“All it takes to get along in this here man's town is a little shit, grit, and mother-wit.”
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison_ was February's read for #classiclitbookclub 📚, and I decided to listen to this one — which turned out to be a very good decision 🎧. I really enjoyed Joe Morton’s narration; he did a fantastic job capturing the many different accents as our unnamed protagonist moves from the Deep South 🌾 to the hustle and bustle of New York City 🗽.
We never learn the protagonist’s name, even when he is given a new identity. I believe this reflects the invisibility he feels — as a Black man coming of age in a world with deeply blinkered views about how he should behave in the presence of “white folk.”
Few books stay rent-free in my head ðŸ’, but this may just be one of them. If this sounds like something you’d enjoy but you’re worried about struggling with the colloquial language, I highly recommend the audiobook 🎙️. This is definitely a book I’ll return to, and one I suspect will reveal something new each time ✨.
About the Book
Ralph Elllison's Invisible Man is a monumental novel, one that can well be called an epic of 20th-century African-American life. It is a strange story, in which many extraordinary things happen, some of them shocking and brutal, some of them pitiful and touching - yet always with elements of comedy and irony and burlesque that appear in unexpected places.
After a brief prologue, the story begins with a terrifying experience from the hero's high-school days; it then moves quickly to the campus of a "Southern Negro college" and then to New York's Harlem, where most of the action takes place.
The many people that the hero meets in the course of his wanderings are remarkably various, complex and significant. With them he becomes involved in an amazing series of adventures, in which he is sometimes befriended but more often deceived and betrayed - as much by himself and his own illusions as by the duplicity and the blindness of others.
Invisible Man is not only a great triumph of storytelling and characterization; it is a profound and uncompromising interpretation of the anomalous position of Blacks in American society.
About Ralph
Ralph Ellison was a scholar and writer. He was born Ralph Waldo Ellison in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, named by his father after Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ellison was best known for his novel Invisible Man, which won the National Book Award in 1953. He also wrote Shadow and Act (1964), a collection of political, social and critical essays, and Going to the Territory (1986). For The New York Times , the best of these essays in addition to the novel put him "among the gods of America's literary Parnassus." A posthumous novel, Juneteenth, was published after being assembled from voluminous notes he left after his death.
0 comments:
Post a Comment