An interesting commentary on race and urban life, that avoids any of the easy cliches.

Boğazıma kadar Amerikan kültününe battığım bir kitap oldu. Okurken patladım sıkıntıdan. Amerikan gençleri okusun, gerisi hiçbir şey anlamasa da olur tarzında yazılmış. Globallik sıfır. Öksüz Brooklyn kitabından sonra yazarı merak etmiş ve başyapıtı diye bu kitaba da büyük hevesle başlamıştım. Eski şarkı isimleri, yerel detaylarla, şarkı sözleriyle boğulmuş bir büyüme hikayesiydi.

Bir yüzük aracılığıyla verilen gerçeküstü detaylar olayı biraz ilginçleştiriyordu. Ama biraz. Kitap sonlara doğru biraz kıpırdandı gibi oldu, ama biraz.

Finali de kötüydü.

Tavsiye etmiyorum.

CRITIQUE:

About the Stars

This novel and review had me perplexed.

I regard myself as a Lethem fan, basically because I loved n  "As She Climbed Across the Table"n so much.

However, both on my first pre-GR reading (in 2007) and my recent re-reading of this novel, I was relatively disappointed. This time, I decided to adhere to my original three-star rating, although this is by no means a recommendation that other readers not read the novel.

The star rating perplexed me for two reasons. One is that I gave n  "Motherless Brooklyn"n five stars, and if pressed, I doubt whether I'd conclude that it was two stars better than "The Fortress of Solitude".

Secondly, I also rated Michael Chabon's n  "Telegraph Avenue"n (a very similar novel in style and content) five stars, and I don't feel totally comfortable rating them so divergently.

Yet, I just can't bring myself to raise the rating by either one or two stars. So despite my discomfort, it will remain at three stars.

Sixties to Nineties Brooklyn

Like "Telegraph Avenue", "The Fortress of Solitude" examines a neighbourhood (in this case, Brooklyn, which I haven't lived in or visited) in the context of music and popular culture. The two main protagonists are Dylan Ebdus (a Jewish music writer) and Mingus Rude (a black graffiti artist).

The novel starts when they are in primary school in the 1960's, and ends in the late nineties, when Dylan is working as a journalist, screenplay writer, and free-lance writer of liner notes, and Mingus is serving a prison sentence for the accidental death by gunshot of his grandfather.

Sentimental Realism

Stylistically, the novel was primarily (say 90%) sentimental realism. The rest alludes to Marvel and DC Comics and superheroes, equally sentimentally, but it embraces fantasy or an urban magic realism, which enables Dylan to fly like Superman. When flying, he thinks of himself as Aeroman. Later, he exchanges his superpower for the power of invisibility, whenever he wears his magic ring. I'm not sure that I really understood or appreciated the significance of flying and invisibility for a novel that is otherwise realistic.

Of the 90%, roughly two-thirds (i.e., 60%) describes life in Brooklyn up to the point when Dylan goes to art college in Vermont, and Mingus goes to prison. The remaining third (30%) describes Dylan's college life in both Vermont and Berkeley, and Mingus' life in prison, and when they meet up again in their mid-30's.

Music with Occasional Drugs

Brooklyn life is portrayed in loving detail, with an emphasis on music, super heroes, graffiti, drugs and street games. College life witnesses the generational changes in music styles that saw punk, new wave, disco, rap, hip hop, soul and R&B dominate the seventies to the nineties.

Subtle Distinctions

We see little of the boys' mothers. The boys are described as motherless children. The fathers have a greater role, although they're not particularly parental. Dylan admires Mingus' father, Barrett Rude Junior, who was a well-regarded R&B singer from the early sixties to the mid seventies (his group was called the Subtle Distinctions). The middle chapter of the book consists of the liner notes Dylan wrote for a CD box set of his music released by a re-issue label called Remnant.

"Mattering for a While"

Music (and writing about it) is the essence of Dylan's life. Indeed, post-comic phase, it's possible that music constitutes "the Fortress of Solitude" of the title (which is a Superman reference).

As Dylan writes of Barrett Rude, you could almost say of Dylan:

n  
n  "Barrett Rude had in the Distinctions found the context within which he could tell the story he had to tell, a place to do the one thing a human being can hope to do - matter for a while."n  
n

"Brother, It Sings If You Listen"

Overall, I think I appreciated "The Fortress of Solitude" more than many (but not all - Brooklynite?) other readers, because of my love of music. As Lethem writes:

n  
n  "Brother, it sings if you listen."n  
n

From my perspective (on the ground), the novel sang least when Dylan was flying or invisible.

"Those Middle Spaces of the Demimonde"

The music world was a middle space that allowed black and white, parent and child, East and West Coast, Motown and Stax to come together:

n  
n  "We all pined for those middle spaces, those summer hours when Josephine Baker lay waste to Paris, when 'Bothered Blue' peaked on the charts, when a teenaged Elvis, still dreaming of his own first session, sat in the Sun Studios watching the Prisonaires, when a top-to-bottom burner blazed through a subway station, renovating the world for an instant, when schoolyard turntables were powered by a cord from a streetlamp, when juice just flowed...

"We were in a middle space then, in a cone of white, father and son moving forward at a certain speed. Side by side, not truly quiet but quiescent, two gnarls of human scribble, human cipher, human dream."n  
n

This middle space, this human dream is a "bohemian demimonde, a hippie dream," a Watermelon Sugar like the one celebrated (if not invented) by Richard Brautigan (to which Dylan's mother, Rachel, had once retreated from Brooklyn).



Skully board


SIDEWALK VERSES:

Poem Brought to You by the Letter "S"

After school, we'd stroll
Through the schoolyard
To the subway station,
Ascending the stairs
On the other side
To the streets outside,
Skipping along the sidewalks,
Until we arrived
At our home stoops,
Where, still excited, we'd sit,
Watching, or playing skully,
Stoop ball or some street game
With our spaldeens
On a square of slate
Chalked on the sidewalk,
All the time fantasising
About superheroes and soul singers
With their secret powers,
Marvel, DC, Subtle Distinctions,
Comics, science fiction, Star Wars,
Sun Studios, Elvis, Stax,
Tagged streetwise on every surface,
Hoping we could escape
The sly gentrification
Of Dean Street, Brooklyn,
Though of course we never would.


SOUNDTRACK:

Spotify Playlist of Every Song Mentioned in the Novel (Assembled by Bettycam)

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5Cg...

Lou Reed - "I'm Waiting for the Man" (Live in Paris, 1974)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nv7dv...

Talking Heads - "Take Me to the River" (Live)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RHZE...

Al Green - "Take Me to the River" (Live)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEasx...

Al Green - "Let's Stay Together"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COiIC...

Ann Peebles - "I Can't Stand the Rain"

https://youtu.be/CTMjMeFKyPs

Judy Clay & William Bell - "Private Number"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKLya...

Marvin Gaye - "I Heard It Through The Grapevine" (Live)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ZnrZ...

Marvin Gaye - "What's Going On?"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5TmO...

Bettie Serveert - "Here She Comes Now" (Live)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBVCf...

The Clean - "Fish"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrhLd...

The Clean - "Fish" (Live)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xRu7...

I loved everything about this book apart from that it ended. I could have happily spent another couple of weeks engrossed in the author’s prose and the world he created. Highly recommended.

Second Lethem. Last Lethem.

Dafuq did I just spend six months trying to read?

Ok, I'll admit it: I bought this book for the title. Slap a comic book reference on the cover and you've got me. The fact that the author is one of "the Jonathans" (thank you Orange is the New Black for that wonderfully fitting categorization) only made me more certain that this was a good purchase. "A coming-of-age novel set in 1970s Brooklyn with a dollop of magical realism and a wealth of comic book and music cultural references?" thought I, "What could possibly go wrong?"

Everything. Everything went wrong. I regret ever setting eyes on what turned out to be one of the most laborious reads of my lifetime. It's not that I was especially opposed to the plot (I was) or characters (I hate those fuckers). It's more that the author's award-winning, supposedly-brilliant, hailed-by-all-and-sundry-as-a-work-of-art prose was nigh unreadable. Everything else aside, this might be the most unreadable book I've laid eyes on since fucking n  Neuromancern. And yet the accolades are heaped so high on this thing you can hardly find an accurate plot summary anywhere. If this is the right way to do capital-L Literature, then I'm happy being dead wrong.

So that is why:
a) it took me six months to finish. Not that I read it continuously for that whole time. In fact I kept putting it aside in favor of less offensive reads before I could force myself to read another few chapters while waiting for my next hold at the library. I finally bit the bullet and read the last hundred pages or so on a weekend camping trip when I had access to zero other forms of media or entertainment.
b) I will never buy a book for the title again. I have learned my lesson. I was a fool.
c) I have decided this is the last time I will soldier through a book I hate purely for the sake of finishing it. I don't know what I was thinking, but I do know that I am stubborn as all hell and I hate being defeated. I could've saved myself an awful lot of trouble if I'd just said "fuck it" after the first chapter.

Needlessly lengthy, unbearably myopic, artificially profound, practically unreadable, deeply unsatisfying, bafflingly pointless, startlingly boring, and an excellent soporific, The Fortress of Solitude will be remembered as my personal exercise in futile tenacity.

OH MY GOD PRAISE BE TO JESUS I FINALLY FINISHED IT BLAAARGH


Oh, and also: thoroughly okay. I could have done without the postmodern flourishes…the fantastical superhero elements of the narrative were sort of handled unwield-ily, as in, they weren’t fantastical enough to really persuade me that yesssssssss! This man can fucking FLY!

What else, what else? I don’t know. Lethem’s special irritating self-aware post-ironic, hipper-and-more-well-read-than-thou attitude can be read allllll over this book (it was, at times, almost a “fictional” extension of his Disappointment Artist essays, and I wished I had started with the novel first, so as not to roll my eyes so disdainfully and so often) – basically I hated all the childhood and race commentary rendered by adult Dylan Ebdus and grooved way more on, like: a boy, his hippie parents, his best friend, their reckless boyhoods and painful adolescences and Brooklyn. Brooklyn.

I think there’s also something to be said for the fact that it took me WEEKS to slog through the first 250 pages of this novel and I finally had to make a concerted effort to knock the remaining pages out, and now that it’s finished I kind of want a shower? I am pretty sure books are supposed to be fun.

Mi sento triste e inquieta nel non essere capace di apprezzare questo libro. Capisco che è ricco, pieno di riferimenti che la mia ignoranza mi impedisce di cogliere, ma la scrittura di Lethem è troppo leziosa e ammiccante per coinvolgermi.

Along with The Bronx is Burning which alternates the stories of The New York Yankees and the hunt for The Son of Sam it captured New York in the late 70's perfectly.

Dylan moves into black Brooklyn and does his best to survive while being picked on for being the only white kid. He befriends Mingus, the black kid who comes to rule the street and the two remains friends throughout.

i could hardly understand the language, i thought it was long-winded, and i gave up on it. life is too short for this kind of introverted crap

la Fortezza della Storia


Brooklyn, anni settanta. Mingus e Dylan sono due ragazzi, uno bianco e l’altro nero.
Questa all’apparenza è la loro storia, una storia di amicizia, di segreti e di sopravvivenza urbana.
Ma è pure la storia di un quartiere e dei suoi abitanti, e poi ancora potrebbe essere la storia di una passata gloria della musica soul, di un film mai finito, o magari è la storia di un supereroe con un anello…Quello che è certo è che il racconto si dipana lungo tutti gli anni ottanta, fino ad oggi, senza mai dare l’impressione di raccontare qualcosa di già ascoltato.
E’ vero ci sono l’erba e poi il crack, il soul e poi il rap, le scuole private e quelle pubbliche, l’università del Vermont e quella di Berkeley, ma nel contesto del romanzo esse sono motivazione e contorno alla storia di un’anima.
Dylan potrebbe essere uno di noi, con tutte le sue strategie da strada e le cattiverie casalinghe.
Il suo guardarsi indietro è quello di un’intera generazione, e le risposte che non si riesce a dare sono le stesse che potremmo cercare anche noi.
Molte volte le cose lasciate a metà ci impediscono di andare oltre, come se non potessimo dare un senso alle cose che facciamo se non chiudendo ogni porta che abbiamo aperto sul nostro cammino. Il dolore che traspare è quello di chi si accorge che crescere non vuol dire necessariamente migliorare e che le cose nuove non sempre sono meglio di quelle vecchie. E’ il dolore del non detto. Il dolore per tutte le cose della vita che sono già scritte e quasi mai da noi. Unica possibilità resta quella di sentire tutto questo, non lasciarsene travolgere, pena l’annullamento in un destino scritto da altri.

Lethem non ha mai scritto due libri rimanendo nello stesso genere letterario, e in questo caso il passaggio alla narrativa tout court gli riesce benissimo. La storia è raccontata con stile asciutto, sotto cui trapela una grande passione, le motivazioni ed i sentimenti resi con maestria.
Il tocco magico inserito con grazia nella trama non toglie nulla al realismo dell’intera storia, potrebbe essere anche parte di un sogno, una fantasia di salvezza di un giovane sperduto.
In definitiva direi che siamo di fronte ad un’opera matura, qualcosa da leggere anche per chi finora pensava a Lethem soltanto come ad uno scrittore di genere.

Lethem intrigues me.

"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, something you weren't necessarily ready to learn from the radio. So, for you at least, the song is lost. By chance it goes unheard for fifteen years, until the day when your own heartbreak unexpected find its due date. This happens the moment the song takes you by surprise, trickling from some car radio, to retie the frayed laces of your years. Beguiled, you permit yourself to hear. But the disc jockey flubs the call list, never names the singer. Or maybe it happens in a movie theater, over a montage that relies on the old song. Afterward you scan he credits, but a dozen licensing permissions to by in a blur, hopeless.
So you forget the song again. Or recall just the hook, a dumb central phrase which sours in memory. How could it ever have seemed bittersweet as your own post youth?"

This book is heavy with Othering, dark with white skin. Like many his narratives, there is no overt plot with this story; the book mirrors life well enough that the readers are invited into another's view, a different place.
Despite racial tensions, drug use and violence, "the fortress of solitude" only dissolves in one place: where Lethem turns and faces the reader, explaining quickly and shyly the explorations of D and Dose alone in the basement. Oddly, the ring needs no conjecture, nor does the cocaine or father. Lethem trusts in his abilities as a writer not to face the reader and explain what things ARE NOT, don't get me wrong, you're too steeped in the second coming of the Christian millennium to understand what boys do in basements.
At first I was mystified by my own lack of credentials, then angered by my presupposed compass of moral sexuality. In the end I decided it wasn't me Lethem was addressing in this brief break: it is more likely that he had to address himself.

A brooding read.