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A Novel
by Paul Beatty
Book Reviewed by:The breakout novel from a literary virtuoso about a disaffected Los Angeles DJ who travels to post-Wall Berlin in search of his transatlantic doppelganger.
Hailed by the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times as one of the best writers of his generation, Paul Beatty turns his incisive eye to man’s search for meaning and identity in an increasingly chaotic world. After creating the perfect beat, DJ Darky goes in search of Charles Stone, a little-known avant-garde jazzman, to play over his sonic masterpiece. His quest brings him to a recently unified Berlin, where he stumbles through the city’s dreamy streets ruminating about race, sex, love, Teutonic gods, the prevent defense, and Wynton Marsalis in search of his artistic—and spiritual—other. Ferocious, bombastic, and laugh-out-loud funny, Slumberland is vintage Paul Beatty and belongs on the shelf next to Jonathan Lethem, Colson Whitehead, and Junot Diaz.
PART 1
THE BEARD SCRATCHERS
CHAPTER 1
You would think they’d be used to me by now. I mean, don’t they know that after fourteen hundred years the charade of blackness is over? That we blacks, the once eternally hip, the people who were as right now as Greenwich Mean Time, are, as of today, as yesterday as stone tools, the velocipede, and the paper straw all rolled into one? The Negro is now officially human. Everyone, even the British, says so. It doesn’t matter whether anyone truly believes it; we are as mediocre and mundane as the rest of the species. The restless souls of our dead are now free to be who they really are underneath that modern primitive patina. Josephine Baker can take the bone out of her nose, her knock-kneed skeleton back to its original allotment of 206. The lovelorn ghost of Langston Hughes can set down his Montblanc fountain pen (a gift) and open his mouth wide. Not to recite his rhyming populist verse, but to lick and suck some ...
If you prefer fleshed-out, psychologically rich characters and a gratifying plot, this is not the book for you. Slumberland is, rather, a book of ideas in fictional form. It is intensely thought-provoking and never has time to be dull as it races through itself. It makes you work to wrap your mind around racial politics in post-unification Berlin and the relationship between race and aesthetic form. And it ends on a note that even DJ Darky, with his phonographic memory, could not have anticipated...continued
Full Review
(810 words)
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(Reviewed by Amy Reading).
Unless you are exactly as hip as Paul Beatty, Slumberland is rife with
Googlable moments, as DJ Darky riffs about jazz and hip-hop and funk. Here are
some of the references that anchor the plot.
Sixteen hours into a marathon rave, DJ Darky reaches into his crate and pulls
out a record that a fellow DJ fears will stir a riot among a bunch of white frat
boys expecting industrial music rather than South Bronx hip-hop. The song that
he plays is Stezo's "It's My Turn," which was all over the radio in the summer
of 1989. It seems utterly quaint and tame in retrospect: "Extra extra, read all
about it / It's me Stezo that has been doubted / I came to make you move and
groove and get down / There's no way that the crowd can sit ...
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If you liked Slumberland, try these:
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
by Junot Diaz
Published 2008
Things have never been easy for Oscar, a sweet but disastrously overweight, lovesick Dominican ghetto nerd. Oscar dreams of becoming the Dominican J. R. R. Tolkien and, most of all, of finding love. But he may never get what he wants, thanks to the Fukœ - the curse that has haunted Oscar's family for generations.
by Jonathan Lethem
Published 2004
'A vibrant, sometimes heartbreaking ballad of Brooklyn...prose as supple as silk and as bright, explosive and illuminating as fireworks.'
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The secret of freedom lies in educating people, whereas the secret of tyranny is in keeping them ignorant
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Junot Diaz
Furiously written…another bravura performance from the searingly talented Paul Beatty. A no-holds-barred comedic romp that crushes through the Fulda Gap of Black/White, East/West relationships like an M1 tank.
