This one belongs on your shelf! I laughed so much throughout this adventure and I am so glad to own it as it will be one I will revisit time and again when I need a book that is guaranteed to having me laughing aloud and having the best kind of reading enjoyment.

Il mio approccio con Lethem comincia con questo romanzo ben architettato e congegnato, anche grazie ai vari personaggi che ne fanno parte. Con questa storia, non si conoscono soltanto i protagonisti, ma si entra in contatto con la città di Brooklyn e dei suoi tanti cambiamenti nel corso degli anni. Un noir tradizionale con tutti gli ingredienti e un personaggio straordinario per tantissime sfaccettature. Tra i protagonisti, si distingue Lionel Ersshog, ovvero Testa di pazzo, nome che spiega benissimo il turbinio di pensieri e disordine della sua mente. Un classico noir che ci regala un personaggio affetto dalla Sindrome di Tourette, pieno di tantissimi tic "perché il tic è la mia vita". Un personaggio impossibile da dimenticare che vi entra nel cuore e che contribuisce alla buona riuscita di questo romanzo.

My favourite novel of the year.

Lionel Essrog is a loveable orphan who has Tourette's. He and three of his fellow orphans are taken under the wing of Frank Minna, a small-time hustler with mob connections. Lionel hero worships the sharply dressed smooth talking Frank. Eventually Frank sets up a detective agency but something very bad happens to him and Lionel has to discover who did it.

This is a novel that ticks all the boxes. It's full of suspense, rife with great plot twists, fabulously written, often laugh-out-loud funny and Lionel is without question the most memorable character I've encountered all year.

Eat me (I really wanted to make this the entire review, but I thought that would be cheating).

Motherless Brooklyn, fartiness mainlined. This entire novel was a verbal tick. The whole premise is built on the assumption that the reader will find Tourette’s interesting. I’m not reading a book on clinical psychology, at least that’s not why I picked this up. I thought it was a crime novel. Some sort of medical disorder, in and of itself, isn’t my idea of a good basis for a novel.

If you’re looking to be annoyed, this novel is for you. I bet this guy teaches creative writing.

Mi permetto di segnalare una mia recensione al film che Edward Norton ha tratto da Motherless Brooklyn, che forse sta ricevendo meno attenzione di quanto meriti.
Inevitabilmente, ci sono scappate due parole anche sul romanzo di Lethem, del quale il regista-attore-sceneggiatore ha cambiato parecchie cose:

https://www.ecodelnulla.it/con-gli-oc...

«Dove il romanzo aveva un impianto parodistico, efficace nel rivelare al lettore l’impostura narrativa attraverso una serie di testuali rimandi a Raymond Chandler e a Dashiel Hammett, il film sceglie comunque una via citazionista, ma virata piuttosto all’omaggio. I nomi di Philip Marlowe e Sam Spade per Lethem erano un pretesto tutto postmoderno per giocare col genere, per spingere al massimo sul pedale dell’ironia: ironia che non manca al Motherless Brooklyn nortoniano, che mantiene intatta l’ossatura della storia, mutandone in parte il sistema dei personaggi e aggiungendo un sotto-testo politico che punta il dito sulla collusione tra malavita e classe dirigente. È il Moses Randolph interpretato da Alec Baldwin, responsabile comunale di New York per lo sviluppo urbano, a incarnare il malaffare, in una città nella quale Lionel si trova fagocitato, inghiottito in un vortice di botte, di locali malfamati e di personaggi ambigui come Paul (Willem Dafoe: inutile ribadirne la bravura), il fratello reietto di Moses.»

My words begin plucking at threads nervously, seeking purchase, a weak point, a vulnerable ear. That's when it comes, the urge to shout in the church, the nursery, the crowded movie house. It's an itch at first. Inconsequential. But the itch is soon a torrent behind a straining dam. Noah's flood. That itch is my whole life. Here it comes now. Cover your ears. Build an ark.

“Eat me!” I scream.

Or more often, “Eat me, dickweed!” Meet Lionel Essrog, undoubtedly the only fictitious gumshoe with Tourette's syndrome and the unforgettable protagonist of Jonathan Lethem's remarkable genre mash-up. Hard-boiled detective novel? Parody? Meditation on language and the working of the brain? Literary tour de force? Yup. When I read “Motherless Brooklyn” fifteen years ago, I admired but didn't love it. This time around, I admired it even more but Lethem's inventiveness, humor and linguistic virtuosity still engage the brain more than the heart, at least for this reader.

”Uncle Batman! Unclebailey Blackman! Barnamum Bat-a-potamus!”

“Ziggedy zendoodah... Pierogi Monster Zen master zealous neighbor... Zazen zaftig Zsa Zsa go-bare... Zippity go figure.”

“Flip-a-thon! Fuck-a-door! Flipweed! Fujisaki! Flitcraft! Nun-fuck-a-phone!”

It's hard not to root for Lionel. His verbal outbursts, along with touching and counting compulsions, make him “Freakshow” to his compatriots but Lethem never makes him a laughingstock even when the manifestations of his disorder are hilariously funny. Lionel and three other orphans (“all of motherless Brooklyn”) were plucked as teenagers from St. Vincent's Home for Boys by small-time gangster Frank Minna to work for his car service/detective agency. When these “Minna Men” are unable to prevent Frank's murder, Lionel doggedly sets out to avenge the loss of the only father figure he has ever known and gets tangled up with a Zen center, for-real Brooklyn mobsters, a Polish giant, a powerful Japanese corporation and oh yes, a girl or two. The noirish plot gets pretty convoluted and silly but don't they all? Lethem isn't going for a classic of the genre; he's turning the genre inside-out. And while he's at it, he's putting a corner of my hometown on the literary map. That's worth a star from this Brooklyn chauvinist. But even after two readings and despite one of my favorite titles ever, I haven't been able to register even a flutter of love for “Motherless Brooklyn.”

3.5

"Motherless Brooklyn" was a fantastic homage to the classic NYC noir detective novel, complete with a dingy office, shady characters, and a femme fatale. The plot itself wasn't necessarily unique, but the main character and its contemporary setting were, bringing new life to the genre.

I'm glad I listened to this as an audiobook rather than read the print version. The narrator was amazing with the different characters' voices and the main character's verbal tics. The way the narrator seamlessly added the tics in conversations added a raw urgency to the story that I don't think would have come across as well in print.

“Prince's music calmed me as much as masturbation or a cheeseburger.”
Lionel Essrog, protagonist in Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn




Lethem's 1999 literary detective novel set in Brooklyn was a fun read, much more layered and satisfying than the hard-boiled detective novels. The protagonist Lionel Essrog grew up an orphan and was nicknamed "The Human Freakshow" due to his Tourette syndrome. In lesser hands, these verbal tics could have turned gimmicky, but here Lethem fully develops Essrog and makes the reader care about him.

Essrog is working for Frank Minna, who has some mob connections and owns a "seedy," "makeshift" detective agency (a front for two-bit organized crime), when Minna is murdered by stabbing. Essrog's suspenseful journey investigating and solving the crime is always intelligent and often risible.

Lionel Essrog is a character for all time. In a world where many would be disgusted or annoyed by his traits (a sufferer of tourette's syndrome) he is a man who is dog loyal, and a man content to be who he is. I found his voice to be a refreshing burst of honesty in a literary world rife with soulless characters.
Jonathan Lethem has written a novel that has two great characters. The tourettic protagonist Lionel Essrog, and the low budget mobster Frank Minna. Although Minna departs the novel by the end of the first chapter his character and influence reverberate up to the very last page. Lionel and his mentor / father figure are not ideals or even profoundly likable people, but their little eccentricities and behaviors allow the reader to identify with them despite the fact that most of us will have little to nothing in common with either of them. As in real life we will see the humanity come through the mask and then of course, we will see bits of ourselves.
Some reviewers have hailed this as a detective story. The mystery plot is really only meant to be used as a vehicle for the much more interesting character study. Pick it up to be blown away by good writing and a couple of great characters. Not to read a literary car chase.
Mr. Lethem refuses to tie up this tale with a pretty bow, and the ending is pleasant, but not movie ending pleasant. Rather, the type of pleasant ending that decent people can create for themselves in this world when they are content with who they are.

Way too gimmicky! About Motherless Brooklyn Newsday calls Jonathan Lethem "one of the most original voices among younger American novelists;" while Entertainment Weekly describes him as "one of our most inventive, stylish and sensous writers." I strongly disagree. I think these organiztions have confused originality with gimmickry.

Goodreads interviewed Jonathan Lethem in their November newsletter. I'd never heard of him. I checked out a couple of his books at the library, one for me, one for my wife, with the idea that we'd trade. That trade never happened; neither of us liked what we read. I even picked the one whose dustcover summary seemed most interesting. New York detective agency, members killed, Brooklyn underworld, hitmen, mob funding, Japanese profiteers.

Lethem attempts something in Motherless Brooklyn that seems very original. His main character has Tourette's syndrome, with a comorbidity of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD). His Tourette's causes him to choke, rhyme, stutter, invent, and swear through words, while his OCD causes some minor ritualistic touching and balancing of his environment. It's through this character's perspective that we quickly cruise through 311 pages.

After a few chapters the novelty of storytelling through Tourette's syndrome become overworked. The vocal tics aren't heavy-handed and don't obstruct the flow, but it becomes routine and predictable. Lethem doesn't experiment with Tourette's. Instead, it's the same rhyming and kluging together of 'hot' words the character, Lionel, can't get out of his head. We learn (a little) what it's like to have Tourette's, and perhaps it was Lethem's intent to hammer the same vocal repititions to prove the insidiousness of Tourettes, but in the end, Lionel is a very flat, predictable, and unsympathetic character.

Here's a list where I think gimmickry replaces originality. Remember, any 2 or 3 or 4 of these options together, though highly stereotyped already in the detective genre, could make a run at a good novel. But here, in Motherless Brooklyn, all the stereotypes are piled together in clichéd suffocation. It's as if Lethem handled too many ingredients, causing a gallimaufry of overused tastes, smells, and sights.

- The 'hook' is a double murder, both agents in a small detective agency
- Immediate confusion and suspicion among the agents
- Dead man's wife leaves town in a hurry
- All agents grew up together in an inner-city orphanage, hence the title 'motherless'
- As kids, they start working for the mob
- The oldest orphan marries a beautiful woman, becomes leader, acts as father figure
- Maffia represented by 2 stereotyped old Italian gangsters, always meeting in the same safehouse
- There's a Russian hitman, physically enormous, dumb, and has no speaking parts
- A zen budhist school seems to be a front to something illegal
- The detective agency seems to be a front to something illegal
- Lead character falls in love with a zen student
- Zen student inbetween boyfriends, but has experience dating Tourette's
- Most action takes place at night
- Tough black cop from Harlem
- Surveillence, from a car, from foot
- Tie to crooked Japanese businessmen
- Throughout there's a description of New York City's tough underbelly
- Interstate car chase
- In hostility bullets fired
- Escape
- Beautiful woman suddenly reappears
- Car crash
- Gunpoint
- Unsuspected appearance of long lost brother
- Clues build until the end
- Climax is what you expected, but with an obligatory minor twist

Apart from the formula above, I didn't really think the writing was all that inspired; there was not enough background to empathize with any of the characters; the connections in the plot weren't put together as if there was an overarching vision--they were frayed as if Lethem just began writing one day and suddenly ended up with a book that should have been combed by a better set of publishers; and the climax seemed rushed and tenuous. USA Today called this book 'hugely ambitious'. I would call it hugely overrated.

No new words from this book.

Frank Minna is a neighbourhood owner of a seedy detective agency, or he was until he was found stabbed to death. Lionel, along with Tony, Danny and Gilbert worked for Frank and were often collectively known as Minna Men. The group grow up together in St. Vincent’s Home for Boys and owe a lot to this small time mobster turned private eye. Lionel is determined to find out what happened by Frank.

This is my first Jonathan Lethem novel and I have been keen to read him for a long time. What I heard about Lethem is his ability to combine genre fiction and explore themes in an interesting way. Motherless Brooklyn does just this; under the vial of a hard-boiled detective novel, this also is a coming of age story as well as exploring life with Tourette’s syndrome. Lionel Essrog has lived with Tourette’s for his entire life, manifesting in physical and vocal tics. He is often referred to as Brooklyn’s human freakshow, which only begins to cover the reactions people to have Lionel’s disorder.

I have to admit I knew very little about Tourette’s syndrome going into this novel, I knew the effects but I did not fully grasp what was going through mind of someone living with the disorder. One of the things I love most about reading fiction is learning about the lives of people living in different cultures or living a different life than my own. Motherless Brooklyn allowed me to explore life living with Tourette, it was an eye opening novel.

On the surface Motherless Brooklyn is a pretty simple hard-boiled detective novel, but exploring growing up as an orphan in an all-boys home with Tourette’s makes this novel great. Jonathan Lethem is a brilliant writer; he takes a typical genre plot and explores just how complex the story can be. I believe The Fortress of Solitude does this with comic books (similar to The Adventures of Kavalier & Clay), Gun, With Occasional Music with science fiction and Chronic City with drug culture. I have not read these books, so I might be wrong; either way I am keen to check them out.

I am so glad to have finally picked up a Jonathan Lethem book and Motherless Brooklyn was the perfect starting point. I wanted to stay in this world for as long as possible, and I ended up slowing down on my reading. I have since discovered to joys of reading slowly with The Valley of the Dolls, but Motherless Brooklyn may have been my starting point. I have no idea which Lethem book to read next, I might have to try to get to all of them. Motherless Brooklyn was a great book and I loved that it was set in a hard-boiled setting. The combination between the genre style and understanding Tourette’s worked really well for this novel; highly recommend Motherless Brooklyn to everyone.

This review originally appeared on my blog; http://www.knowledgelost.org/book-rev...