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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.  ZoharLaor | Jan 6, 2010 |  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 |  no reviews | add a review
Amazon.com Amazon.com Review (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 Tue, 05 Jan 2010 11:51:15 -0500) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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Wikipedia in English (1)
A delightful book with engaging characters. The mystery is more of a subplot to the character study of Essrog and his loser friends. (