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Palmares
Gayl Jones' long-awaited novel about the last of the seven fugitive slave settlements in colonial Brazil in the 17th century.
This extraordinarily powerful narrative is Gayl Jones' long-awaited fifth novel. Intricate and compelling, Palmares is set in the 17th century on the last of the seven fugitive slave settlements in colonial Brazil. Combining her mastery of language with her unique brand of mythology and magical realism, Jones reimagines the historical novel.
Gayl Jones has been described as one of the great literary writers of the 20th century; the best American novelist whose name you may not know. Originally discovered & championed by Toni Morrison, Jones published several novels in the 1980s and 1990s before personal tragedy caused her to close herself off from the world. Now, for the first time in 21 years, Jones is ready to publish again.
This extraordinarily powerful narrative is Gayl Jones' long-awaited fifth novel. Intricate and compelling, Palmares is set in the 17th century on the last of the seven fugitive slave settlements in colonial Brazil. Combining her mastery of language with her unique brand of mythology and magical realism, Jones reimagines the historical novel.
Gayl Jones has been described as one of the great literary writers of the 20th century; the best American novelist whose name you may not know. Originally discovered & championed by Toni Morrison, Jones published several novels in the 1980s and 1990s before personal tragedy caused her to close herself off from the world. Now, for the first time in 21 years, Jones is ready to publish again.
512 pages, Hardcover
First published September 14, 2021
511 people are currently reading
6711 people want to read
About the author
Gayl Jones
41 books594 followersGayl Jones is an African-American writer from Lexington, Kentucky. Her most famous works are Corregidora, Eva's Man, and The Healing.
Jones is a 1971 graduate of Connecticut College, where she received her Bachelor of Arts degree in English. While attending the college she also earned the Frances Steloff Award for Fiction. She then began a graduate program in creative writing at Brown University, studying under poet Michael Harper and earning a Master of Arts in 1973 and a Doctor of Arts in 1975.
Harper introduced Jones's work to Toni Morrison, who was an editor at the time, and in 1975, Jones published her first novel Corregidora at the age of 26. That same year she was a visiting lecturer at the University of Michigan, which hired her the following year as an assistant professor. She left her faculty position in 1983 and moved to Europe, where she wrote and published Die Vogelfaengerin (The Birdwatcher) in Germany and a poetry collection, Xarque and Other Poems. Jones's 1998 novel The Healing was a finalist for the National Book Award, although the media attention surrounding her novel's release focused more on the controversy in her personal life than on the work itself. Her papers are currently housed at the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University. Jones currently lives in Lexington, Kentucky, where she continues to write.
Jones has described herself as an improvisor, and her work bears out that statement: like a jazz or blues musician, Jones plays upon a specific set of themes, varying them and exploring their possible permutations. Though her fiction has been called “Gothic” in its exploration of madness, violence, and sexuality, musical metaphors might make for a more apt categorization.
(from Wikipedia)
Jones is a 1971 graduate of Connecticut College, where she received her Bachelor of Arts degree in English. While attending the college she also earned the Frances Steloff Award for Fiction. She then began a graduate program in creative writing at Brown University, studying under poet Michael Harper and earning a Master of Arts in 1973 and a Doctor of Arts in 1975.
Harper introduced Jones's work to Toni Morrison, who was an editor at the time, and in 1975, Jones published her first novel Corregidora at the age of 26. That same year she was a visiting lecturer at the University of Michigan, which hired her the following year as an assistant professor. She left her faculty position in 1983 and moved to Europe, where she wrote and published Die Vogelfaengerin (The Birdwatcher) in Germany and a poetry collection, Xarque and Other Poems. Jones's 1998 novel The Healing was a finalist for the National Book Award, although the media attention surrounding her novel's release focused more on the controversy in her personal life than on the work itself. Her papers are currently housed at the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University. Jones currently lives in Lexington, Kentucky, where she continues to write.
Jones has described herself as an improvisor, and her work bears out that statement: like a jazz or blues musician, Jones plays upon a specific set of themes, varying them and exploring their possible permutations. Though her fiction has been called “Gothic” in its exploration of madness, violence, and sexuality, musical metaphors might make for a more apt categorization.
(from Wikipedia)
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 151 reviews
May 21, 2025
As a Brazilian, this was a highly anticipated read, so this book is a disappointment. It's beyond me how this could be published. The premise held potential. And yet,
1) The writing is amateurish
2) The "foreign" language is forced, a common flaw when writers use a language not their own (ex. “I’m just an ordinary mulher”)
3) The Portuguese is… not.
The author principally uses SPANISH. It’s heavy-handed Spanish and not something that can be overlooked. Plus, misspellings. No diacritics. Grammar inconceivably blundered. I am begging to understand where this author pulled this writing from, and the publisher should surely have proofed “foreign” writing, right? Scratching my head. Spanish!!
4) And worst of all, the author did not research. I understood this while reading Palmares, which the American author wrote as a story of American slavery set in a “mythical” land. It was then confirmed to me when I read how the author pronounced with her whole chest that she didn’t research (or more aptly, didn’t need to research). See full interview here.
Jones took no effort to contextualize this story in the sociocultural and historical context of the quilombo Palmares, which was a —real— place (while thousands of other quilombos still exist today). Slavery was practiced differently in different contexts, which means the U.S. and Brazil economic models and therefore sociopolitical power structures also vary. Relations among enslaved persons and between enslaver and enslaved are also not comparable to the U.S. brutalities since they were organized differently, faced different horrors, performed different activities (notably sugarcane cropping in Brazil), were subject to different colonial empires, and were considered more expendable in Brazilian “markets”. If she had considered it worth her time to research before writing a book on this subject, the author would have known the monumental role of Dandara of Palmares in the Brazilian conscience. None of this is captured in Palmares. Instead, we get a story of American slavery with tropical exoticisms, e.g. mandacaru and manioc with Spanish words sprinkled throughout in a supposedly Brazilian context. What’s more, it reveals the efforts of an American author and American publisher delivering a Brazilian story to a Global North audience to their tastes/familiarities. Jones does a disservice to the representation of Brazilian resistance and quilombo societies, and to the Brazilians of today who inherit this ancestry that continues to inform cultural traditions and contemporary racial relations.
It pains me to say that this book, which I was so excited about, is a disaster. A mess of a novel by an author not in a position to write on her chosen subject, willfully distorting Brazilian history, language, and culture to an American lens.
For more details on missteps and their significance (in terms of power, resistance, violence, and hegemony), check out this great vlog reviewer, who aptly states, “You could listen to ... any samba school in Brazil and you would get more of an accurate history lesson than whatever Gayl Jones does in this book.”
-------------
oooo quero em português 🙏
NYT Books writes in its Toni Morrison feature, that "during the years that she worked at Random House, she published books by Muhammad Ali, Henry Dumas, Angela Davis, Huey P. Newton, Toni Cade Bambara and Gayl Jones, whom she discovered in the 1970s. Jones’s manuscript was so impressive that when Morrison read it for the first time, uppermost in her mind, she once wrote, was “that no novel about any black woman could ever be the same after this.”
1) The writing is amateurish
2) The "foreign" language is forced, a common flaw when writers use a language not their own (ex. “I’m just an ordinary mulher”)
3) The Portuguese is… not.
The author principally uses SPANISH. It’s heavy-handed Spanish and not something that can be overlooked. Plus, misspellings. No diacritics. Grammar inconceivably blundered. I am begging to understand where this author pulled this writing from, and the publisher should surely have proofed “foreign” writing, right? Scratching my head. Spanish!!
4) And worst of all, the author did not research. I understood this while reading Palmares, which the American author wrote as a story of American slavery set in a “mythical” land. It was then confirmed to me when I read how the author pronounced with her whole chest that she didn’t research (or more aptly, didn’t need to research). See full interview here.
“In addition, the Brazilian experience (purely literary and imaginative, since I've never been there), helped to give a perspective on the American one […] The only time I had to research for facts was with the Brazilian history; and then I only had to know when slavery was abolished, what kinds of plantations there were, and luckily I came across the story of Palmares, which has become the basis for later work. But there aren't any facts or stories that one could say really happened.”
Jones took no effort to contextualize this story in the sociocultural and historical context of the quilombo Palmares, which was a —real— place (while thousands of other quilombos still exist today). Slavery was practiced differently in different contexts, which means the U.S. and Brazil economic models and therefore sociopolitical power structures also vary. Relations among enslaved persons and between enslaver and enslaved are also not comparable to the U.S. brutalities since they were organized differently, faced different horrors, performed different activities (notably sugarcane cropping in Brazil), were subject to different colonial empires, and were considered more expendable in Brazilian “markets”. If she had considered it worth her time to research before writing a book on this subject, the author would have known the monumental role of Dandara of Palmares in the Brazilian conscience. None of this is captured in Palmares. Instead, we get a story of American slavery with tropical exoticisms, e.g. mandacaru and manioc with Spanish words sprinkled throughout in a supposedly Brazilian context. What’s more, it reveals the efforts of an American author and American publisher delivering a Brazilian story to a Global North audience to their tastes/familiarities. Jones does a disservice to the representation of Brazilian resistance and quilombo societies, and to the Brazilians of today who inherit this ancestry that continues to inform cultural traditions and contemporary racial relations.
It pains me to say that this book, which I was so excited about, is a disaster. A mess of a novel by an author not in a position to write on her chosen subject, willfully distorting Brazilian history, language, and culture to an American lens.
For more details on missteps and their significance (in terms of power, resistance, violence, and hegemony), check out this great vlog reviewer, who aptly states, “You could listen to ... any samba school in Brazil and you would get more of an accurate history lesson than whatever Gayl Jones does in this book.”
-------------
oooo quero em português 🙏
NYT Books writes in its Toni Morrison feature, that "during the years that she worked at Random House, she published books by Muhammad Ali, Henry Dumas, Angela Davis, Huey P. Newton, Toni Cade Bambara and Gayl Jones, whom she discovered in the 1970s. Jones’s manuscript was so impressive that when Morrison read it for the first time, uppermost in her mind, she once wrote, was “that no novel about any black woman could ever be the same after this.”
September 30, 2021
edit 30.9.2021: you can see my full review in youtu.be/r2p25NxpkMg
I might just be very stupid, but while I can forgive the basic misunderstandings of Brazilian slavery and culture, I cannot forgive the erasure of Dandara dos Palmares and her replacement with a white woman. Not for me.
I might just be very stupid, but while I can forgive the basic misunderstandings of Brazilian slavery and culture, I cannot forgive the erasure of Dandara dos Palmares and her replacement with a white woman. Not for me.
November 30, 2022
'It's a longer story than it comes out as being in my telling it,' Anninho said, 'and there are atrocities that I have not told you, and amusements that I haven't told you either and I have learned things in a day of that adventure, that I might not have learned in two days without it. There is a secondary story about the maritime plans I made that involves betrayal, but I will not tell you about that one today - but there will be other days to tell you the details of that story, and to fill in the gaps of that other one.'
This is a difficult book to get to grips with and it's perhaps easier to talk about what it isn't: so it's not historical fiction in the ways that genre term is usually understood and it makes no attempt to reconstruct seventeenth century Brazil. Jones refuses to be tied to a literal and historical reality and uses the tools of surrealism, modernism and postmodernism to try to get at the heart of big-ticket themes such as slavery, liberation, freedom, identity, love, trauma, race, gender and how the past has a presence in the present.
It thinks about storytelling, how stories work, what functions they perform, how no single set of stories can encompass all experience and the gaps that stories leave. It follows a vague chronology but disrupts it with a labyrinthine structure that doesn't always move forward but which side-steps and hops. There are threads that weave together and others that don't, there are strands to hold onto and some which go nowhere - there is an open-endedness and a refusal to provide any neat resolution.
So much that would be concrete and material in another version of this story told by a different author becomes contingent and unstable: Brazil is really 'Brazil' because it's no more than a name that points both to and away from the geographical entity, just as the purported date of the seventeenth century doesn't have a purchase on the narrative we're reading in any firm way: things like this might have happened in the seventeenth century but the events and people of the book are liberated from any direct tie and literal link back to precise and accurate 'history'.
So I'd say this is a book that adheres to the spirit of Jones' deep and thoughtful vision, bypassing the literal. She's such a gorgeous writer with a penetrating way of creating scenes that feel 'real' even when they don't cohere in the way traditional novels require. If you go into this expecting something of a conventional piece of historical fiction that can be verified via external sources then maybe best to step away now - this is creative fiction that is thinking about new and truthful ways of telling history and experience.
November 26, 2023
Lyrical writing, exploring the roots of Identity, in an exoticized "Brazilian" setting that the author herself acknowledges is merely called Brazilian without deeply exploring Brazil or its extremely complex society.
There's been a lot of stick wielded at Author Gayl for this latter decision. She's not even trying to hide her lack of research. In a Callaloo interview is, directly and simply, her making her statement of an author's privilege to invent and create as needed for her art: "...there aren't any facts or stories that one could say really happened."
The flipside of that choice is, of course, the responses of Brazilian people to what comes across to them as appropriation of their culture for the entertainment of others. The loudest complaints are Dandara do Palmares, famously African, replaced by a white character with her name. An unworthy part of me really enjoys seeing this kerfuffle center on a Black woman creator in this context. Another part of me is slightly impatient with Author Gayl for bringing such fully warranted criticism on a story that, at its heart, is about the roots of identity in memory, a notoriously unreliable source of any sort of truth or fact. Then the problems with Spanish words in a Brazilian context...well, it wasn't particularly well-handled to be honest.
So what the heck am I doing giving it four stars?
Because this is a work of fantastical fiction, made by a writer in her own mind, and that to me is a different thing than an historical study, biography, or even conventional historical novel. The author isn't attempting to tell the story of the actual Dandara, but has made the choice to invent an entirely other Brazil that doesn't really resemble the real one. It was a choice. She made it up...and that is an artist's privilege. I'm not hugely interested in ownership arguments, as I see them as the wrong angle to take on the "who tells the stories" argument we, as a culture, need to have. The answer in my view: Bring diverse voices to the table, listen to all the voices you can find, and quit worrying about whose voice is saying things "wrong." That's not relevant to fiction...the story one wants to tell is either true to the spirit of the inspiration or not, but that's not "wrong" it's just something people whose identity is involved should bring up as a data point. I want to read stories, always; I usually prefer them to be true to the source that inspired them, but even that is negotiable.
This has a very direct and personal relationship to me, an older gay man, because so many...so! many!...books about gay men in relationships are written by straight women. They get things wrong. It's really inevitable...a few have done so in ways I found quite startling. But I'm not going to say they were wrong for "appropriating" my identity as a gay man because they didn't. They chose to tell a story about people like me without doing research? Okay...but I'm going to tell on you. What difference it makes is to the people who listen to me, and take my opinions for what they are: More or less informed, experienced in some areas, and where possible backed up by facts. (Opinions are of necessity based on facts as one understands them, but not wholly defined by them.)
Anyway. My point, and I do have one, is that I took on board the upset responses of actual Brazilians to the way Author Gayl used their history as a launching pad for this lyrical and flowing exploration of American Black slave identities, and still found much to admire and enjoy in the way the author told her unique, wholly fictional story.
I can't give it a full five stars, as some have done, because I found the longueurs of stream-of-consciousness writing obtruded into my ability to connect the story just that fraction of time too much for the experience to be fully immersive. It's possible the novel is just that touch too long for its story....Almeyda does not start out fully formed yet we're asked to invest in her as though she has...but, at all events, Palmares made me stay up too late and care enough to do it.
There's been a lot of stick wielded at Author Gayl for this latter decision. She's not even trying to hide her lack of research. In a Callaloo interview is, directly and simply, her making her statement of an author's privilege to invent and create as needed for her art: "...there aren't any facts or stories that one could say really happened."
The flipside of that choice is, of course, the responses of Brazilian people to what comes across to them as appropriation of their culture for the entertainment of others. The loudest complaints are Dandara do Palmares, famously African, replaced by a white character with her name. An unworthy part of me really enjoys seeing this kerfuffle center on a Black woman creator in this context. Another part of me is slightly impatient with Author Gayl for bringing such fully warranted criticism on a story that, at its heart, is about the roots of identity in memory, a notoriously unreliable source of any sort of truth or fact. Then the problems with Spanish words in a Brazilian context...well, it wasn't particularly well-handled to be honest.
So what the heck am I doing giving it four stars?
Because this is a work of fantastical fiction, made by a writer in her own mind, and that to me is a different thing than an historical study, biography, or even conventional historical novel. The author isn't attempting to tell the story of the actual Dandara, but has made the choice to invent an entirely other Brazil that doesn't really resemble the real one. It was a choice. She made it up...and that is an artist's privilege. I'm not hugely interested in ownership arguments, as I see them as the wrong angle to take on the "who tells the stories" argument we, as a culture, need to have. The answer in my view: Bring diverse voices to the table, listen to all the voices you can find, and quit worrying about whose voice is saying things "wrong." That's not relevant to fiction...the story one wants to tell is either true to the spirit of the inspiration or not, but that's not "wrong" it's just something people whose identity is involved should bring up as a data point. I want to read stories, always; I usually prefer them to be true to the source that inspired them, but even that is negotiable.
This has a very direct and personal relationship to me, an older gay man, because so many...so! many!...books about gay men in relationships are written by straight women. They get things wrong. It's really inevitable...a few have done so in ways I found quite startling. But I'm not going to say they were wrong for "appropriating" my identity as a gay man because they didn't. They chose to tell a story about people like me without doing research? Okay...but I'm going to tell on you. What difference it makes is to the people who listen to me, and take my opinions for what they are: More or less informed, experienced in some areas, and where possible backed up by facts. (Opinions are of necessity based on facts as one understands them, but not wholly defined by them.)
Anyway. My point, and I do have one, is that I took on board the upset responses of actual Brazilians to the way Author Gayl used their history as a launching pad for this lyrical and flowing exploration of American Black slave identities, and still found much to admire and enjoy in the way the author told her unique, wholly fictional story.
I can't give it a full five stars, as some have done, because I found the longueurs of stream-of-consciousness writing obtruded into my ability to connect the story just that fraction of time too much for the experience to be fully immersive. It's possible the novel is just that touch too long for its story....Almeyda does not start out fully formed yet we're asked to invest in her as though she has...but, at all events, Palmares made me stay up too late and care enough to do it.
September 14, 2021
See my review at the NY Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/14/bo....
June 5, 2024
Disrespectful towards Brazilian history, especially black Brazilian history, in so many ways I can’t even begin to write it all. From the usage of SPANISH instead of Portuguese to CHOOSING not to research about Brazil and its history in any somewhat not-shallow way, the author just shows with a slap in the face to all Brazilians just how profoundly disrespectful people can be towards other cultures, their history and the complexities of slavery in different places.
This book is a disgrace and should be considered an embarrassment to the publisher as well. Just no.
Update: If you speak Portuguese and are into podcasts, I recommend the podcast História Preta. They have a whole season about Palmares and the research they did was amazing:
https://spotify.link/IBxzdXE0bKb
This book is a disgrace and should be considered an embarrassment to the publisher as well. Just no.
Update: If you speak Portuguese and are into podcasts, I recommend the podcast História Preta. They have a whole season about Palmares and the research they did was amazing:
https://spotify.link/IBxzdXE0bKb
November 27, 2023
This novel was a torture for me to read. I was hoping it would get better if I soldiered on, but it didn't.
Every character acts and talks similar way (with tons of repetitions). They talk a lot but Jones failed to give deeper meaning to us. I waited and waited to learn there was some deeper meaning to each talk but I learned nothing significant later. The writing is simple. No beautiful/remarkable prose to marvel. Magical realism is not well executed or explained. What is it about "I'm no ordinary woman." or "I'm no ordinary man"? Why do they have to tell others if they are not "ordinary". Is it important for the entire book that this should be repeated? That's just an example. I found so many conversations and phrases unnecessary.
The worst thing is Jones gave me no reason whatsoever to care about the main character. She showed no inner depth (or Jones failed to show me). And again, the repetitions! It drove me crazy. By the half way of the novel, every time a character repeated the same/similar words or laughed the same way, I wanted to through the book to the wall.
Maybe it's "It's not you, it's me" situation since there are more people who gave 5 stars here. To me, it was one star. It was my honest opinion. I added one more star for Jones's courageous comeback after so many years.
Every character acts and talks similar way (with tons of repetitions). They talk a lot but Jones failed to give deeper meaning to us. I waited and waited to learn there was some deeper meaning to each talk but I learned nothing significant later. The writing is simple. No beautiful/remarkable prose to marvel. Magical realism is not well executed or explained. What is it about "I'm no ordinary woman." or "I'm no ordinary man"? Why do they have to tell others if they are not "ordinary". Is it important for the entire book that this should be repeated? That's just an example. I found so many conversations and phrases unnecessary.
The worst thing is Jones gave me no reason whatsoever to care about the main character. She showed no inner depth (or Jones failed to show me). And again, the repetitions! It drove me crazy. By the half way of the novel, every time a character repeated the same/similar words or laughed the same way, I wanted to through the book to the wall.
Maybe it's "It's not you, it's me" situation since there are more people who gave 5 stars here. To me, it was one star. It was my honest opinion. I added one more star for Jones's courageous comeback after so many years.
October 3, 2021
As magnificent as the prose and narrative constructs are( and as malignantly woke as her vociferous critics can be), one must abide by the due diligence of intelligence and research and openly speculate that-if she were alive to edit this-Toni Morrison would send Jones to the library to do more research. Jones' lack of interest in the realities of Brazillian Slavery flies in the face of the African American tradition of Hurston's research, Morrison's own alchemy of magical realism, and Hughes's noble field and groundwork in translating The Ultraists, Nicholas Guillen, and Gabriela Mistral.
The disappointment of the literary year.
The disappointment of the literary year.
December 27, 2021
DNF. I really tried. For weeks I kept picking this up, slogging through a few more chapters. It's fine--what I read--interesting and well written-- but nothing was happening. There was no development in the plot. I get it--the setting, the characters-- but there is no storyline (so far, and I can't keep waiting) that is compelling me forward. I just don't care much about any of the characters either.
May 13, 2022
From the PEN America long list of 2021’s most significant books, this is a challenging, 500-page novel that worked my reading muscles hard as it introduced me to a world of formerly enslaved Black people, predominantly women, in 1690’s Brazil. I loved the great variety of characters and situations Jones created as she portrayed this diverse culture, with a heavy emphasis on women who have knowledge of the old ways and/or are experiencing the aftermath of extreme trauma. May 2022 update: now also named as a runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize.
January 29, 2022
Unfortunately I didn’t like this book. This was my first Gayl Jones book and I admit Bookstagram made me do it and I don’t have any regrets. I’m just disappointed that I didn’t like this story. I found it rambling and boring and sometimes confusing. I just didn’t care.
Jones’ writing was fine, but the idea behind the story is one she should have left alone. My understanding is that she did very little research and also wrote this story decades ago. If both of those are true, it unfortunate. I feel it’s a money grab at that point. I also feel that she should not have tackled the Brazilian culture. Especially if not going to do massive research to get it right.
I read this with a group and finished it only to be apart of the conversation. Otherwise it would have been a DNF for me. Having said that, I have heard that her prior books Corrigedora and Eva’s Man were better. So I will give this author another chance. I don’t believe in quitting on authors after only one book. Maybe that one just wasn’t the one.
Jones’ writing was fine, but the idea behind the story is one she should have left alone. My understanding is that she did very little research and also wrote this story decades ago. If both of those are true, it unfortunate. I feel it’s a money grab at that point. I also feel that she should not have tackled the Brazilian culture. Especially if not going to do massive research to get it right.
I read this with a group and finished it only to be apart of the conversation. Otherwise it would have been a DNF for me. Having said that, I have heard that her prior books Corrigedora and Eva’s Man were better. So I will give this author another chance. I don’t believe in quitting on authors after only one book. Maybe that one just wasn’t the one.
December 29, 2021
I may as well not bury the lede: I think Palmares a masterwork. Gayl Jones has captured the confusing and rootless nature of being an African-Brazilian woman in the late 17th century in tones and colors so evocative and brilliant they cannot be ignored. She is clearly a writer confident in her craft at the top of her form.
Memory is selective. It is not that we willfully ignore some parts of the real and endorse others, or make up from whole cloth what we recall, but that the mind has only a certain capacity and we therefore must pick and choose. Add to that the fact that trauma, joy, love, hatred, and cruelty can all skew our view, causing us to recall things in ways that others—living as they are within their own skewed view—would not endorse as having been real.
History is much the same, in a more collective sense. As has been said, it is written by the victors, but it is also written by the victims; neither can purport to be in any way objective. By the time historians get to the source materials, so much degradation has occurred that they are more in the nature of archeologists than truthtellers, piecing together the disparate and contradictory evidence into the best approximation of past's reality they can.
What Jones has accomplished with Palmares is to take the perspective of one young girl, Almeyda, born into slavery in Brazil, and tell her story over the next 20 years or so not as an historical document nor a literal retelling of fact, but from the perplexing and confusing point of view Almeyda inhabits. Just as James Joyce, Virginia Wolff, and others used stream-of-consciousness to put themselves and their readers at the closest remove to their characters' minds, so does Gayl Jones use disparate, disjointed, and seemingly irrelevant details and digressions to paint a picture more complex and gorgeous than could have been accomplished through narrative alone. At one point her grandmother asks, "What will become of you?...There's no place else to go. When we are born, we have been everywhere," yet Almeyda at that point has been almost nowhere. Still, we understand what the wise woman means.
Though I have assiduously avoided reading any of the other reviews here in order to remain as uninfluenced as possible, I see that Palmares is not rated very highly on this site. I thoroughly understand the impulse to have found it perplexing and overlong, if those are the objections, but I disagree wholeheartedly on both counts. It is supposed to be perplexing because Almeyda is perplexed much of the time. She stumbles from one encounter to another, depending on her silence and wits to survive when others would not. But she is not managing any of this from great wisdom or knowledge. Rather, she responds in each moment from a place of innocence and honesty; she does not have an ounce of cunning in her. Because Jones has taken the brilliant tack of showing us what it may have been like to be this woman, it's no wonder we in our turn might be confused and reeling.
Toward the end of this generous novel, Almeyda reflects on what she has learned: "I looked up at him in alarm. What alarm I don't know. Was it that I felt after leaving Moraze's I had received nothing? Had my adventures taught me no lesson? Had not Moraze said that adventures were worthless unless one learned something?" Great courage is required to undertake a work in which there is no grand moral to be gleaned, to tell the story of the struggles of one woman to be free and how much she must suffer just to be her own.
Memory is selective. It is not that we willfully ignore some parts of the real and endorse others, or make up from whole cloth what we recall, but that the mind has only a certain capacity and we therefore must pick and choose. Add to that the fact that trauma, joy, love, hatred, and cruelty can all skew our view, causing us to recall things in ways that others—living as they are within their own skewed view—would not endorse as having been real.
History is much the same, in a more collective sense. As has been said, it is written by the victors, but it is also written by the victims; neither can purport to be in any way objective. By the time historians get to the source materials, so much degradation has occurred that they are more in the nature of archeologists than truthtellers, piecing together the disparate and contradictory evidence into the best approximation of past's reality they can.
What Jones has accomplished with Palmares is to take the perspective of one young girl, Almeyda, born into slavery in Brazil, and tell her story over the next 20 years or so not as an historical document nor a literal retelling of fact, but from the perplexing and confusing point of view Almeyda inhabits. Just as James Joyce, Virginia Wolff, and others used stream-of-consciousness to put themselves and their readers at the closest remove to their characters' minds, so does Gayl Jones use disparate, disjointed, and seemingly irrelevant details and digressions to paint a picture more complex and gorgeous than could have been accomplished through narrative alone. At one point her grandmother asks, "What will become of you?...There's no place else to go. When we are born, we have been everywhere," yet Almeyda at that point has been almost nowhere. Still, we understand what the wise woman means.
Though I have assiduously avoided reading any of the other reviews here in order to remain as uninfluenced as possible, I see that Palmares is not rated very highly on this site. I thoroughly understand the impulse to have found it perplexing and overlong, if those are the objections, but I disagree wholeheartedly on both counts. It is supposed to be perplexing because Almeyda is perplexed much of the time. She stumbles from one encounter to another, depending on her silence and wits to survive when others would not. But she is not managing any of this from great wisdom or knowledge. Rather, she responds in each moment from a place of innocence and honesty; she does not have an ounce of cunning in her. Because Jones has taken the brilliant tack of showing us what it may have been like to be this woman, it's no wonder we in our turn might be confused and reeling.
Toward the end of this generous novel, Almeyda reflects on what she has learned: "I looked up at him in alarm. What alarm I don't know. Was it that I felt after leaving Moraze's I had received nothing? Had my adventures taught me no lesson? Had not Moraze said that adventures were worthless unless one learned something?" Great courage is required to undertake a work in which there is no grand moral to be gleaned, to tell the story of the struggles of one woman to be free and how much she must suffer just to be her own.
February 20, 2023
Wondering if any editing or revisions went into this since clearly no research did or attention to Brazilian history, language, and culture did.
did-not-finish
October 21, 2021I love Gayl Jones, so this return depresses me. It's great for a hundred pages and then devolves into digressions of faulty magical realism, recurring characters that lead to little or no actual studies of character, and the prose in and of itself is faulty. Where did the prose stylist of Corregidora and The Healing go? Palmares feels bereft of aesthetic intentionality or value. Few sentences or paragraphs leave an imprint.
It also just irritates me that, according to Brazilian readers, Jones' representation of the quilombo social realm and Brazilian slavery altogether is flawed, at least that's the word to use when trying to speak kindly.
Sad to see Jones fall back on mediocrity in a literary project that clearly means the world to her, as she has thought and written about this subject matter in prior work and supposedly has had some form a manuscript of this novel for decades. Tragic.
Undoubtedly the biggest disappoint of my literary year.
It also just irritates me that, according to Brazilian readers, Jones' representation of the quilombo social realm and Brazilian slavery altogether is flawed, at least that's the word to use when trying to speak kindly.
Sad to see Jones fall back on mediocrity in a literary project that clearly means the world to her, as she has thought and written about this subject matter in prior work and supposedly has had some form a manuscript of this novel for decades. Tragic.
Undoubtedly the biggest disappoint of my literary year.
June 27, 2022
6/26. I have made it. And I will rest then jot down some thoughts. I first started this book in July of 2021, actually more like February. I flirted with it for a long time, then one time the book spoke to me and asked me, why I would not commit to her. I said in due time baby. That time came two days ago. I committed and gave her all I had in the literary sense. We did the dance of wordlove and I’m spent but joyously so. Not even sure if my thoughts will make sense, but I’ll try. Stay tuned……….
6/27. This is an interesting novel. It’s rather disjointed, especially it’s mid-section, but the first third and the last fourth are solid. The story of Almedya gets tangled in the dense mess of her day dreams and her imaginings. Those digressions and the magical realism portions, I think made this a piece of work for me. I don’t want to use the word confusing, I don’t think it’s that.
I’ll say it’s demanding. Demanding of your time, your patience and your willingness to push forward, no matter how thrown off you may become. The young Almedya parts are the most cogent and effective for a solid story. But, then we get mid book and the solidness of Almedya’s story becomes muddled with a cast of characters that appear and then vanish, so the story is now something mushy and we can’t always be sure who is speaking and what are they talking about.
Strange. On top of that, the prose is ordinary and I can’t remember any passages that were hi-light worthy. It feels almost blasphemous to write that. Anyway, Almedya is back as principal narrator (the last quarter) and carries us to the end, as she searches all over for her Husband, and this search introduces her to some more characters. Some new, some old. The mysticism and spirit centered work of African people throughout the novel is a plus.
That sense of knowing and seeing beyond what’s in front of your face, was well represented.
She also stayed away from the brutality of slavery, for the most part. I am conflicted about the novel. It was certainly epic, and I’m excited about reading some more Gayl Jones. So, I conclude it’s uneven at best, but you feel your having an epic experience and you should be disciplined enough to finish. At least, that’s how I felt. Like I was being challenged. I heard questions in my head, “so you think you’re a focused reader?” And “maybe you aren’t ready for this level of literary work?” This one is certainly not for the timid and unfocused, impatient reader. It’s a challenging read, and only you can determine if the challenge is ultimately rewarding. It was for me.
6/27. This is an interesting novel. It’s rather disjointed, especially it’s mid-section, but the first third and the last fourth are solid. The story of Almedya gets tangled in the dense mess of her day dreams and her imaginings. Those digressions and the magical realism portions, I think made this a piece of work for me. I don’t want to use the word confusing, I don’t think it’s that.
I’ll say it’s demanding. Demanding of your time, your patience and your willingness to push forward, no matter how thrown off you may become. The young Almedya parts are the most cogent and effective for a solid story. But, then we get mid book and the solidness of Almedya’s story becomes muddled with a cast of characters that appear and then vanish, so the story is now something mushy and we can’t always be sure who is speaking and what are they talking about.
Strange. On top of that, the prose is ordinary and I can’t remember any passages that were hi-light worthy. It feels almost blasphemous to write that. Anyway, Almedya is back as principal narrator (the last quarter) and carries us to the end, as she searches all over for her Husband, and this search introduces her to some more characters. Some new, some old. The mysticism and spirit centered work of African people throughout the novel is a plus.
That sense of knowing and seeing beyond what’s in front of your face, was well represented.
She also stayed away from the brutality of slavery, for the most part. I am conflicted about the novel. It was certainly epic, and I’m excited about reading some more Gayl Jones. So, I conclude it’s uneven at best, but you feel your having an epic experience and you should be disciplined enough to finish. At least, that’s how I felt. Like I was being challenged. I heard questions in my head, “so you think you’re a focused reader?” And “maybe you aren’t ready for this level of literary work?” This one is certainly not for the timid and unfocused, impatient reader. It’s a challenging read, and only you can determine if the challenge is ultimately rewarding. It was for me.
January 25, 2022
A strange, wild ride. I love the repetition in the sentences. The stories like waves over the reader. It is said this was a forty-ish year work in progress, I think the attention to character really shows. Maybe, at times, it feels a little distant.
November 21, 2021
I appreciate the subject matter of this novel, and was interested to read it, however, I was very disappointed. The story follows Almayde from a childhood and young adult life being traded as a slave in Brazil and indoctrinated in Catholicism. She finds her way to the first free slave community, where she marries Aninho. When the community is destroyed and her husband disappears, she sets off on a journey across Brazil to find him and meets many interesting people along the way. Sounds like the makings of a great story… but I didn’t like the writing. It is extremely hard to follow, there are random Portuguese words thrown in, it doesn’t flow and the magic realism is distracting. There are no characters you feel like you get to know or understand and nothing particularly new revealed.
January 28, 2022
I really hated this. I wanted to love it and looked forward to reading it for a long time but it’s confusing for the sake of being confusing, brutal for the sake of being brutal, and so extremely inaccurate in terms of the actual history of Palmares that it should be labeled fantasy.
September 27, 2025
So this is one of those books that I feel like I 'should' have liked more than I actually did. It is historically interesting, set in the late 1600s in Brazil and follows the main character Almeyda from her girlhood as a slave through several sales and then eventual freedom in a hidden city of free slaves. Jones highlights the differences in Brazil at this time between the blacks (imported slaves, from several different African countries), the natives, the mulattos (mixed race of different sorts), and the colonial whites (from several European countries).
The novel is about Almeyda, but also about the context of the time and the interplay of power between local tribes and newly created free black societies (most of which consisted of escaped slaves) and (of course) colonizing whites. As part of her journey, Almeyda becomes a medicine woman (almost; she leaves "school" too early resulting in some strange consequences later). Jones explores the power differential and hierchies within medicine as well; noting superstition and outright rejection around good care as well as the lack of respect for people and fear that can prevent folks from getting that care.
In theory, this is a 4-5 star book, the topic is interesting and the history is new to me (I know almost nothing about Brazil) and appears to be roughly historically accurate (there was in fact a colony of escaped slaves who lived in a place called Palmares in Brazil during this time--as another aside the word palmares means "list of achievements"; as the name of a place that is not actually a place [Palmares has to move to protect its occupants] it is interesting, I took it to mean that each of the newly freed slaves is in fact an achievement, added to the growing list of occupants and making Palmares a longer palmares; of course, I cannot credit Jones with this wordplay as this city and its name did exist in history); however, I just didn't like Jones' writing style. She jumps around between perspective and never indicates entirely who is speaking. I understood the scenes but there were moments almost every few pages where three or four characters were speaking or present and I had to go back and think: "who said that?" or "who did that?" because it was not immediately clear. Similarly, there was enough magic and looping and disguises throughout that it was unclear if Almeyda was her own grandmother at times: the circular pattern of women's lives (and powerlessness or rejection of society that goes with this) means that patterns of abuse and deceit and escape repeated enough and since the "witch" could change appearance and escape, she might have just been bouncing around through time.
Overall I see the relevance and would have enjoyed it much more if the writing was more clear to me.
All of that said, there were a few interesting quotes:
"She grew very silent, then she reached out and took my arm, in anger. I had never seen such silence before, silence with anger at the core of it."
"that's what memory is, an accumulation of fantasies, because you never know what reality really is."
"a dark woman has more freedom to walk about the streets than I do, because it doesn't matter to them about respectability."
"One learns from every place...The exact truth is always unknown."
"The same things that can cause good can cause harm if in ignorant hands"
"everything in the world is part science and part magic and part foolishness. But one must have some dignity in one's own surroundings."
The novel is about Almeyda, but also about the context of the time and the interplay of power between local tribes and newly created free black societies (most of which consisted of escaped slaves) and (of course) colonizing whites. As part of her journey, Almeyda becomes a medicine woman (almost; she leaves "school" too early resulting in some strange consequences later). Jones explores the power differential and hierchies within medicine as well; noting superstition and outright rejection around good care as well as the lack of respect for people and fear that can prevent folks from getting that care.
In theory, this is a 4-5 star book, the topic is interesting and the history is new to me (I know almost nothing about Brazil) and appears to be roughly historically accurate (there was in fact a colony of escaped slaves who lived in a place called Palmares in Brazil during this time--as another aside the word palmares means "list of achievements"; as the name of a place that is not actually a place [Palmares has to move to protect its occupants] it is interesting, I took it to mean that each of the newly freed slaves is in fact an achievement, added to the growing list of occupants and making Palmares a longer palmares; of course, I cannot credit Jones with this wordplay as this city and its name did exist in history); however, I just didn't like Jones' writing style. She jumps around between perspective and never indicates entirely who is speaking. I understood the scenes but there were moments almost every few pages where three or four characters were speaking or present and I had to go back and think: "who said that?" or "who did that?" because it was not immediately clear. Similarly, there was enough magic and looping and disguises throughout that it was unclear if Almeyda was her own grandmother at times: the circular pattern of women's lives (and powerlessness or rejection of society that goes with this) means that patterns of abuse and deceit and escape repeated enough and since the "witch" could change appearance and escape, she might have just been bouncing around through time.
Overall I see the relevance and would have enjoyed it much more if the writing was more clear to me.
All of that said, there were a few interesting quotes:
"She grew very silent, then she reached out and took my arm, in anger. I had never seen such silence before, silence with anger at the core of it."
"that's what memory is, an accumulation of fantasies, because you never know what reality really is."
"a dark woman has more freedom to walk about the streets than I do, because it doesn't matter to them about respectability."
"One learns from every place...The exact truth is always unknown."
"The same things that can cause good can cause harm if in ignorant hands"
"everything in the world is part science and part magic and part foolishness. But one must have some dignity in one's own surroundings."
May 6, 2023
I just didn't get this one.
At first there are a lot of Portuguese words/phrases and native plant and animal names. Then there are some Spanish words (ojos instead of olhos) and weird usages of English (mulatto woman and mulatta instead of mulata; plus there's this discussion of someone who misspelled "destiny" as "density," but that wouldn't happen in Portuguese; plus some other verb constructions that don't make sense, and these are just the ones I caught, with my limited knowledge). At first I was drawn in by the story, the world she evoked, but these little inconsistencies threw me out of the story and made me wonder about the depth of research. (And plenty of people are saying "Why would she need to research if she's creating her own thing?" But why wouldn't she research or get a consultant when she wants to use real names/events and folklore and all kinds of stuff?)
And the grandmother knew Rugendas? But it's set in late 1690s? I didn't get it. Maybe she sees the future? Visions? I had no idea what's going on, which is fine for awhile but then just becomes impenetrable--like if I'm never going to understand, why bother? (I guess there's maybe a critique in there about story-telling and all of that, but if it's SO incoherent, how am I to know? Is the uncertainty the point? I appreciate that, but I don't enjoy the reading of it.) Same with Almeyda's visions: unclear how things are happening. Inconsistent use of italics--what do they even signify? And Almeyda's early life is full of her not understanding things. Which is fine, most people's lives are, but what's the point in the story? All that uncertainty became boring. I gave up trying to parse the meaning.
Almeyda's relationship with Anninho seemed underdeveloped for such a driver of the back half of the story. She's wandering, trying to find Anninho, then she just GETS to new Palmares.
I did not feel like this book had anything new to say about Palmares or the experience of slavery in Brazil.
At first there are a lot of Portuguese words/phrases and native plant and animal names. Then there are some Spanish words (ojos instead of olhos) and weird usages of English (mulatto woman and mulatta instead of mulata; plus there's this discussion of someone who misspelled "destiny" as "density," but that wouldn't happen in Portuguese; plus some other verb constructions that don't make sense, and these are just the ones I caught, with my limited knowledge). At first I was drawn in by the story, the world she evoked, but these little inconsistencies threw me out of the story and made me wonder about the depth of research. (And plenty of people are saying "Why would she need to research if she's creating her own thing?" But why wouldn't she research or get a consultant when she wants to use real names/events and folklore and all kinds of stuff?)
And the grandmother knew Rugendas? But it's set in late 1690s? I didn't get it. Maybe she sees the future? Visions? I had no idea what's going on, which is fine for awhile but then just becomes impenetrable--like if I'm never going to understand, why bother? (I guess there's maybe a critique in there about story-telling and all of that, but if it's SO incoherent, how am I to know? Is the uncertainty the point? I appreciate that, but I don't enjoy the reading of it.) Same with Almeyda's visions: unclear how things are happening. Inconsistent use of italics--what do they even signify? And Almeyda's early life is full of her not understanding things. Which is fine, most people's lives are, but what's the point in the story? All that uncertainty became boring. I gave up trying to parse the meaning.
Almeyda's relationship with Anninho seemed underdeveloped for such a driver of the back half of the story. She's wandering, trying to find Anninho, then she just GETS to new Palmares.
I did not feel like this book had anything new to say about Palmares or the experience of slavery in Brazil.
September 30, 2022
I found the historical world of Almeyda, a Black slave girl on Portuguese plantations who escapes to a fugitive slave settlement called Palmares, to be accurate and described with surgical precision. And after Palmares in attacked, Almeyda sets out across colonial Brazil to find her husband, lost in said battle, but in the end I felt the plot, Almeyda's motivation & obstacles were lacking in depth due to the author's laser-focus on the historical atrocities of slavery through a series of exhaustive tales of characters Almeyda came across briefly who were given entire backstories thus making me (the reader) lose sight of the main plot/main character's own story. I liked the mythology and magical realism - but I also felt PALMARES was a hundred novels in one...so many interesting characters we "meet on the side of the road" - introduced to us only to be killed or disappear/never heard of again...and perhaps Jones wanted her readers to meet someone, get to know them and then suffer a sudden loss (a common tragedy of slavery) --creating a tear in the soul caused by an abrupt and unexplained loss. If so, the novel was a success in that regard.
Read
June 26, 2022Yes, it took me all of almost seven months to finish this thick girl, but it was well worth the journey. Palmares is somehow both reminiscent of Jones' earlier works but still brings something new and original to her bibliography. She creates a compelling character with Almeyda and wonderfully supports her with post-colonial Brazil. The worldbuilding is so rich and vivid that I was able to immerse myself in it, something I find missing from many works these days. I truly would love to see this adapted as a miniseries.
March 13, 2023
did not finish. i read up until the second part of the book (Quilombo) and then lost motivation. the book is dragging, i find the writing quite confusing and i get lost a lot in what is going on. after i found out that the author hasn’t done much research about the history and context of events she is writing about, i didn’t feel it worth to continue. i prefer the historical/cultural context of books such as these to be authentic so i can also learn from it, but if the background is not really accurate i feel like it is counterproductive to make the historical backdrop of a story such a fundamental part of it. might as well write a completely fictional story then.
i might finish it later when i have more time though as in a way i found the writing kind of comforting, even though it is slow. maybe i will change my mind about the book
i might finish it later when i have more time though as in a way i found the writing kind of comforting, even though it is slow. maybe i will change my mind about the book
October 3, 2021
I enjoyed Jones' previous novels. I have been in Brazil and was fascinated by the cultural mixtures as well as the stories about Palamares. Unfortunately, Palamares was repetitive in language and a disappointment.
June 10, 2022
Another unfinished book, I tried for 1 month to finish this and I managed to complete half. At some points it was interesting but at others super confusing. There are millions of great books out there, so decided not to spend more time on this.
January 10, 2023
If 'meh' was a book, 'Palmares' would be it.
I know it sounds interesting. Maybe Jones has written some things that are. This one isn't.
I know it sounds interesting. Maybe Jones has written some things that are. This one isn't.
tasted
September 24, 2025Very well done, but its dialogues just didn’t hold my interest.
January 15, 2023
Aside from the controversy over this book, I really enjoyed it and learned a lot about Palmares! It dragged a bit in the middle but the ending was a great conclusion to a very Toni Morrison-esc novel
October 18, 2021
3.5/5
Holy crap, it took me a long time to finish this book. That tells you something. Though it was interesting and sometimes really engaging - other times it was meandering and repetitive and ultimately more of a character study woven with folklore than much of a story.
Holy crap, it took me a long time to finish this book. That tells you something. Though it was interesting and sometimes really engaging - other times it was meandering and repetitive and ultimately more of a character study woven with folklore than much of a story.
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