A Chocolate Soldier: A Novel (Contemporary Fiction Series) - Softcover

Colter, Cyrus

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0938410490 ISBN 13: 9780938410492

Publisher: Thunder's Mouth Pr, 1988

Synopsis

Mesach, the narrator, looks back thirty-five years to when he was a young Black divinity student and explains how his friend became a murderer

About this title

About the Author

A distinguished attorney and public servant, Cyrus Colter took up writing in midlife and, after retiring from the law, devoted himself not only to his art but also to teaching. He held the Chester D. Tripp Professorship in the Humanities and chaired the Program in African-American Studies at Northwestern University. His first book, The Beach Umbrella, won the Iowa School of Letters Award for First Fiction in 1970. TriQuarterly Books and Northwestern University Press have reprinted his earlier novel, The Hippodrome. His other works include The Rivers of Eros, Night Studies, and The Amoralist.

From Publishers Weekly

Colter takes on a formidable task with this novel. He unveils his denouement in the first chaptera "highly agitated, confused, country black boy" nicknamed Cager will kill a "highborn old white woman," then takes several hundred pages of admittedly "verbose" narration by Cager's friend, a preacher named Meshach Barry, to arrive at the murder. He shifts scenes almost compulsively, from a poor, rural black community to an upwardly mobile black university in a small Tennessee town, from a blues nightclub to a prison for white-collar criminals (Meshach serves time for "mishandling" federal educational funds.) With his vivid characterizations and eye for detail, Colter creates an engrossing, disturbing and enlightening fiction about black power and powerlessness. In his plot and his psychological insights, he purposely echoes Wright's Native Son, Ellison's Invisible Man and Dostoyevski's Crime and Punishment. But this ambitious work falls short on several counts: at times the narrative plods, the numerous characters and scene changes are distracting, and the story of Meshach Barry, presented as a subplot, pales beside the passionate tale of Cager. Colter (The Beach Umbrella), an emeritus professor at Northwestern University, is an attorney. Portions of this novel were previously published in TriQuarterly.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Thunder's Mouth Pr
• Publication date: 1988
• ISBN 10: 0938410490
• ISBN 13: 9780938410492
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1