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Jamestown

3.09 of 5 stars 3.09 · rating details · 269 ratings · 73 reviews

Jamestown chronicles a group of �settlers” (more like survivors) from the ravaged island of Manhattan, departing just as the Chrysler Building has mysteriously plummeted to the earth. This ragged band is heading down what’s left of I-95 in a half-school bus, half-Millennium Falcon. Their goal isto establish an outpost in southern Virginia, find oil, and exploit the Indians...more

Hardcover, 320 pages

Published February 16th 2007 by Soft Skull Press

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Jamestown, the Buried Truth by William M. Kelso

Before and After Jamestown by Helen C. Rountree

Love and Hate in Jamestown by David A. Price

Books about Early Jamestown, Virginia

3rd out of 10 books — 1 voter

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Feb 06, 2012 Joshua Nomen-Mutatio rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Gay Pioneer Sex Enthusiasts, Unipolar Depressives, Inkblot Interpretters, Nihilistic Romantics

Shelves: fiction, dystopic, survivally

Throughout my reading, this book transformed within my perceptual apparatus from a darkly hilarious (and loosely historical) farce to a viscerally felt chunk of despair-engaged-with-directly-as-despair rather than despair-with-silver-(in-between-the)-linings. By about the halfway point I shifted from mainly chuckling and appreciating Sharpe's inventive and highly synesthesiac prose into grimly and silently accepting that there's ultimately nothing truly redeeming about anything, ever. That the w...more Throughout my reading, this book transformed within my perceptual apparatus from a darkly hilarious (and loosely historical) farce to a viscerally felt chunk of despair-engaged-with-directly-as-despair rather than despair-with-silver-(in-between-the)-linings. By about the halfway point I shifted from mainly chuckling and appreciating Sharpe's inventive and highly synesthesiac prose into grimly and silently accepting that there's ultimately nothing truly redeeming about anything, ever. That the world is a meaningless—albeit interestingly interconnected—whorl of chaos and destruction and pain, and while beautiful and gratifying to be within at various intervals, is mostly directed toward a great big pile of entropic decay and a resounding So What pushed out through cosmic collapsing lungs and a throaty void. The progress of civilization—a mere shell game of rearranged variables of violence and greed and selfishness. Artistic expression—vanity and petty distraction. Political revolution—same shit, different shovel. Romantic relationships—a mere tangle of limbs and fluids and deceit spiraling towards disappointment and gut-wrenching anxiety and depression. Bleak, stark, horrible shit. The types of descriptions rightly laughed off as terminally one-sided and gothy and self-pitying by those not caught in the grip of Seriously Bad Thoughts at the moment, but the types of descriptions that nonetheless bluntly and accurately describe the monolithic crushing feelings that can be and are undeniably felt by creatures boxed in by and are themselves summations of flesh 'n' bone—feelings which have no room or basic constitution for things like nuance and complexity and perspectival shifts allowing one to See Tomorrow As a New Day or silver linings as non-delusional or non-trivial. To feel psychic pain so tremendous and claustrophobic and inexorable that words fail to bring it to a truly living and radiant description perhaps precisely because it's, by definition, the kind of thing words fail to alleviate. The most condensed one-liner of a description of such a mental state that even gets close for me comes (of course) from a guy whose name begins with 'Dav' and ends with 'allace', which is described as basically a inescapably intense feeling that every cell, molecule, atom and subatomic particle that composes the duly plagued person feels utterly, pinnacle-y nauseous, yet paralytically unable to vomit and attain cathartic amelioration.

"To me it's like being completely, totally, utterly sick. I will try to explain what I mean. Imagine feeling really sick to your stomach. Almost everyone has felt really sick to his or her stomach, so everyone knows what it's like: it's less than fun. OK. OK. But that feeling is localized: it's more or less just your stomach. Imagine your whole body being sick like that: your feet, the big muscles in your legs, your collar bone, your head, your hair, everything, all just as sick as a fluey stomach. Then, if you can imagine that, please imagine it even more spread out and total. Imagine that every cell in your body, every single cell in your body is as sick as that nauseated stomach. Not just your own cells, even, but the e.coli and lactobacilli in you, too, the mitochondria, basal bodies, all sick and boiling and hot like maggots in your neck, your brain, all over, everywhere, in everything. All just sick as hell. Now imagine that every single atom in every single cell in your body is sick like that, sick, intolerably sick. And every proton and neutron in every atom, swollen and throbbing, off color, sick, with just no chance of throwing up to relieve the feeling. Every electron is sick, here, twirling off balance and all erratic in these funhouse orbitals that are just thick and swirling with mottled yellow and purple poison gases. everything off balance and woozy. Quarks and neutrinos out of their minds and bouncing sick all over the place, bouncing like crazy. Just imagine that, a sickness spread utterly through every bit of you, even the bits of the bits. So that your very . . . very essence is characterized by nothing other than the feature of sickness; you and the sickness are, as they say, "one."

This book is hilarious, though. And emotionally poignant (even its less than picturesque central love story). But also unrelentingly dark in many ways. Characters are often roiling in a cornucopia of disease and physical pain and all too regularly live amidst extreme violence and uncertainty about futures both immediate and less so. Almost all of the sex is violent and encased in dirt and mucus and feral, subhuman grunts and cerebellum-piercing yelps and excretions of purely profane physical relief that all mainly manage to avoid anything to do with such quaint and luxuriant ideas as 'love' and 'affection'.

But again, it's a surrealistic laugh riot.

And this is a laugh riot ("Remember that one bares their teeth while laughing") in which a (not-too-far-off-in-all-probability) futuristic post-apocalyptic dystopian conceit collides in a biting (as in literally, with teeth) and erotically undulating embrace with the tropes of 17th century pioneering adventure tales, replete with arrow-slinging and tomahawk-wielding Natives and counterpoints of dusty, grizzled, raggedly-bearded Caucasian 'settlers' with newfangled machines, spanning the technological gauntlet from high-powered autobus-mounted firearms to touch screen sensitive pixelations capable of transmitting and receiving both battle plans and love notes. Of course in this dirt-caked fuck-fest of a collision the conceit and tropes are skewed, rearranged, gorgeously and uniquely re-envisioned and generally flipped on their disease-ridden asses in order to make for an emotionally engaging and cerebrally incisive 300+ p. slice of novelistic experience. Characters live in uber-simplistic/-filthy tents while using mobile texting devices. They’ll talk about trailing (oft-radiation-infused) animals on the hunt while making reference to the Chrysler building (which is a collapsed column of ash along with most of NYC and its interlocking and tribally warring boroughs). They cook up corn gruel on greasy campfires while sitting right outside of their Mad Max style autobus. So yes, certain narrative conventions collide and shift about throughout the book, but in a very organic, unobstrusive, non-clever-for-clever's-sake way. Most of the story is written in various first person POVs which range from the brute and immediate thoughts of a person's encounters with sex and/or violence scrawled in raw onomatopoeia to the extended chin-rubbing, starry-eyed musings of a philosopher-poet (puppeteered by a self-conscious enough author to make them both sincere and deep-minded without becoming annoyingly self-important, in fact, they're often hilarious, subtle parodies of self-important deep-mindedness).

And whatever the tone or objects/subjects of depiction, Sharpe's overall way with words always remains fresh and vivid and fascinating to me. One such e.g. is his description of the basic human experience of living as a "heroic struggle against the exigencies of having a body made out of a trillion cells each with a hungry mouth." Another would be his description of the titular Jamestown as "this wet and sucking thing that vied with my foot for my boot at every step [and] bespoke the yearning bullshit of men's souls." Or how to look up at the sky during a clear day is to be "blinded by the nothing that hung between the sun and their eyes." And on and on these little gems trail through the bombed out cavities and the condensed ash plains of paper and ink.

A final, extra-textual, somewhat thematically-relevant observation about this reading and reviewing exercise is that there's something to the notion that one can overload themselves with blunt, hyperbolic descriptions of certain states in order to alleviate those very states. I’ve thought about this before. When I reach foul and desperate enough moods in which altering them with things that traditionally bring about cheer and sunshine (or at least neutral distraction) simply compounds the scope and intensity of the foulness because the fear and frustration brought about by witnessing these traditional means fail in spectacularly unnerving ways—when this happens I’ve noticed that encountering egregiously dark materials{1} with enough gusto can eventually begin to untangle the cognitive/connotive knot in one's mind, if not transform and malleate the whole mess into an altogether new light. Sharpe does this at various points within his bleak and phantasmagorial comedy, and while the Reading Me didn’t really appreciate the benefits fully (to say the least), the Reviewing Me now thanks him for it, despite the fact that the only thing that really counts in life is the Heat Death of the Universe.
____________________________________________

{1} Shortlist E.g.: the tremendously bleak, albeit gorgeous, aphorisms of Emil Cioran, or the woe-is-me mania of Fernando Pessoa, or the crushing melancholy of a song by Mark Linkous—or any number of minor-chord-anchored, tear-duct-tingling tracks by any number of musicians—etc, etc, etc, etc.(less)

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Jul 12, 2007 Jason Pettus rated it 5 of 5 stars

(Full review can be found at the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. IMPORTANT DISCLOSURE: I am personal friends with a number of staff members of Soft Skull Press, publishers of Jamestown, even to the extent of sometimes staying on their couches during past trips to New York. It should be kept in mind while reading this review.)

Is it just me, or has there been just a whole slew of high-profile, so-called "high literature" novels about the Apocalypse published in the...more (Full review can be found at the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. IMPORTANT DISCLOSURE: I am personal friends with a number of staff members of Soft Skull Press, publishers of Jamestown, even to the extent of sometimes staying on their couches during past trips to New York. It should be kept in mind while reading this review.)

Is it just me, or has there been just a whole slew of high-profile, so-called "high literature" novels about the Apocalypse published in the last year? There's Michel Houellebecq's The Possibility of an Island, for example (which I've reviewed here in the past); Tatyana Tolstaya's Russia-based The Slynx (which I've also reviewed); Jim Crace's The Pesthouse (which I've kinda reviewed, or at least explained why I found it too awful to actually finish); not to mention Cormac McCarthy's The Road (which I haven't read...yet), plus any others that I'm forgetting or haven't heard of in the first place.

Whew! And now onto this pile you can add the insanely great Jamestown by Matthew Sharpe, which very easily is the best of them all, because it is in fact a whole bunch of different things at once: not just a political comment on the Bush administration and 9/11 that many of the others are, but also a new examination of a historical event from the point of view of what we traditionally have considered the "enemy," not to mention a slick and mentally dazzling tone poem at times that combines sophisticated rhyme and meter with the throwaway language of our modern instant-messengering times. And did I mention that it's slapstick-funny at points? And also dirty and sometimes fiercely politically incorrect? Yeah, it's that too.

So with all these things going on in one book, where do we even start? Well, probably with the most well-known thing about it, the gimmick that got it all its original press when it first came out -- that the novel is a literal re-telling of the Jamestown myth, the 1600s story of the very first permanent English settlement in North America, which has been embellished so much over the centuries that no one's quite sure what to believe anymore; but in this case under the setting of a post-apocalyptic America, one where a Road Warrior type group of stragglers have managed to take over a large chunk of Manhattan and form their own twisted combination of gang and corporation, who are just now starting to send exploratory groups into the radioactive wilds of Virginia, to start collecting such needed supplies as oil, trees, and uncontaminated food (if any can be found).

And let's just be honest...(less)

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Jun 26, 2007 Jim rated it 4 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Absurdist fiction fiends

"Jamestown" is a wild, violent, mordantly hilarious retelling of how the first permanent English colony in the New World came into being and unlike the version extolled in countless middle-school textbooks, Matthew Sharpe doesn't gloss over its influence on those who were already there. Indeed, the Indians' perspective on the events of 400 years ago is what gives Sharpe's satire such ferocious bite.

Set in the indeterminably near future, a ragtag band of employees of the Manhattan Company (rough...more "Jamestown" is a wild, violent, mordantly hilarious retelling of how the first permanent English colony in the New World came into being and unlike the version extolled in countless middle-school textbooks, Matthew Sharpe doesn't gloss over its influence on those who were already there. Indeed, the Indians' perspective on the events of 400 years ago is what gives Sharpe's satire such ferocious bite.

Set in the indeterminably near future, a ragtag band of employees of the Manhattan Company (roughly analogous to the colonial-era venture capitalist Virginia Company of London) leaves the city in an armored bus as the Chrysler Building disappears in a cloud of dust. Their mission is to cross the wasteland between New York and Virginia, make contact with the local Indian population and exploit their natural resources.

The first locals to approach the bus are Pocahontas, Chief Powhatan's daughter, and her uncle and physician, Sidney Feingold. Johnny Rolfe, the Manhattanites' communication officer, is ordered to greet the natives, which he does through interpretive dance. Charmed, Pocahontas leads the party to a grove of red-skinned women. In a scene that is not likely to be re-created in a school play anytime soon, the women clean, clothe, feed and sexually pleasure the interlopers before sending them back to their bus.

The following morning the warriors unleash an arrow attack on the woozy settlers, piercing one of the pilgrims in the lower intestine. The Indians are held off with automatic weapons fire and the New Yorkers retreat to the safety of the bus. Johnny is called upon to mediate a truce with the Indians, which ensues, though neither side stops scheming to destroy the other. Johnny's loyalty to the Manhattan Company is challenged by its erratic management and by the realization that he is developing feelings for Pocahontas.

The first section of the novel alternates between the perspectives of Johnny and Pocahontas so that by the time they meet, the reader is completely won over by Pocahontas' effusive charm. At 19 years old, she's got a plethora of problems: She hasn't gotten her period yet, which causes her father all kinds of embarrassment since all of the men in her village want to bed her because she is the chief's daughter. Pocahontas is an exceptional character: part smartass, part wood sprite, and completely captivating. It would have been easy to present her as a cipher, a Joan of Arc type, shouldering the burden of history the moment she steps out of the cornfield. Instead, Sharpe has given us a wildly precocious and eminently likable girl-on-the-verge who is several steps ahead of every male she meets.

Throughout the novel, Johnny and Pocahontas correspond through a variety of media that makes use of the written, rather than the spoken, word. This form of expression is appropriate, for much of what we know about the original settlers of Jamestown comes from the letters they sent back to the home office. The scenes in Sharpe's novel so closely parallel the original events that the more one knows about the origins of Jamestown the greater one's enjoyment of the novel is likely to be.

Although there are plenty of parallels between 1607 London and 2007 New York, ultimately "Jamestown" is an utterly implausible tale. After all, no credible governing agency would blindly send its representatives to a perilous land they could never hope to understand nor control simply for the purpose of the short-term exploitation of its natural resources.

Thankfully, Sharpe's vividly realized farce plays much better as a novel than as the lead story on the nightly news.

(Excerpted from review published in the Los Angeles Times.)(less)

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Jun 19, 2008 Cheryl rated it 3 of 5 stars

It was an alright telling of the Jamestown story. There were interesting spins, such as warring sections of New York and idiosyncratic injections of motor vehicles and computers. It is in an unspecified post apocalyptic time period that could be any time period you would imagine (many think it is post-9/11 New York). There is a great deal of humor in Sharpe's writing; quite a lot of one line puns and quite a lot more descriptive sexual material. As the young Pocahontas was likely a young girl,...more

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Feb 06, 2009 Nick rated it 4 of 5 stars

(From now on I'm going to try and tie in the appropriate music I listen to while reading a selected book.)

Hope, social commentary, a post-apocalyptic wasteland, black humor and raunchy humor...You will find all these things within these pages.

Recommended soundtrack to your reading experience:
Explosions in the Sky-All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone,
Ween or a Monty Python Soundtrack.

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May 07, 2008 Kevin rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: weird-lit, funny-stuff

I didn't know I could like any kind of "historical fiction" but this is some crazy shit. Sharpe has engineered a new kind of epic with alternating characters and language that's as tight and ready to burst as an overinflated tire. Almost a 5-star read, and maybe it could have been if I would have been better schooled in the Jamestown story (I did much of my studying up on the story after I was finished). This Pocahontas is maybe my favorite character in fiction so far this year. See my little in...more

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Jul 29, 2011 Mark rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction

Jamestown is a funny, smartass book with more heart than most novels that try to be the exact opposite of funny, smartass books--if that makes any sense. The characters are brightly colored cartoons for the most part, but both Pocahontas and Johnny Rolfe frequently astounded me with the enlightened truths that spilled from their mouths.

As with the movie Children of Men (and, presumably, the novel--though I never finished reading it, shame on me!), what makes these end-of-the-world works of art...more

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Mar 15, 2011 Lori L (She Treads Softly) rated it 2 of 5 stars

Jamestown by Matthew Sharpe is an odd, modern-day dystopian novel. Sharpe calls Jamestown, "an ahistorical fantasia on a real event." What he has done is take the historical Jamestown story, added Disney's Pocahontas to it, as well as other more diverse elements, and set it in an uncertain future USA.

Chapters are each told from a different character's point-of-view. At the beginning, the story alternates between Johnny Rolfe and Pocahontas, while later sections add the first -person accounts of...more

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Aug 03, 2009 Marvin rated it 3 of 5 stars

This wonderfully quirky novel is a post-apocalyptic novel drawing on the Pocahontas story. With New York City mostly in ashes, a delegation is sent down what used to be I-95 to what used to be Virginia to steal a presumed supply of oil from the natives. The delegation nearly starves while the natives marvel at how inept they are and alternate between helping them and undermining their survival, even attacking them. The delegation includes Jack Smith, who's saved from execution by the chief's dau...more

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May 05, 2013 Jackie Intres rated it 3 of 5 stars

This was a really interesting concept that did not deliver. Using the failed attempt to begin a colony at Jamestown, Sharpe tries to expand that into an understanding of conquering and ownership in a future distopia. But the whole book waxes on (and on and on) about language, the differences in language, the subtle things that actually led to suffering between the Native Americans and colonialists, but in the end it is a lot of sound and fury. He does not really do anything interesting with lang...more

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Sep 27, 2007 Jerah rated it 5 of 5 stars

i already reviewd this book but the internets ate my goodreads account so here it is again.

i want to eat this book. funny, violent, post-annihilation cleverness.

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Feb 15, 2011 A.J. Howard rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: finished-in-2011, bookshelf-fiction

The dreaded one star review. Let me explain myself. Some parts of Jamestown featured the most insightful use of sardonic wit this side of Joe Heller. But other parts I found annoyingly grating as anything I've ever red. Unfortunately, almost the entirety of the second half of the book was closer to the latter experience. On several occasions I had to put the book down because it was just completely failing to connect with me. Yet, I'm willing to bet that I wouldn't have found certain parts as gr...more

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Sep 22, 2008 Malini Sridharan rated it 3 of 5 stars

I read Jamestown for post-apocalyptic book club. It's definitely an interesting interpretation of the founding of Jamestown. It has a lot in common with other books that explore the cyclic nature of human history, like A Canticle for Leibowitz and Cloud Atlas. There was something genuine in the flippancy of Rolfe's and Pocahontas's attitudes, but it went a little too far for my taste. I think the novel would have been better balanced if Sharpe had given more face time to Stickboy or even some of...more

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Jun 18, 2008 Ben rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2008

Sporadically brilliant. I like it a ton, mostly because it's the closest thing I've found to a Barthelme novel/story that wasn't actually written by Barthelme. Reminded me quite a bit of "Cortes & Montezuma," in particular, and for reasons beyond the superficial associations.

I'll be very interested to see what he does next.

***

"All right let me take a guess as to what a guy like you could possibly want when you steal into my tent at midnight, give me back my wireless device, and sing a song o...more Sporadically brilliant. I like it a ton, mostly because it's the closest thing I've found to a Barthelme novel/story that wasn't actually written by Barthelme. Reminded me quite a bit of "Cortes & Montezuma," in particular, and for reasons beyond the superficial associations.

I'll be very interested to see what he does next.

***

"All right let me take a guess as to what a guy like you could possibly want when you steal into my tent at midnight, give me back my wireless device, and sing a song of love, and by the way don't ever sing. And move your mouth away from mine, your breath is foul, it's hot in here. You know what love is because you've studied it, not because you've felt it. You never will. You know what love is? It's this insidious thing that infects your eyes and ears, spreads to every inch of skin, the follicles of hair on the skin, the lips, the tongue, a hundred million microscopic organisms crawling on you. They commandeer the hollow of your thorax and your guts, your arms, your legs, your head, and other extremities. You cease to be yourself. You are now a vessel of impressions and thoughts of the person you love, of wishes for her, of dreams of her. You're jealous of the air she breathes because she takes it inside her all day and needs it to live; it becomes her, as you want to. You case your thoughts of her and you an hour, a day, a week, a year, a hundred years into the future. No thought has the power to push itself as far into the future as the thought of love--not even thoughts of fame, or wealth, or death. You with me so far, Smith?"

"No."

"Of course you're not, but listen. It can happen--and this is what you want to happen--that this same love is extracted from the bodies of the ones it has possessed, and is used as an expedient to link one family to another, one town to another, one corporation to another, and then it follows not the paths of thought and flesh but those of trade and law, and is meant to replace but really just precedes and facilitates the theft, murder, and rape of one swarm of men by another that goes by the name of history. That's why you're giving this back to me."(less)

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Jul 26, 2009 Ed rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Enjoyed the dense blantantly self-aware dialogue and structure up until the last 50 pages, at which time it just seemed to compete with the actual story. Read it all in one go if you can, so you don't have time to start thinking about the story vs. writing.

Ultimately, it felt more like self-indulgence than entertainment. Some of the self-indulgence was impressive, but I was too often thinking about the author writing the words rather than the characters thinking or saying the words.

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Jun 03, 2009 Emily rated it 1 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2009-book-list

this book is all about the most base of human urges - the bad ones. that's the whole focus. the world has been annihilated and everyone has turned to their instincts to survive... kind of like what we see on the news everyday - and definitely not what i'm looking for in my entertainment. if i wanted to read/listen/visualize evil people in my novels - i would just watch the news.

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Apr 25, 2011 Jonfaith rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: speculativelyspeaking

This originally to be read a month ago aspart of what I deemed the Calamity Song detor, then the tsunami happened and I didn't find it clever any longer. I dove into this last night and read half of it. the concluding half was digested today as the rain returned. The author's composure is promising, there is better work ahead once he outgrows his snark.

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Aug 21, 2007 Glenn rated it 3 of 5 stars

Another recommendation from my weirdo friends, but another fruitful read nonetheless. The book was recommended due to it's highly scatalogical content, but what I found captivating was the painting of a picture without revealing all the details at once. Nothing was ever explained outright, but the picture nevertheless came into focus: specifically, a post "apocalyptic" world, where government as we know it has collapsed, replaced by tribal allegiances and a nasty, brutish and short life in a sta...more

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May 06, 2010 Rita rated it 1 of 5 stars

Shelves: didn-t-finish

I loved The Sleeping Father. It was one of the funniest and saddest books I've read.

I just can't get into this book though. I tried the first two chapters and I can see where it's supposed to be funny, but it's just not in my vein of humor. I flipped forward a few chapters to see if it changes and it doesn't, so I'm setting it aside.

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Jun 28, 2008 Ian rated it 4 of 5 stars

Those four stars should be taken with four corresponding grains of salt. For each thing this book gets right, there's a lot that it doesn't. Characterization is spotty at best, and the plot itself affords only the weakest of structures. That the book is a "fantasia" on historical occurrences is an interesting conceit, but the fantastic elements seem loose, only mostly thought out, and gimmicky. However, Sharpe succeeds incredibly with his use of language to convey pathos, humor, depth and feelin...more

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Jul 18, 2009 Ben Robinette rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Like others, I wanted to like it. I enjoyed the Pocahontas character but beyond that I can't say I enjoyed the prose or the plot. Maybe I am not smart enough to "get it" but I did not get it. I finished it but did not enjoy the book.

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Jul 03, 2009 Danielle rated it 3 of 5 stars

I am still thinking about what to think about this book. I think three stars is the average of loving it/hating it/being pissed off by it in ways that were sometimes thought provoking and sometimes less so.

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Jul 27, 2011 Angela Lintner rated it 1 of 5 stars

I'm not certain what I expected. . .but it wasn't delivered. I'm not the point, the story. . .maybe it was completely lost on me. I just kept waiting for something. . .that I never got.

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Jul 15, 2007 Katie rated it 4 of 5 stars

I approached this novel with equal excitement and skepticism - the story/myth of Jamestown reimagined in the near-future? Sign me up. But. Would it be too clever and pomo? And sure, there are plenty of "clever" jokes I could do without, but the writing here is most often brilliant and fun and he knows when to pull back and balance the pomo cleverness with true insight and seriousness. Saunders-esque language, Shakespearean scenes of betrayal and bloodshed, Joycean sex-driven females (Penelope Ra...more

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Feb 22, 2012 Brad rated it 1 of 5 stars

Shelves: started-but-could-not-finish

Too quirky for its own good. Tries to meld this innovative blend of history with modern technology and the result is just muddled with nothing driving the story forward.

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Nov 13, 2011 Katharine added it

I love Christopher Moore's books and was hoping this would be similar - not quite what I expected. Definitely not bad, but not quite what I was in the mood for. Shelving for another time.

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Aug 23, 2011 Nat rated it 2 of 5 stars

I really did think I was a fan of this title until I was about half-way through. This was the point at which it soured under the weight of its own contrivance. It felt, by the end, as if this was a novel trying desperately to be as pithy as its post-modern friends. It failed, it knew it had failed, and so resorted instead to experimenting with drugs. In the end, even the trippy overcompensation didn't turn out rewarding to read.

The worst part about these kinds of books is that they inevitably re...more

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Mar 02, 2009 Leeyanne rated it 4 of 5 stars

Post-apocalyptic retelling of Jamestown story. Sort of like George Saunders meets Mad Max. Love works by Soft Skull Press too.

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Apr 29, 2010 Blaise rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: nonfiction

A more complete and truthful history of Jamestown than any I have read. Very interesting stuff.

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Nov 01, 2007 Alexis rated it 5 of 5 stars

So far I'm loving it. I put off reading it for so long because it's about a post-apocalyptic U.S. (and there's been a lot of that lately), but Sharpe is hilarious. He alternates between two characters, which sets a swift pace. The voice of Pocahontas is brilliant--teenager, wickedly smart--her pronouncements about the English language are enough to recommend the book.

"Oh English! How I love to write to you in English, even though it is so slow to do anything in English, because English moves at...more

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About Matthew Sharpe

Matthew Sharpe (born 1962) is a U.S. novelist and short story writer. Born in New York City, but grew up in a small town in Connecticut. Sharpe graduated from Oberlin College in Ohio. Afterwards, he worked at US Magazine until he went back to school at Columbia University, where he pursued an MFA. Since then, he has been teaching creative writing at various institutions including Columbia Universi...more

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Books by Matthew Sharpe

Zizek and Politics: A Critical Introduction

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Quotes from Jamestown

“A friend who won't respond to what a friend can't ask is like a looking glass in which you cannot see yourself.” — 5 people liked it

“You know what love is because you've studied it, not because you've felt it. You never will. You know what love is? It's this insidious thing that infects your eyes and ears, spreads to every inch of skin, the follicles of hair on the skin, the lips, the tongue, a hundred million microscopic organisms crawling on you. They commandeer the hollow of your thorax and your guts, your arms, your legs, your head, and other extremities. You cease to be yourself. You are now a vessel of impressions and thoughts of the person you love, of wishes for her, of dreams of her. You're jealous of the air she breathes because she takes it inside her all day and needs it to live; it becomes her, as you want to. You cast your thoughts of her and you an hour, a day, a week, a year, a hundred years into the future. No thought has the power to push itself as far into the future as the thought of love—not even thoughts of fame, or wealth, or death.” — 4 people liked it

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Jamestown

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