: "This is the orchard of abandoned dreams." Weaving it all together is music: the blues, jazz, the river of sound and emotion whose current flows worldwide, with unexpected effect. Shearer (The Wonder Book of the Air) has crafted a lyrical, floating world of an imagined Delta town that could not and does not exist, but perhaps should. Her touching characters and the beauty of her language overshadow any issue of pacing or self-conscious preciousness that threaten it, often rising to the level of prose poetry. A must for readers of modern serious fiction; a joy to the ear; a return to beauty in literature; it needs only a true spiritual dimension to achieve greatness.
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About this edition

• Publisher: Counterpoint
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 1593760523
• ISBN 13: 9781593760526
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 396