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Ladataan... Man Gone Down: A Novel (alkuperäinen julkaisuvuosi 2007; vuoden 2007 painos)Tekijä: Michael Thomas (Tekijä)
TeostiedotMan Gone Down (tekijä: Michael Thomas) (2007)
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Kirjaudu LibraryThingiin nähdäksesi, pidätkö tästä kirjasta vai et. Ei tämänhetkisiä Keskustelu-viestiketjuja tästä kirjasta. I'm surprised I finished this book because I spent the first half of it wondering why I was bothering reading it. I think mostly I don't really like to read books that are mainly just inner dialogue. Especially when the narrator is super annoying. Also, it is hard to differentiate between the present and past with the constant time jumping... maybe it would help if I would remember character names. I'm had some difficultly trying to review this. In the early going, over about 100 pages or so, this book was an out and out wow. The narrators is broke, jobless, homeless but living in a wealthy friends house in Brooklyn, and alone having just watched his kids and wife leave town to stay with his mother-in-law. He begins to break down; as he does so he goes into trances pondering the consequences of being black, of a troubled childhood, of his white wife and mixed children, all of which are fascinating. But then the narrator starts to talk about his day and doesn't stop; it keeps on going and going. I had to change how I read it, actually I had to figure out how to read it. I had the impression the book became something like a musical composition with long wandering passages that come to peaks and pauses when there is a dramatic twist or the scene changes. I'm not sure if that's really accurate, but that's how I read it, trying to find a flow, and following the narrator as he hovers on the brink of collapse. It's interesting and it works in its own way. On the inspiration of the first 100 pages or so, I was able to carry on through and enjoy it. 2009 http://www.librarything.com/topic/68641#1376494
In its award citation, the five-member Impac Dublin jury called Mr. Thomas “a writer of enthralling voice and startling insight.” It described “Man Gone Down” as a “drama of individual survival set against the myth of an integrated and racially normalized America” and said it “shows, in unsentimental clarity, the way the future can close mercilessly on those marginalized by race and social circumstance.” The scope of Thomas’s project is prodigious, though, and the end result is an impressive success. He has an exceptional eye for detail, and the poetry of his descriptive digressions — “the heaving surface of the water is what the night sky should be — moving and wild, wavering reflections of buildings on both sides, dark and bright, like thin, shimmering clouds” — provides some respite from the knowledge that the city he loves can truly crush a man’s spirit. A Boston-bred African-American writer who lives in Brooklyn with his wife and their three children, Thomas seems to have fully embraced the “write what you know” ethos. And what he knows is how the odds are stacked in America. He knows the unlikelihood of successful black fatherhood. He knows that things are set up to keep the Other poor and the poor in their place. More than anything else, he knows how little but also — fortunately — how much it can take to bring a man down.
On the eve of this thirty-fifth birthday, the unnamed black narrator of Man Gone Down finds himself broke, estranged from his white wife and three children, and living in the bedroom of a friend's six-year-old child. He has four days to come up with the money to keep his kids in school and make a down payment on an apartment for them to live in. As we slip between his childhood in inner city Boston and present-day New York City, we discover a life marked by abuse, abandonment, raging alcoholism, and the best and worst intentions of a supposedly integrated America. This is a story of the American Dream gone awry, about what it's like to feel preprogrammed to fail in life and the urge to escape that sentence. Kirjastojen kuvailuja ei löytynyt. |
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Google Books — Ladataan... LajityypitMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.6Literature English (North America) American fiction 21st CenturyKongressin kirjaston luokitusArvio (tähdet)Keskiarvo:
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Ye gods I hated this. The narrative was full of flashes of beautiful writing in a murky stream of consciousness, and that style is just not my cuppa. The narrator’s voice also seemed annoyingly whiny considering this guy was able to go to college "in Boston." Some in my book club accused the narrator of over-emphasizing the role race played in his problems. I won’t say that, because it’s hard to over-emphasize the role that race and class play in the kind of “luck” you have in life. In some ways I have faced the same issues as our narrator. But if I wrote the book it would not be stream of freaking consciousness. ( )