Slumberland

grand book by a lovely new york writer about berlin just before the fall of the berlin wall. much fun and wisdom, totally enjoyable novel.

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...

Paul Beatty is one of my all-time favorite writers, and with Slumberland, he does not disappoint. His sense of humor and comedy strongly mirror my own. He is HILARIOUS! He is brilliant and his world seems at once vast and peculiarly small. He is, in my opinion, his generation's best writer.

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...

Comment on the first review by DatDudeCrazee. Trust his monicker: he is crazy. Slumberland is Beatty's most mature novel and, so far, his best. Trust the reviews above, like the one from the Washington Post. Trust Beatty, he is the real thing.