Le cicatrici dell'infanzia

Capolavoro di Lethem, questo romanzo appartiene di diritto tra i migliori esempi di Bildungsroman: le vicende del protagonista, cresciuto in un selvaggio quartiere di Brooklyn, affascinano e inquietano, capaci come sono di raccontare i problemi razziali e sociali da una prospettiva nuova. La cosa migliore è sicuramente l'anello che Dylan possiede e che dona poteri speciali, quali quelli di un supereroe Marvel, perché restiamo incerti fino all'ultima pagina se si tratta di una immaginazione infantile o di una vera invasione del fantastico in una realtà dura e prosaica.

This was a bit of a slog, but I liked it well enough by the end. It was a wide-ranging story of the main character's childhood and early (or middle aged) life, and I thought it was a bit too meandering. But I liked the sci fi element (the ring)--I wasn't sure if it was real for most of the book, and instead wondered if it was a sort of fanciful flourish. There were some passages about losing touch with previous phases of one's life, and those parts resonated with me a lot. I've had some phases in my life, and I'm not in touch with a lot of people who were (and still are) important to me. So yeah, I liked those parts a lot. I also like that it revolved around music. It was a rare book that talked about music in a way that didn't annoy me.

"L'estate bruciava solo per pochi pomeriggi, alla fine. Volare era un'estate nell'estate"

Gentrification [sarà tremendo questo termine?] è il fenomeno per cui si ottiene la riqualificazione di un area urbana depressa attraverso l'innesto di abitazioni e locali destinati all'uso di persone appartenenti ad una classe sociale upper rispetto quella autoctona.
Così riqualifichi. Certo. Ma le persone che prima abitavano in quei luoghi? Dove traslocano? In carcere?
Il problema si sposta, non si risolve. Ma sicuramente l'idea, nata con fini più nobili, si perde nell'istanza, nella concretizzazione. Che probabimente si gioca solo su interessi economici.
Dylan è un ragazzino, che per seguire l'idea della madre Rachel, viene innestato in un quartiere della Brooklyn degli anni '70. Quartiere abitato da neri. Ma l'idea perseguita da Rachel è quella della convivenza e integrazione, non quello della estromissione. Dylan, la goccia bianca, con desiderio acceso dalla madre, di "macchiarsi di negritudine".
Madre che peraltro, forse cogliendo l'utopia del suo sogno, lascia. Figli, marito e luogo di realizzazione: la Brooklyn di Gowanus.

"Il centro che collassava era ciò da cui il Granchio in fuga era scappato. Era lo stesso spazio che i comunisti e i gay e i pittori di celluloide credevano di aver trovato a Gowanus, finendo per fare da inconsapevoli apripista alle agenzie immobiliari, uno strumento di demolizione razziale. La gentrification era la cicatrice lasciata da un sogno, dato che l’Utopia era uno spettacolo che chiudeva sempre la sera della prima."

Sognando di giocare e successivamente amare ragazzine biondissime, Dylan riesce a sopravvivere ad infanzia ed adolescenza grazie all'amicizia di Mingus[Tag -Dose]. E al sogno con lui condiviso di poter vivere in un modo ripulito e migliore. In cui i due, come supereroi, avrebbero spazzato via soprusi e abusi. E ingiustizie.
Ma. I supereroi esistono solo nei fumetti. E purtroppo sopravvive in modo decente, chi riesce ad ad andarsene da dove crack et similia distruggono fisicamente e mentalmente le persone che ne divengono schiavi.

La vita: pochi momenti resi epici dal rinnovarne ed esasperarne il ricordo. E se non rimane la possibilità di alzare gli occhi al cielo, e sognare o semplicemente sperare...
"Ma le storie che raccontavi a te stesso – che fingevi di ricordare come se fossero accadute tutti i pomeriggi di un’estate infinita – erano in realtà solo una manciata di giorni distorti in forma di leggenda ... Quante volte sarà stato aperto, quell’idrante? Quante volte avrai diretto il suo fiotto dell’idrante contro un’auto di passaggio? Due volte, al massimo? L’estate bruciava solo per pochi pomeriggi, alla fine. Quanto a volare, Dose non lo aveva neanche più guardato, il cielo. Volare era un’estate nell’estate, un capriccio."

La meta: "uno spazio intermedio aperto e chiuso come un’occhiata" in cui essere e realizzare se stessi. Che sia le quattro mura di uno studio in cui creare un film perennemente incompiuto, o un luogo in cui le persone di diverse provenienze possono vivere integrate.

Bello, eh. Ma che fatica. Terribilmente denso. Ad un certo punto ho deciso di adottare la lettura con machete. Troppo ignorante io su alcuni temi per riuscire a seguire a fondo. Ho deciso di godermi il viaggio con quello che arrivava.
Forse è improprio il paragone, ma visto che questo romanzo me l'ha richiamato per contenuti affini, ho preferito "Il tempo di una canzone" di Powers. Tutta un'altra musica. Letterale e figurato.

This book is an epic and at times I wasn't sure where the plot was going (still might not) but I enjoyed this story. The characters are memorable, have decent dialogue and the descriptive writing of their situations they are in are beautifully well written. The story is about a boy named Dylan that grows up in Brooklyn in an area that is predominately Black. Dylan has a hard time growing up until he meets his best friend, Mingus, who is also Black. The book focuses on their friendship over mostly one decade (the 1970s) and how they adapt to racism, adolescence, and growing up through games of stoopball, reading comics, listening to music, drugs and tagging/graffiti. There is a lot of great mini-stories, but for the first half you kind of find yourself wondering, "Where is this all going?" There is a side plot with a magical ring that makes the reader even more confused (is it symbolism, real, etc) and I thought the story could have done without. That being said the story kind of came together at the end. It's an epic, so don't give up early on reading it if possible. Looking forward to reading more by the author Jonathan Lethem.

Jonathan Lethem is the writer I love to hate. hmm. maybe that's a bit strong. I suppose I just have some residual ill feeling because I was forced to read Motherless Brooklyn for an English seminar. today, years later, I guess Motherless Brooklyn was a 3 and Girl in Landscape was a 4--although I have the two switched round in that respect. kinda just vaguely remember mildly not despising Landscape. but in any case, I can't see the author as getting more than two 3's and one 4 under any circumstances... maybe this is all splitting hairs?

the central question of rating this book is whether it's social value (deconstructing and subverting racial relations in Brooklyn, 1970s) outweights long stretches of subpar prose. (admittedly there are some classic moments)... for a lot of people, this book politics vs. book quality question apparently tilts yes. 3.8 off thousands of ratings. but I don't know if I can forgive. if a book takes 4 cups of caffeine merely to work through another 50 pages, I pull off the fourth star.

3/5. value to new yorkers. value to race relation thinkers. politically correct. I can justify not lowering the 4th star on Ian Fleming's Live and Let Die. another new york novel. to that degree related to Egan; riff off manhattan books everywhere (however brooklyn this setting)

similar-- franzen, filipacchi, egan,

Ognuno è ignorante a modo proprio
Lethem mi ha colpito in pieno viso, come se mi avesse lanciato una spaldeen e io non fossi stata pronta a riceverla. Sono ammutolita, direi. Raramente mi sono sentita così ignorante leggendo un libro, al punto da chiedermi frequentemente "ma io dov'ero?" Ad esempio, non sapevo che la Fortezza della Solitudine fosse il rifugio segreto di Superman, tanto per cominciare dal titolo... Il mio orecchio distratto, e tanto meno l'occhio, non è stato mai colpito dal fatto che la Marvel fosse la casa editrice storica dell'Uomo Ragno, di X-Men, dei Fantastici Quattro, di Hulk tanto per citarne qualcuno, ad esempio... D'altronde non li ho neanche mai letti, io mi limitavo a Topolino, Tarzan e Alan Ford... Anche la succitata spaldeen non faceva parte del mio immaginario collettivo, ad esempio... Per non parlare poi di quella fantastica progressione musicale dagli anni '70 ai '90... mai consultato YouTube così frequentemente leggendo un libro... e così ancora potrei elencarne. Lethem è stato capace, Yo, motherfucker, di portarmi là, a Brooklyn, sulle scalinate d'ingresso alle abitazioni, luogo di ritrovo di quei pre-adolescenti già uomini e donne, neri, con le loro prevaricazioni ma anche i loro passatempi, e poi con le droghe, quelle forti, con la scuola che non insegnava niente come fosse rassegnata al fatto che nulla poteva essere cambiato. E i loro odi e le loro amicizie, e la ghettizzazione del bianco in un ghetto di neri. Dylan - D-man, è vittima, addirittura pioniere della gentrification, di quella riqualificazione immaginata dalla madre hippie la quale, però, da hippie non è riuscita a sobbarcarsi delle responsabilità. E D-man rimane nelle mani del padre, artista serio ma - essendo artista - svagato che lo accompagna molto marginalmente nella sua crescita. E sono anni di paure, di sottomissioni, di furti di un dollaro subiti quotidianamente, di sogni di riscatto, di colpi di spaldeen ben piazzati o ben ricevuti, di anni vissuti - si dice più in là - sotto la protezione di quartiere di Mingus. Poi c'è l'abbandono, poi il ritorno, poi la vendetta - o forse è solo sogno - poi finalmente indagini, anche se fortuite, sulla madre, assenza dominante in tutta la vicenda. Bellissimo, bellissimo quadro di una infanzia, che va oltre la questione se l'infanzia sia stata più o meno bella.

Lethem is a really great writer. His prose is observant and nuanced. He creates characters and settings so realized, I felt I could touch them and see them while I was reading. The book is mostly heartbreaking and I was left just wanting to take everyone in this story under my wing in an attempt to keep them all safe. In fact, I sort of want to give Lethem a hug.

As a rule, I veer far from anything with “coming-of-age” smells, so falling into this near 600-page monster in which Lethem autofictionalises his childhood in painstaking detail was something of an act of readerly carelessness, where this reader almost howled at the umpteenth use of ‘spaldeen’ and ‘ailanthus’, two words that needed executing very early on in the novel. Having waded through the 300-page shrine at the temple of Onanostalgia, God of Masturbatory Reminiscence, the second half of the novel is a far more stimulating foray into Lethemian prose, limning the very interesting themes of race and class that wibble around in the first half, making the audaciously bold part where Lethem elevates his boring childhood into L-I-T-E-R-A-T-U-R-E almost worth the week-long commitment. Almost.

Anyone from a mile around who was in their right mind was at the Duffield tonight. And if you delivered free Ray Charles' tickets to the mailboxes this morning it wouldn't be any different. Who wouldn't wanna be here jeering through Bingo Long in the dark, anticipation just making things better, waiting for Carwash. All that Norman Whitfield, Rose Royce Pizzazz on the soundtrack.
Only proved the boy has sense.

I half expected to find that Jonathan Lethem is one of those authors that readers either love or hate, but was surprised by how mad the people who hate him are. Personally, I fall into the former camp - those who love Mr. Lethem's work. Let me explain why.

Jonathan Lethem creates the most absurd scenarios possible and then crafts ingenious narratives around them. To describe a book like Fortress of Solitude to someone not already familiar with Mr. Lethem's work requires a lot of qualification. To do so with some of his other stories, his short stories in particular, can be almost embarrassing... There's this white kid and black kid and they come across a homeless man with a magic ring. They get the ring and use it to blaze graffiti on tall buildings in an urban turf rite. Bootsy Collins stops by to chat on occasion... It sounds hideously stupid.

But it's not. I imagine Mr. Lethem's process is this: 1. Come up with something absolutely bonkers, like magic rings (Fortress of Solitude, this book) or a former child star colluding with a mutant crustacean to take over the world (a different Lethem story, "Interview with the Crab") or exo-suits that give normal people the physical attributes of great NBA players of yesteryear ("Vanilla Dunk"). 2. Make it interesting. I imagine guiding characters like Dylan Ebdus, Mingus Rude, and Aaron X. Doily through a meaningful narrative is a tremendous challenge. I imagine a man who's up to such a challenge derives a great deal of satisfaction from it.

It's like being the world's greatest dungeon master: instant pariah status. What I find strange, though, is that Jonathan Lethem is essentially a contemporary of Neil Gaiman. And while folks love Mr. Gaiman because of his command of mythology, fascination with nightmare states, and melodious English accent, they seem to hate Jonathan Lethem. We live in a time where otherwise healthy adults devour young adult fiction. You'd think Jonathan Lethem's work would be right up the mainstream's alley. Only it would be better, because it's not for kids.

I know better than to enter a new book by an author I’ve enjoyed before. But … Motherless Brooklyn was so good, against my better judgment, I wanted it again. This book is not Motherless Brooklyn. There are whole sections I haven’t even figured out the point of yet. And probably the tons of emphasis on music I am not particularly familiar with deadened the book for me somewhat. But still, there is a lot here.
The hardest part for me, I think, was that I was fascinated with Dylan as a child: how he experienced the world and how the world experienced him. The adult Dylan left me cold. I just didn’t like him. And I don’t think it was the too much drinking and drug use (although that turns me off pretty quickly). I think with all the potential he had as a child appeared to be totally wasted on the adult. So sad. Maybe I would like the person that came out of all this reflection and visiting of the past the adult Dylan did. But that’s where the book ended, so I don’t know….

Quotes that caught my eye

…exposed the inadequacy of the Etch A Sketch and the Spirograph again, the stiffness of the knobs, the recalcitrance of the silvery ingredient behind the Etch A Sketch’s smeared window, the untrustworthiness of the Spirograph’s pins, the way they invariably bent at perihelion when the pressure of the drawing pen grew too much, so the every deliciously scientific orbit blooped and best at the crucial moment into a ragged absurdity, a head with a nose, a pickle with a wart. If the etch A Sketch and the Spirograph had really worked they would probably be machines, not toys, they would be part of the way the adult universe operated, and be mounted onto the instrument panel of cars or worn on the bests of policemen. Dylan understood and accepted this. These things were broken because they were toys, and vice versa. The required is pity and patience, like retarded children who’d been entrusted to his care. (9-10)

Time, he’d been told, would speed up. Days would fly. They didn’t fly there, on the floor of his father’s studio, but they would. They’d fly, the film would speed up and run together so fast it would appear to move, summer would end, he’d be in school, he was growing up so fast, that was the consensus he alone couldn’t consent to, mired a he felt himself to be, utterly drowning in time there on the studio floor, gazing into Brueghel, searching for the other children among the dogs under the banquet table at the feet of the millers and their wives. (11)

Today Rachel was talking and Dylan listening, listening. She sprayed language as the hydrant opened by the Puerto Rican kids around the corner on Nevins on the hottest days that year sprayed water, unstoppered, gushing. You might scrape the bottom of a tin can until it was open at both ends, then use the can to direct the water momentarily through the window of a passing car, but the force of the spray would win in the end. When Dylan had tried it the pillar of water captured the can from his hands and sent it spinning across the street to clatter under a parked car. His mother’s flow he wouldn’t dare try to direct. (59)

In windows of time, returning from different schools to the same block, two brownstones, two fathers, Abraham Ebdus and Barrett Rude Junior each wrinkling back foil edges of RV dinners to discover peas and carrots that had invaded the mashed potatoes and Salisbury steak, setting them on the table in dour silence. (89)

If Dylan choked or whined they were perplexed and slightly disappointed at the white boy’s too-ready hysteria. Dylan didn’t quite get it, hadn’t learned his role. On those occasions they’d pick up his books or hat and press them on him, tuck him back together. A ghost of fondness lived in a headlock’s shadow. Yoker and yoke had forged a funny compact. (95-96)

We yoke you for thinking that we might: in your eyes we see that you come pre-yoked.
Your fear makes it our duty to prove you right. (97)

Shrugging around in your own language, falsely casual, you discovered what you already knew. The stories embedded in the words like puns, waiting. (108)

Dylan didn’t look up as Abraham entered. The kid read books like he was engaged in some sort of scavenger procedure, scowling in concentration, turning pages at improbably speed while he flayed away the inessential flesh of prose and inspected the skeleton of story, the bare facts or crucial nonsense. Dylan Ebdus didn’t read, he filleted. (111)

His film’s plot had lately turned to the banishment or purgation, by degrees, of color. By infinitesimal movements, small blottings and eclipses, black and gray were coming to dominate the zone above the horizon line at the center of the frame, and white and gray the zone below. What colors remained were muted, fading rapidly as though disheartened by the trend, their obvious death sentence they’d seen the writing on the wall. First they came for the crimsons and I didn’t speak up, then they came for the ochres— (112)

His monologues were all brow-furrowed and lip-pursed, craven machinations cut with philosophical asides and nice versa. His jabber had a glottal, changed quality, seemingly designed to guide you past the territory where you might wish to tell him to shut up already or even to strike him, into a realm of baffled wonderment as you considered the white noise of a nerd’s id in full song. (143)

Sarcasm as something you practiced like karate. Later concealing your mute fury when nobody fed you the opening lines. (144)

Arthur Lomb using both hands to knead sensation back into his folded-under leg, brain whirring behind consternated gerbil eyes as he dialed up another digression. (145)

Here was Dylan’s burden, his cross: the accumulated knowledge of Arthur Lomb’s smug policies on every possible question. The cross was Dylan’s to bear, he knew, because his own brain boiled with pedantry, with too-eager trivia ready to burst loose at any moment. So in enduring Arthur Lomb Dylan had been punished in advance for the possibilities of being a bore. (146)

…yanking bawling kids’ arms like yo-yo strings. (155)

Abraham was a collection of sound bound in human form by gloom. (162)

A Saturday afternoon in early April, first blush of heat in the air, the rutting birds and sun-stoned children in the dizzying, near-vertical park screaming in unison, bombarding the hospital windows with a shrill hail of sound. The flung-open windows couldn’t decant the detox work’s deep linoleum-urine rot, an air of body poisons overlaid with disinfectant and sharp wafting farts from the recently destarved. No fear a bird would fly into the hospital. They’d be knocked back by a wall of odor as though butting a glass pane. (168)

Drowsiness dulled rage and good taste, unnecessary functions. (265)

Dylan emptied his pockets, his despair absolute, the dollars negligible for passage out of here.
One thing transfer of funds always did accomplish was a turning of the page. (272)

Dylan feels despair rising. Fishnet tights do not a cultural vocabulary make. To the ironized, reference-peppered palaver which comprises Dylan’s only easy mode of talk former prep-school girls have frequently proved deaf as cats. (302)

The music in this collection tells a tale—of beauty, inspiration, and pain—in voices out of the ghetto and the suburb, the church and the schoolyard, voices of celebration and mourning, sometimes voices of pensiveness and heartache so profound they feel unsustainable in the medium of pop. The voices may propel you to warble along, or to dance, they may inspire you to suction or insurrection or introspection or merely to watching a little less television. (350)

I had as much use of his romance of faux poverty and mock illiteracy as he did for mine of faux privilege and mock sophistication. (459)

That was far enough to suit my mood, a distance form which Vermont receded into the gnarled mass of old states no one on the bright coast could ever be bothered to tell apart. (463)

Invisibility was what every superhero really had in common. After all, who’d ever seen one? (470)

…the block was like a set for an idealized movie that fudged poverty into sepia quaintness. (494)

… and the heap of Board of Ed typewriter carcasses, keys gnarled in a knot at the platen, as if trying to blurt some unsayable word. (527)

Eno sang I can’t see the lines I used to think I could read between— (580)

I love Lethem. I didn't love this as much as everyone said I would but it was still wonderful.