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Slumberland: A Novel
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Product Description
Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #61781 in Books
- Published on: 2008-06-10
- Released on: 2008-06-10
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Binding: Hardcover
- 256 pages
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
The narrator of Beatty's late '80s picaresque, Ferguson W. Sowell—aka DJ Darky—is so attuned to sound that he claims to have a phonographic memory. Ferguson, who does porno film scores for the money in L.A., has a cognoscenti's delight in jazz, and he's close to obsessed with Charles Stone, aka the Schwa, a musician who apparently disappeared into East Germany in the '60s. Ferguson receives an already-scored tape whose soundtrack is so rich and strange and transformative that it must be by Schwa. Ferguson is soon on his way to Slumberland, a bar in West Berlin to which he sources the tape. He arrives just in time to experience the sexual allure black men exercise on Cold War Berliners, and stays long enough to watch the city's culture fall apart after the fall of the Wall. With its acerbic running commentary on race, sex and Cold War culture, the latest from Beatty, author of Tuff and editor of The Anthology of African American Humor, contains flashes of absurdist brilliance in the tradition of William Burroughs and Ishmael Reed. But the plot seems little more than an excuse to set up a number of comic routines, denying the story a driving, unifying plot. (July)
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From Booklist
Ferguson Sowell, aka DJ Darky, has created what his fellow L.A. turntablists proclaim is the perfect beat, a synthesis of life itself. All that remains is for the beat to be ratified by finding legendary avant-garde jazzman Charles Stone and convincing him to solo over the beat. Stone, however, is as mysterious as he is legendary, and no one knows if he’s even alive. Then a clue, in the form of a porn tape, arrives mysteriously, and DJ Darky travels to Berlin in the months before the Wall comes down to find Stone. Beatty’s freestyle prose is a writerly equivalent of John Coltrane’s reinvention of My Favorite Things—by turns lyrical and edgy, playful, passionate, deeply hip, and endlessly inventive. As he searches the city for Stone, DJ Darky ruminates on race, German culture, music, sex, the destruction of the Wall, life in L.A., and dozens of other subjects; some of his thoughts are harsh (e.g., his withering critique of Wynton Marsalis), but they all are memorable. --Thomas Gaughan
Review
“With laugh-out-loud parodies of everything from the SAT's cultural bias to neo-Nazi musical tastes, Slumberland shows that Beatty can still crank out the acerbic riffs...as inimitable as ever. Beatty's outrageous novel aims to provoke, and it succeeds.” —Time Out New York
“With its dictionary delight mixed with cheerfully raunchy, tossed-off outrageousness, Slumberland is like a trip-hop Myra Breckinridge. (If Myra were plying her libidinous philosophy in contemporary America, it's easy to imagine her, like Sowell, dreaming of a "ménage a noir.") . What Gore Vidal did for sex and gender constructs, though, Beatty does for race and prominent black Americans, with sacred cow-tipping on nearly every page. Waterfalls of wordplay that pool and merge like acid jazz on the page...well worth checking out for any language lover with a wicked sense of humor. When Beatty is beating out his linguistic arpeggios, I could listen all day.—Washington Post
“A remarkably strange and funny meditation...revelatory and mind-blowing. From its opening pages, Beatty's powerhouse novel leaves no doubt about the topsy-turvy narrative road ahead, one that destroys conventional notions of black identity and white oppression while finding perverse humor in verbal salvos flung at and over the wall of race.” —Seattle Times
“One of the hip hop generation's most lyrical writers spins a tale that traces an introspective DJ from his Los Angeles home to Berlin in search of a sublime sax player he hopes will bless his latest sonic sculpture.” —Vibe
“Slumberland" is laugh-out-loud funny and its wit and satire can be burning, regardless of where they are pointed: blackness or whiteness. The book places Beatty somewhere among Ishmael Reed, Dany Laferrière and William S. Burroughs, and it is rife with sex (particularly interracial sex as weapon, as guilt and celebration, but never as love), music (it is, in fact, a love poem to music as identity, as savior, as self, as the perfect language) and religion, whatever mask it wears. There are incredible moments of tenderness... Beatty is kind of symphonic W.E.B. Du Bois.” —Los Angeles Times
“The final message, romantic but deeply felt, is crystal clear -- music might not pave the way for reunification, but in many ways it's the best possible option.” —Chicago Sun Times
“Ferociously witty and original...virtuosic and hilarious. Whether he’s warning against the 'cutie-pie cabal' of The All-New Mickey Mouse Club; spinning a track for a philosopher skinhead; hypothesizing about Harriet Tubman or Nabokov or Big Daddy Kane; rhapsodizing about every sound he’s ever heard (he has a “phonographic memory”); or brilliantly spinning an analogy between East Germans after reunification and African-Americans during Reconstruction, DJ Darky brings the full funk. Marvelous.” —Kirkus
“The narrative touches on oppression and the inexplicable, transcendent power of music, both of which translate to the American race struggle. Beatty’s rolling Faulknerian prose has been praised for its “dazzling linguistic flights” (Salon), and this newest novel is no different; the dense imagery and sound create a synesthesia carnival.” —Library Journal
“With its acerbic running commentary on race, sex, and Cold War culture, the latest from Beatty contains flashes of absurdist brilliance in the tradition of William Burroughs and Ishmael Reed.”—Publishers Weekly
“Nobody riffs like Paul Beatty. Uproarious, incisive and thrillingly original, Slumberland is a masterful journey into sound, a diatonic/Teutonic search for love, identity, the perfect beat and the perfect beatdown. Like any great soloist, Beatty reveals entire worlds with each note, some of them heartbreakingly familiar and others heretofore unknown. This is an epic mash-up of race, music, culture, history, and everything else worth throwing on a turntable.”—Adam Mansbach, author of The End of the Jews
“In Paul Beatty's brilliant comic novel, an American deejay in Berlin declares the end of blackness even as he finds himself the object of a million racial projections. Every sentence is a moment of fierce and intelligent wit, and all of our preconceived notions – of racial-uplift narratives, of Germany, and of the nature of music – are turned squarely and rightly on their heads.”—Danzy Senna, author of Caucasia and Symptomatic
“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.”—Junot Diaz
Customer Reviews
Simply amazing
As a German living in Los Angeles (well Pasadena, but you know what I am saying) I just couldn't put down Slumberland. There were a couple of unfortunate mistakes in the German expressions used in the book but I have rarely seen any American, or any writer at all, display a better insight into the schizophrenia of a person's struggle between identity, purpose, and projection. We all are constantly trying to define our identity between our own delusion, heteronomy, and reality. As this might be read as a text on racism, I would argue it simply addresses identity issues at large. That racism, "white man's burden", colonialism, and slavery still linger through the ages, is a given, but it is the individual's struggle to find his or her place in the world tat really matters. Funny enough white man travel to Asia and indulge into the illusion of "yellow fever" while white women seek the holy grail of sexual nirvana in Africa - but what does it really say about human nature? It is the other, eternally defined as something unattainable, the promise of a better tomorrow that, let's be honest, will never come. But that is not the point of this novel that deals with a fish-out-of-water turning from a seeker to a seer: It is the jazzy and irreverent prose that takes us down the rabbit hole of a "former" fascist society struggling with the contradiction of its failure to implement the bizarre nightmares of racism and its inability to make amends that transcend the narrow horizon of its overcast sky, while seeking definite absolution for the holocaust - but it does not matter if the final solution is worse than slavery - in the end it is that we are all human besides our divisive, and absurd, ideas about what constitute the other and ourselves. Music will slave us to a common beat with all our foibles and fears... I was blown away by this work and its style. I like to see this adopted into a movie. Paul let me know if you are interested...
Hilarious social criticism and music snobbery
Paul Beatty has written a really scathing and hilarious tale about a Black guy, who goes by DJ Darky, on his journey of creating the perfect beat. The most significant part of this journey involves him going to Berlin to get validation from his musical hero, jazz musician Charles Stone, who he and his friends- The Beard Scratchers- have affectionately dubbed "The Schwa". This novel presents ideas of race, culture, and music with language that's lyrical and cheeky. From the opening page, DJ Darky declares that Blackness is over and while reflecting on years of tanning says: "My complexion has darkened somewhat; it's still a nice nonthreatening sitcom Negro brown, but now there's a pomegranate-purple undertone that in certain light gives me a more villainous sheen." Brilliant!
I was laughing out loud from just the first few pages. This is rare that a book invokes emotion in me that's evident. This has to be my favorite book thus far for the year. That this book's focal point is music and the level of music snobbery by the host of such thoughtful characters was so on point for me as I can be quite a music snob. Slumberland is like your favorite movie from which you love to quote every other line. Yes, this book has too many lines I want to quote. I'm glad I held on to Beatty's White Boy Shuffle even though I couldn't get into it on my first attempt many years ago. I think I have more appreciative eyes towards his writing now.
Beatty Begets Berliin Beat
Beatty has written a wise and funny glimpse of African-American angst as seen through the paradiddles of noise masquerading as music. The story may be set in Germany during The Wall collapse, but the text mirrors the culture and attitude of American thought, juxtaposing post-Nazi German population coping with the sins of the past with post-Lincoln African-American life still muddling through the oppression of past and present; all played to the funkiest jukebox in Berlin. A great read...
