Fortaleza da solidão é um calhamaço que se lê bem rapidamente. Apesar das mais de 600 páginas, a leitura se faz com muita fluidez.
O livro é dividido em duas grandes partes, entremeadas por um breve interlúdio.
Na primeira parte, a estória é contada em terceira pessoa. Dylan (como o cantor) é um menino branco que se muda com os pais para o um reduto negro no Brooklyn dos anos 1970. O pai é um artista de vanguarda, que em certo momento abandona a carreira, se obceca em fazer sozinho um filme de arte e, para pagar as contas, vira capista de livros de ficção científica, que nunca lê. A mãe, que some depois de alguns anos, é uma pós-hippie, deslocada no casamento e na sociedade.
Dylan é o único menino branco na escola e na vizinhança. O seu melhor amigo é Mingus (como o cantor de jazz), o vizinho negro, poucos meses mais velho, que foi também abandonado pela mãe, e que vive com o pai, Barrett Rude Jr, um cantor de soul music que nunca chegou realmente ao sucesso e que se entope de drogas em casa. Na mesma casa vai viver também Barrett Sr, pai de Junior e avô de Mingus.
A tragédia que envolve Mingus, seu pai e avô é contada no interlúdio entre as duas grandes partes.
Na segunda parte, a história muda de foco. Ao contrário de ser contada em terceira pessoa, é narrada – em sua maior parte – em primeira pessoa por Dylan. Passaram-se uns vinte anos. Dylan é um jornalista especializado em música, não muito bem-sucedido e que vive na Califórnia. Mingus foi para a cadeia, de onde saiu e depois voltou e depois saiu e voltou.
Bem, a segunda parte faz uma volta no tempo, até o momento após a prisão de Mingus e a ida de Dylan para a universidade, de onde é expulso depois de se envolver com o tráfico de drogas, quando da visita de um amigo do Brooklyn, Arthur.
A estória de Mingus também é contada, a tragédia com seu pai e avô e de como foi caindo cada vez mais no poço sem fundo das drogas.
Há também um elemento fantástico. Um anel com superpoderes. Na primeira parte, voo. Na segunda, invisibilidade.
O anel tem um papel importante no livro porque serve como resolução – mesmo que terrivelmente violenta – dos traumas causados em Dylan na infância pela presença de Robert Woolfolk, um outro garoto, que volta e meia aparece, sempre para surrar e roubar ou intimidar o protagonista.
Lethem escreve bem, mas com prolixidade irritante. É uma verborragia, especialmente na primeira parte que parece totalmente desnecessária. Parece que é um daqueles casos em que o escritor fica encantado com a própria escrita. Hipnotizado, diria.
Ele parece fazer parte de certo tipo de escritor americano – e poderia citar além dele, Donna Tartt, Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace – que passou a acreditar em algum momento que o grande romance americano deveria ser, antes de mais nada, o volumoso romance americano.
É o caso desse Fortaleza da Solidão, que tenta ser um painel da geração que cresceu depois do Vietnã, em um Brooklyn, distrito de Nova York, decadente, sujo, corroído pela pobreza e pelas divisões raciais entre brancos, negros, latinos e em que a droga – maconha, cocaína, crack, ou qualquer outra – é um dos protagonistas, junto com a música.
Mas, enfim, há páginas demais. Não que o livro seja ruim. Não é, mas um corte substancial de páginas teria ajudado muito.
E as duas partes são desiguais. A primeira é um romance de formação, o pequeno Dylan passando de criança a adolescente. A segunda parte tem também elementos disso, mas temos também um Dylan mais velho, no final do século, com mais de trinta, que está sem rumo.
A segunda parte é melhor e gostei do reencontro de Dylan com o pai em uma convenção de ficção científica – capítulo 4 da segunda parte; muito bom. Gostei também da estória de Mingus, a sua terrível e crua descida no submundo do vício e do crime. Gostei, ainda, da visita que Dylan faz a Mingus na prisão e como o anel mágico resolve questões emocionais de maneira patética, mas trágica. Achei, porém, que a página final tenta fazer uma reflexão existencial, que busca uma espécie de entrelaçamento de todos os fios soltos na vida de Dylan, em que busca encontrar um sentido em tudo. Pareceu-me que ele perde um pouco a mão nesse ponto.
Enfim, vale a pena para conhecer um nome significativo da produção americana atual, mesmo que tenha alguns pontos complicados.
Uma nota final: deve ter sido um livro bem complicado para se traduzir, mas acho que a tradutora se saiu bastante bem.
Nota final dois: o título faz uma referência à morada do super-homem no pólo Norte, único local em que o homem de aço é sincero consigo próprio.
Nota final três: o livro é recheado de centenas de referência aos mundo pop - quadrinhos, cinema, televisão, literatura e principalmente música.

I don’t know why I was under the impression that this was supposed to be some great book. I had read Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn a bunch of years back and thought it was pretty good – but Fortress of Solitude seemed to have this reputation as a Great Book.

I’ll admit that, early on, I sensed some promise. It seemed like it was going to handle race and gentrification in an interesting way, maybe. What really got me excited was when it appeared that there were two central characters who seemed like outsiders, bonding over comic books, and navigating a kind of gray area of sexuality. Let’s be honest, though, I was just excited because I thought I might be reading another Kavalier and Clay.

This book is NOT Kavalier and Clay.

I think it completely fails as a book about race. The protagonist is a white Jewish boy/man/manboy who has a fascination with the black people he grows up with – and particularly with their music – but all the black characters end up dead or in prison while he goes on appropriating their culture from across the county. Is he a surrogate for Lethem himself? Is Lethem trying to tell us ‘even though I’m this white boy who writes books about white boys I really do love black people too’? He doesn’t pull off any successful criticism of race in America – just shows us some of the highlights of racism in America without really working to show its evils (sure, Dylan Ebdus grows up in a black neighborhood in Brooklyn and struggles through some of the same challenges and some unique to being picked on for being the white kid, but he gets out and there’s nothing in the book that implies it was anything but his own strength of character and intelligence that rise him up rather than systemic racism keeping the rest of the community down).

Then there’s the super powers. Every once in a while, a character remembers that there’s a magical ring that can make them fly or turn invisible or whatever. It feels as though it never figures out how it’s supposed to fit into the story. It’s completely ignored most of the time while characters just live their lives. Even that could have worked really well – but it doesn’t.

Anyway, Lethem can write and some characters were pretty compelling when they didn’t bother me. I don’t think I can give it less than three stars, but I was tempted.

Avoid my mistake of starting with minor Lethem (You Don't Love Me Yet, what was I thinking), and read this first. Pretty much perfect. It combines my love of tales of young adulthood with my love of tales of young adults being bullied. Warning: don't read this if you are aspiring to write fiction about a male in his formative years, you will give up. I highly recommend listening to the audio book as I did, so you can hear a man in his mid-40s white guy reading doing accents and sing/song dialogue for LaLa and other 6 year old black girls.

This is an impressive, magical book. I would give it 4.5 stars, if I could. The only thing holding it back for me is my difficulty to relate to the characters and their life choices. While I grew up in the '70s and '80s and read a lot of superhero comics, my white, rural childhood was pretty much the exact opposite of these characters who grew up in mostly black Brooklyn, NY, with its drugs, graphiti, and funk and nascent rap music. None of that really resonated with me. The closest I come to any of that is watching "The Get Down" TV series on Netflix. But that's why we read books, and this is an extraordinarily well written book. Bravo, Lethem.

Read/reviewed in 2017.

“Voices in memory you can’t name, rich with unresolved yearning: a song you once leaned toward for an instant on the radio before finding it mawkish, embarrassing, overlush. Maybe the song knew something you didn’t yet…By chance it goes unheard for fifteen years, until the day when your own heartbreak unexpectedly finds its due date”—Jonathan Lethem

“The Fortress of Solitude” is one of these novels that you realize from the first page is an epic tale of unrequited love between two motherless friends: Dylan and Mingus.

Dylan is white and Mingus is biracial and African American. Their story reinvents the coming of age story through music, gentrification, jazz, and queer love.

The first third of the novel: Dylan and Mingus’ friendship, love of music, being best friends in the throbbing beat in areas of Brooklyn during the 1970s is an unsentimental story of two boys whose friendship seems to transcend race. Downtown Brooklyn is on its way to gentrification, "this zone's on their official map, never displayed to the public, of Hopeless" (Lethem 135).

Dylan’s mother Rachel abandons him and his father Abraham, an artist. Also abandoned by his mother, Mingus lives with father, a former music legend named Barrett Rude Jr, in a ramshackle brownstone.

Dylan and Mingus fight off gangs, masturbate, discover comic books, and even imagine their lives as one. They discover the magical Aaron X Doily- and through the magic ring, Mingus learns to fly, teams with neighborhood bully Robert Woolfolk, and manipulates Arthur Lomb.

Suddenly, Mingus is charged with shooting his father to death and is addicted to cocaine; and Dylan ends up a writer writing music liner notes out in Berkeley, California.

Dylan spends aimless years trying to figure out his existential crisis until he thinks saving Mingus is the key to his own salvation. His relationship with a black woman named Abby and his failure to maintain an erection during sex with another woman sure establishes his broken heart over losing his beloved Mingus.

Mr. Lethem does not allow Dylan to have redemption; rather, he becomes even more hollow and sad at the novel's unforgettable finale, "I felt the distance between Dean Street and my Berkeley life as an unbridgeable gulf" (Lethem 442).

Through the loudness that generates through the narrative that illustrates the 1970s and 1980s, the center of the novel is a big broken heart that beats with a furious sadness where everyone is stagnant and lonely as hell: Dylan wants to be loved and connect, with unrequited love for Mingus, "Mingus greets Dylan with a hug...Dylan told himself he'd have returned the hug if he and Mingus were alone...so in defensiveness, he shrugged Mingus off, was all business" (Lethem 278).

Mingus shoots his grandfather, an incarcerated preacher, to protect his father, Barrett Jr and of course, Dylan, in an act of love that will reverberate with unbearable consequences, "he felt the weight of their expectations...Pops and Dillinger were dreamers, it made them shy, weak. He wished to protect them from knowledge that would crush them...stuff Mingus knew just because his eyes were wide open" (Lethem 460).

Mingus and Robert Woolfolk become the symbols of how they are black men who becomes tragic figures and statistics of an unforgiving system of injustice because of racial hatred.

Barrett Rude Jr and Abraham as fathers unable to connect with their sons in healthy and nurturing ways because of their own inability to penetrate their own fortress of sadness.

Lethem weaves a magical spell using music of the 1970s with artists such as The Jackson 5, Gladys Knight and the Pips, Wild Cherry (in a hilarious section of the book that playfully makes fun of Dylan and cultural appropriation); Curtis Mayfield, Bill Withers, Marvin Gaye (Mingus shooting his grandfather is an allusion to this); to Ray Charles, Little Jimmy Scott, The Jackson 5, REM, Eddie Vedder, Mavis Staples, The Clash, and Nina Simone round out some of the musicians that drive the story from the 1970s to early 2000s.

Lethem also captures Brooklyn as an all encompassing, magical land, mythical with its neighborhoods that haunt the reader with shifting images and language, see Chapter 9, "here, Fourth Avenue's a wide trench of light industrial ruin...liquor stores, bodegas...Court Street an old Italian preserve, the south of Carroll hushed in the grip of Mafia whispers... forced with baseball bats and slashed tires, down to the looming, curling Brooklyn Queens Expressway forms a steel curtain severing what used to be Red Hook. South, the Gowanus Canal is a wasteland of rubber" (Lethem 134-37).

Lethem's most haunting sentence is how black men are treated in America is the beating, furious question that still looms today, "What age is a black boy when he learns he's scary?" (Lethem 490).

I live near every setting that this book has mentioned and I always think of Brooklyn as my own fortress of solitude when I am walking around the industrial wasteland of Gowanus, the leafy green trees in Park Slope, the abandoned buildings near the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

The love that Dylan and Mingus share is what makes this novel ultimately a tragic love story, for every opportunity they might get to connect- it's always missed and heartbreaking. It is one of my top ten reads.

Storytelling has changed.

It used to be that stories unfolded slowly, sometimes even lethargically, until rising to the climactic finish. Think about the classics you like—most likely: slow start, strong finish. These days, stories begin at a rapid pace, but seem to lose momentum by the end. When I think about recent popular titles, even ones I’ve thoroughly enjoyed, this disappointment is usually present. Maybe it’s the immediacy of the modern-day culture, but it’s rare to find an ending up to the neo-pace set by the initial chapters/hour (in movieland terms). Unfortunately, Jonathan Letham’s The Fortress of Solitude is no different.

The story centers around Dylan Edbus, a young white boy sent to public school in a nearly all-black neighborhood in 1970’s Brooklyn, New York. Attacks and abuse run high, but Dylan forges a friendship with his neighbor, Mingus Rude. Despite their differences in family (Dylan from white hippies, Mingus from a cocaine-addicted, formerly popular black singer), they soon share disappointments in that area. Letham paints a strong picture of the charm and volatility of the Dean Street neighborhood. His social commentary on race relations, comic books, music and decades of life in Brooklyn are strong and rarely heavy-handed.

Then there’s that slow descent from the great first part of the book, the point where the flaws of modern storytelling hit and bleed out the vein of what could have been one of the great books of the decade. It’s a shame, because the first part is amazing. Not casual amazing, but actually amazing in its craft and prose, four stars and reaching higher. Then the rest of the book comes with a shift in time, perspective and quality. Even though the story finishes fantastical and strong (with one of the rare successful surrealistic uses of what could be superhero powers), the drop from the peak set by the first part of the book leaves the reader in too low of a valley to ignore. Three stars.

“Fortezza della Solitudine” è il nome del rifugio segreto di Superman. Nel romanzo di Lethem, in effetti, i supereroi bazzicano parecchio, e non solo come personaggi dei fumetti: tra i protagonisti - è bene dirlo subito, anche come preavviso - gira un anello che li può rendere invisibili, o capaci di volare. Attraverso la storia del bianco Dylan Ebdus e del nero Mingus Rude, Lethem racconta il mondo complicato della Brooklyn degli anni ’70-’80, quello della sua formazione: periferico, duro, povero, multietnico, ricoperto di graffiti, sonorizzato prima dal rythm and blues e dal soul e poi dal punk e dal rap, infestato dalle droghe…
Ho apprezzato a tratti, specie nella parte iniziale della storia, più credibile e avvincente, nonché in occasione dei riferimenti musicali, numerosi e interessanti; ma ho faticato in altri lunghi tratti infarciti di elementi disparati, eccessivi o futili, comunque ridondanti, e ho particolarmente sofferto le fasi di irruzione del fantastico (dei superpoteri) nel reale, cosa che non sopporto. E ancora una volta ho considerato quanto gioverebbe a certi autori, soprattutto d’oltreoceano, lo sfrondamento, l’elisione del troppo.

I quite enjoyed this bildungsroman set in 1970s Brooklyn, in a neighborhood just beginning to gentrify (fun fact: I lived in the neighborhood and on the very same street as the protagonist -- Dean Street in Boerum Hill -- just a few years after the story takes place). It's about race (the main character is a white kid -- for a while, the only one -- is a black world), about loneliness and loss (he's son of an emotionally-remote artist father and a mother who abandons them), about nerdiness, about fear and courage, and all of it is beautifully told; I don't think I've ever seen anyone capture in prose what it was like for kids of a certain generation (late baby boom/early GenX -- Lethem was born in 1964) to just go outside, into the neighborhood, and play. It's also about music -- Lethem has written a number of journalistic pieces about popular music, including the 33⅓ series entry for Talking Heads' Fear Of Music -- and while that felt a bit much at times I was happy to indulge it. The only thing that didn't really work for me was the magical-realist element involving a ring with special powers; I'm not sure what he was going for there, but I didn't see the need and wouldn't have missed it. On the whole, though, a terrific read.

Midway through:
Fortress has been sitting on my shelf for over a year. A recent trip (just returned) to NYC, Manhattan, and a dip of the toe into Brooklyn (DUMBO and W'Burg mostly) helped elevate this book to the top of the list. Hours of plane time from the left to right coast and back again makes for some serious reading time. Indeed, Fortress has thus far lived up to it's reputation, both among GoodReaders and the Lit World in general.

Finished: The second half was in fact better then the first half. I've been waiting for awhile now for a fiction book to bring back from non-fiction, and this was it. It has all the elements a great book should have: well-written, a great story line, characters with depth that truly pull you in to the story.

I think my views have been marred by the fact that I really dragged reading this out. It reminded me a bit of 'Prep' inasmuch as it spends a lot of time working over how childhoon/adolescent social relationships work. Mostly I liked the Brooklyn parts, he describes very well what it would have been like, the street life in the seventies and the early stages of gentrification. Later in the book when he returns as an adult and the place is full of hipsters is really interestingly addressed. Wht does he say, it's the home he never had, because he didn't fit in in the first place. Yeah, I agree that the first half is better than the later, but I liked the payoff of the seeing what became of all those childhood characters. Maybe it's also cheapening to get that payoff, though, because in the end the book seems to amount to less than it felt like it might early on. But that's the point maybe, yeah, how everyone's youthful potential is exciting, at the same time as being constricted by context, and that the freeing up of choices later on also maybe deadens something that was more alive when unresolved. Or something. It also did feel somewhat bleak, like bingeing on too many episodes of Six Feet Under.

I’m a little unsure what to think of his book. It’s a “coming of age” story in that it follows the main character from childhood to adulthood, but he never really grows up. His mother disappears at a young age leaving he and his father in the middle of a social experiment they didn’t devise, and Dylan is never really able to define himself. Dylan is a white boy who grows up in a black community in the ‘60’s and struggles to find his place. There is a lot about race and crossing the racial divide in the book that is interesting, but a lot that made me a bit uncomfortable- I felt the author appropriates black culture in some ways. There is also an aspect of magic realism that was hard for me to grasp, and the language is almost too poetic in places, I found myself losing track of what he was trying to say. Nonetheless, there is a lot going on in the book (theme and plot wise) that makes it a worthwhile read.

A fictionalized story of the author's childhood in Brooklyn; at least I hope it is, because if it isn't, then Lethem is depicting as predators, what seems to be every black and Puerto Rican teenager in Brooklyn. If it is autobiographical, then Lethem had the worst luck of any white kid in the history of American urban blight, getting robbed, bullied, and beat up daily throughout his childhood by every black kid that saw him on the street. He depicts this sort of crime and intimidation as a given, whenever he is spotted on the street. I've heard that muggings were an epidemic in New York City for a long time so I have to believe him, to a degree, and hope he isn't exaggerating to heighten the effect of the character's predicament, even though Dylan, the Lethem character's luck is extremely bad. I wish that after a certain point, it would have dawned on him to carry a steak knife or get karate lessons.

He reads lots of comics and while in his early teens, creates a flying super-hero alter ego called Aeroman, that he shares with his best friend, Mingus. Here's the story's major flaw: The ability to fly and become invisible is bestowed to anyone who possesses the magic ring, left to Dylan by a bum that his father saved from the streets. The two of them stake out areas of high crime and rescue the victims. Mingus, wearing the super-hero outfit, jumps and flies from great heights: the top of a parking garage, a bridge cable, etc. and lands on the criminals, then Dylan joins and they give them a beating. The ability to fly is presented as a fact: that someone can jump from such a height and not get hurt. Mingus even falls from one of the cables of the Brooklyn Bridge and survives. Why impose this absurdity on a realistic story? It's natural that Dylan wants revenge for the bullying he endures, and a super-hero fantasy is a good(and common with children) way to depict that desire, but to tell it as a fact ruins the feeling of the story because it shifts, in a jarring and unnatural way from realism to bad action movie absurdity.

The theme recurs throughout the book and is always a disruptive reminder of what a mistake this element or device is. Towards the end of the book, Dylan gives the ring to his childhood nemesis Robert Woolfolk, so that he can escape from jail. Robert had used the ring before to fly, but Dylan purposefully forgets to tell him that it's changed to an invisibility, rather than a flying ring. Robert takes a leap towards freedom and crashes to his death. Dylan later admits to himself that he killed him for revenge for all the years of bullying. I tried to rationalize that the ring's failure could indicate that it was a fantasy all along, but then why would Robert try to fly with it and why would Dylan admit he killed him? Also, the earlier scenes where the ring is used, leave no doubt that the flying and invisibility are to be taken literally.

The story shifts from childhood to mid-thirties, after a digression into the career of Barrett Rude Junior, Mingus' father and ex-singer for the Distinctions. The digression is written as music history and I think could have been worked in as background, in a much-edited version, to the many scenes with Rude Junior in the childhood section. As a separate section, it's too much a change of tone. It talks about the fictional Rude's place among the other artists of the era and is oddly disrespectful of the real music history of the era.

The father-son relationships between Dylan and his father, and Mingus and his father and grandfather are what hold the book together and are where Lethem achieves real emotion. Also, in places towards the end when he talks about Mingus in jail and finally visits his mother's old house, where she lived for a while after abandoning him and his father. The teenage scenes with him and people his own age are too full of pop culture references that muddle things. They seem to be more intent on mentioning surface details than any real emotional interactions. Dylan seems to have experienced the whole range of early 80s pop culture: he was a graffiti artist hanging out at block parties with rap crews, then a punk in front of CBGBs. Lots of drug scenes throughout but nothing really memorable like Burroughs, Kerouac or even Edward St Aubyn; mostly bored, clinical descriptions of coke highs or dealing scenes, though there are a few vivid impressions of Barrett Rude Junior holed up in his cocaine seclusion. The scenes when they're younger, like when Dylan and Mingus first meet, and with Dylan and Arthur playing chess, are more real. Generally, the parts about early youth are the best part of this book.The last part describing Mingus's life in various prisons is also very strong, some of the best writing in the novel.

The story jumps to some lackluster scenes in his mid 30s in San Francisco, then back to his college days at Bennington[Camden], which are more interesting. There's another lackluster section about UC Berkeley and then the strong prison section. I found the book engaging and readable, even with the flaws – it has heart. It's my first by him and I'll read more.