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Loading... Motherless Brooklynby Jonathan Lethem
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. Absolute genius. (  ) jr231 | Nov 6, 2009 |  One of my all-time favorite books. Tourrettic--wonderful, terrible, beautiful, horrid, mesmerizing.... ( ) veracruzlynn | Oct 30, 2009 | So you have an orphan with Tourette's Syndrome, not understanding his affliction and being bullied in school. He meets, with 3 other orphans, Frank Minna, a man who takes them under his wing and has them move furniture and things for him. Over time, they become a team and become known as Minna's Men and under the guise of a car rental service, they become a detective agency, or so they are led to believe by Frank, and learn how to conduct stake-outs, follow strangers and drive without asking questions. Frank is murdered while Lionel and Gilbert are providing surveillance for him on a property. There are sufficient twists and turns following Lionel's attempt to uncover the murderer of his mentor and friend, Frank Minna, to make this a worthy read. What I found more interesting was following the mind of a man with Tourette's Syndrome (he finally learns that he has a disability) and the verbal and physical compulsions that he's forced to express, try to harness and endure. (  )1  cameling | Sep 16, 2009 | What makes this novel so enjoyable is not the rather convoluted noir-style detective story forming the plot, but the uniqueness of its main character: a small-time criminal turned detective who has Tourette’s syndrome. Lionel Essrog doesn’t let loose with a stream of profanities every other sentence, though. His Tourette’s takes the form of nonsense words, tics and other compulsive gestures, and because he is telling the story, the narrative takes on the disjointedness and strange logic of Tourette’s. This unusual approach breathes life into a tired genre and gives the old private dick story a skewed, new aspect. (  ) sturlington | Sep 15, 2009 | Part cozy mystery, part noir, part bildungsroman, part experiment in the metes and bounds of the English language, Lethem's bizarre, hypnotic, lyrical Motherless Brooklyn is fun to read and hard to put down. Lionel Essrog, an already strange boy who suffers from Tourette's syndrome and who can't stop touching, talking, tapping, dialing, or organizing, navigates the crazy language that dominates the inside of his head, and tries to understand the chain of events that led to the murder of his boss, an event that dominates everything else. In many ways Lionel is the most probable of the improbable characters who inhabit Lethem's dreamlike, bell-toned Brooklyn; certainly he is the most relatably human, compulsions notwithstanding. As he chases down the hidden details of the story he's unwittingly become a part of, he becomes a familiar, comforting presence, and an unlikely point of sanity and logic in an increasingly fake, incomprehensible world. The story is hilarious and compelling, and really fun to read. It was recommended to me by a writing teacher, and while it's not the kind of book I'd usually pick up without a recommendation, I really enjoyed it, and if you enjoy well-crafted mysteries and writers who like to play with language - and Lethem really does play, in every sense of the word, twisting and turning English into something unrecognizable and yet recognizable at the same time - I think you'll like it too. (  )1 upstairsgirl | Aug 11, 2009 |  no reviews | add a review
Amazon.com (ISBN 0375724834, Paperback)Pop quiz. Please complete the following sentence: "There are days when I get up in the morning and stagger into the bathroom and begin running water and then I look up and I don't even recognize my own _." If you answered face, then your name is obviously not Jonathan Lethem. Instead of taking the easy out, the genre-busting novelist concludes this by-the-numbers string of words with toothbrush in the mirror.This brilliant sentence and a lot of other really excellent ones compose Lethem's engaging fifth novel, Motherless Brooklyn. Lionel Essrog, a detective suffering from Tourette's syndrome, spins the narrative as he tracks down the killer of his boss, Frank Minna. Minna enlisted Lionel and his friends when they were teenagers living at Saint Vincent's Home for Boys, ostensibly to perform odd jobs (we're talking very odd) and over the years trained them to become a team of investigators. The Minna men face their most daunting case when they find their mentor in a Dumpster bleeding from stab wounds delivered by an assailant whose identity he refuses to reveal--even while he's dying on the way to the hospital. Detectives? Brooklyn? Is this the same Lethem who danced the postapocalypso in Amnesia Moon? Incredibly, yes, and rarely has such a departure been pulled off with this much aplomb. As in the "toothbrush" passage above, Lethem sets himself up with the imposing task of making tired conventions new. Brooklyn accents? Fuggetaboutit. Lethem's dialogue is as light on its feet as a prize fighter. Lionel's Tourette's could have been an easy joke, but Lethem probes so convincingly into the disorder that you feel simultaneously rattled, sympathetic, and irritated by the guy. Sure, the story is a mystery, but Motherless Brooklyn could be about flower arranging, for all we care. What counts is Lionel's tic-ridden take on a world full of surprises, propelling this fiction forward at edgy, breakneck speed. --Ryan Boudinot (retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:22 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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