Lenoir

by Ken Greenhall

Book Overview

Starting with Uncle Tom's Cabin and Huckleberry Finn, going right up through Beloved and Middle Passage, much literature has been devoted to the issue of slavery in America. In Lenoir, Ken Greenhall... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0944072933
• ISBN13: 9780944072936
• Release Date: January 1998
• Publisher: Zoland Books
• Length: 246 Pages
• Weight: 0.97 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.7" x 8.6"

Customer Reviews

Powerful narrative and beautifully human

I expected to like "Lenoir" but not as much as I did. It blew me away. This short novel set in 17th century northern Europe, as seen through the eyes of an African slave is a wonderfully imaginative and equally evocative fictionalization of the model who sat for Ruben's famous "Four Heads of a Negro." Told in the first person, "Lenoir" reads like the journal of person trapped in a world that he neither sought out nor fully understood or even liked. As described by Lenoir, one may come to realize how silly "civilized" society can sometimes appear and are made to see the world through the eyes of someone coming to terms with Western culture and all its trappings, be it religious, social or racial. Lenoir is not a victim but a truly dignified person whose sense of his own beauty and that of his homeland are never diminished by those who wish to dominate him and his circumstances. All the characters, including the larger than life personas of Rembrandt and Rubens, pulse with pure and profound humanity. It is a true testament of Mr. Greenhall's literary talent that such monumental, historical figures can be brought across to the reader with such tactful ease and realism. This is a truly gorgeous book and anyone interested in reading an intelligent and thought provoking novel SHOULD NOT hesitate picking this baby up. I loved every minute of it and I'm sure you will, too.

Blown away by Lenoir

I think it was the face--or faces--on the front jacket that I noticed first; I wasn't looking for a novel. Then I did my usual on-the-spot skim (beginning, middle, and--I confess--end) and was hooked. Though no review can conceivably convey the cumulative impact of this small novel, which couldn't have been a word longer for its lasting power, some of the words that come to mind to describe the writing are grace, wit, irony, profound understanding, uncommon humanity, unique, and even classic--all of which is centered on the singular character of Lenoir himself, whom I believed--and believed IN--from his first unforgettable words. Another of my iconclastic book-buying habits is never to read the jacket copy until AFTER I've finished the book--we all know they're there to charm the reader. This time they all echoed my assessment. (Coincidentally, the jacket also told me why Ken Greenhall's name sounded familiar: he's also the author BAXTER, which was made into an incredible French flick about a dog who's no better than he should be. BAXTER should be back in print!)

A vividly imagined tale of an African in 17th-century Europe

From the opening words of this gem of a novel, we see with the eyes, react with the mind, and feel and love with the heart of its singular narrator--we almost BECOME him. Lenoir's voice is so honest yet compassionate and so very much his own that the world Ken Greenhall has vividly imagined and compellingly told here takes up residence in the brain like something we ourselves have lived. I think that's what impressed me most, and what makes LENOIR ultimately not "just" a novel about an African in the seventeenth-century Netherlands but one that speaks richly and unforgettably to all of us. Looking forward to many rereadings of LENOIR, I'm grateful to the friend whose advance reading copy I all too briefly borrowed, and especially grateful to Ken Greenhall for this wonderful book.