|
Loading... Telegraph Avenueby Michael Chabon
   No current Talk conversations about this book. I've now read three of Chabon's novels and each has its own style. This one, revolving around a used record store in 2004, is densely written, full of descriptive metaphors and similes that seem to be an attempt to create an underlying soundtrack for the story. It took me a few scenes to get into the rhythm of the prose, but once I did, this became a compulsive read. The story covers race, class, culture, families (fathers and sons, wives and husbands), sins of the past, and trying to hold on to a dream when perhaps a new dream is needed. I came to really care about these characters, the two men who own Brokeland Records and their wives who are partners as midwives, as well as their sons, plus the group of regulars who spend time sifting through Brokeland's stock while hanging out, catching up. A threat of a megastore coming that could put Brokeland out of business sets the story in motion. I was not surprised to read that Chabon created Brokeland and its denizens for an aborted TV show; I was envisioning many of the scenes playing out in front of me. (  ) ShellyS | Mar 21, 2021 |  The lovingly crafted sections on pop culture almost make up for the bland characters and plot. Almost. (  ) LubicaP | Mar 21, 2020 | I'm on page 92 but I will have to check it out again. The language is too rich to read when I'm tired at night. Definitely a travel or vacation book. MaryHeleneMele | May 6, 2019 | Chabon was my 'can do no wrong' author until now. I couldn't get past the first few pages - I felt like the book was trying too hard to be hip and it was really offputting. I'd read some of Chabon's New York Review of Books essays while waiting for this to be published, and I couldn't finish them either. And this from my favorite author! It seems like he's trying too hard to live up to the critical praise he gets for being clever and erudite, rather than writing from the heart. badube | Mar 6, 2019 | Please read review by John Lulz below - he said everything I would have - and said it better than I could have. ( ) Rdra1962 | Aug 1, 2018 |
 “Telegraph Avenue,” Michael Chabon’s rich, comic new novel, is a homage to an actual place: the boulevard in Northern California where Oakland — historically an African-American city — aligns with Berkeley, whose bourgeois white inhabitants are, as one character puts it, “liable to invest all their hope of heaven in the taste of an egg laid in the backyard by a heritage-breed chicken.” The novel is equally a tribute to the cinematic style of Quentin Tarantino, whose films its characters study and discuss, and whose preoccupations pepper its pages: kung fu, cinematic allusions and the blaxploitation films of the 1970s; and an interest in African-American characters and experience. Chabon and Tarantino make an unlikely duo; while the latter’s films tend toward gaudy eruptions of violence, Chabon bends Tarantino’s sensibility to a warmhearted novel about fatherhood in which the onstage violence consists of two graphic childbirth scenes and a 15-year-old boy whacking a chubby thug with a wooden sword. A self-help book in the style of Andrei Tarkovsky would be hardly more oxymoronic.  Mr. Chabon has constructed an amazingly rich, emotionally detailed story that addresses his perennial themes — about fathers and sons, husbands and wives, and the consolations of art — while reaching outward to explore the relationship between time past and time present, the weight (or lightness, as the case may be) of history, and the possibility of redemption and forgiveness. Belongs to Publisher SeriesKeltainen kirjasto (458)
In this novel the author takes us to Telegraph Avenue. It is a story that explores the profoundly intertwined lives of two Oakland, California families, one black and one white. Here he creates a world grounded in pop culture: Kung Fu, 1970s Blaxploitation films, vinyl LPs, jazz and soul music, and an epic of friendship, race, and secret histories. Longtime band mates Archy and Nat preside over Brokeland Records, a used-record emporium. All is well until a former NFL quarterback, one of the country's richest African Americans, decides to build his latest Dogpile megastore on nearby Telegraph Avenue. Not only could this spell doom for the little shop and its cross-race, cross-class dream, but it opens up past history regarding Archy's untethered dad and a Black Panther-era crime. No library descriptions found. 
|
 Google Books — Loading...Popular coversRatingAverage: (3.5)
Is this you?Become a LibraryThing Author. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
2
Wikipedia in English (1)
14