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Lädt ... Welcome to Braggsville (2015)von T. Geronimo Johnson
Lädt ...
Melde dich bei LibraryThing an um herauszufinden, ob du dieses Buch mögen würdest. Keine aktuelle Diskussion zu diesem Buch. I picked this from a shelf with my eyes closed and had no expectations. The language was liquid and inventive and the plot moved quickly in interesting directions. D'aron reminded me of the protagonist in [b:The Topeka School|43565369|The Topeka School|Ben Lerner|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1555088207l/43565369._SY75_.jpg|67209658], but with more subtlety and depth. I suspect a re-read would be rewarding too. ( ) I think this book had a lot of important stuff to say and that it spent a lot more time doing weird ham-fisted comedy/melodrama than saying important stuff about race and acceptance and ambiguity around those topics. What was supposed to work as comedy didn't really land for me as comedy, and the tricks with the conventions of fiction didn't land either. There were passages that I had trouble understanding at all because they seemed like in-jokes or just sort of went off into the weeds. On the whole, I wish the book had been tightened up a lot and had dwelled more on the serious issues addressed in a late brief diatribe, and on that really pretty gripping confrontation in the Holler, with its concluding and very telling punishment. The writing is uniformly arresting and the story is wrenching and perfect until the end of ch. 16. After this high dramatic point, the novel remains very, very good. Only, I felt Johnson let go of the reins a little. For my taste he let style and introspection take precedence over story. I wanted more events to happen than did in the last half of the novel. I wanted there to be more consequences for what happened in the first half. I wanted to have the marvelous clash of cultures and ideologies that Johnson set up in the first half to be fulfilled by an equally dramatic climax in the second. I wanted this book to be the Bonfire of the Vanities of the 21st century. Instead, the story retreated into something thoughtful, something nuanced, something personal; nothing like the big novel of social commentary I expected, and nothing like what I thought Johnson seemed to be gearing up for in the first half. It was a great read until the end, though--even if it wasn't exactly the read I wanted it to be. keine Rezensionen | Rezension hinzufügen
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Fiction.
African American Fiction.
Literature.
HTML: LONGLISTED FOR THE 2015 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF 2015 BY THE WASHINGTON POST, TIME, MEN'S JOURNAL, CHICAGO TRIBUNE, KANSAS CITY STAR, BROOKLYN MAGAZINE, NPR, HUFFINGTON POST, THE DAILY BEAST, AND BUZZFEED WINNER OF THE 2015 ERNEST J. GAINES AWARD FOR LITERARY EXCELLENCE LONGLISTED FOR THE 2016 ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE IN FICTION NATIONAL BESTSELLER From the PEN/Faulkner finalist and critically acclaimed author of Hold It 'Til It Hurts comes a dark and socially provocative Southern-fried comedy about four UC Berkeley students who stage a dramatic protest during a Civil War reenactmentâ??a fierce, funny, tragic work from a bold new writer. Welcome to Braggsville. The City that Love Built in the Heart of Georgia. Population 712 Born and raised in the heart of old Dixie, D'aron Davenport finds himself in unfamiliar territory his freshman year at UC Berkeley. Two thousand miles and a world away from his childhood, he is a small-town fish floundering in the depths of a large, hyper-liberal pond. Caught between the prosaic values of his rural hometown and the intellectualized multicultural cosmopolitanism of Berzerkeley, the nineteen-year-old white kid is uncertain about his place until one disastrous party brings him three idiosyncratic best friends: Louis, a "kung-fu comedian" from California; Candice, an earnest do-gooder claiming Native roots from Iowa; and Charlie, an introspective inner-city black teen from Chicago. They dub themselves the "4 Little Indians." But everything changes in the group's alternative history class, when D'aron lets slip that his hometown hosts an annual Civil War reenactment, recently rebranded "Patriot Days." His announcement is met with righteous indignation, and inspires Candice to suggest a "performative intervention" to protest the reenactment. Armed with youthful self-importance, makeshift slave costumes, righteous zeal, and their own misguided ideas about the South, the 4 Little Indians descend on Braggsville. Their journey through backwoods churches, backroom politics, Waffle Houses, and drunken family barbecues is uproarious to start, but will have devastating consequences. With the keen wit of Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk and the deft argot of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, T. Geronimo Johnson has written an astonishing, razor-sharp satire. Using a panoply of styles and tones, from tragicomic to Southern Gothic, he skewers issues of class, race, intellectual and political chauvinism, Obamaism, social media, and much more. A literary coming-of-age novel for a new generation, written with tremendous social insight and a unique, generous heart, Welcome to Braggsville reminds us of the promise and perils of youthful exuberance, while painting an indelible portrait of contemporary America. Keine Bibliotheksbeschreibungen gefunden. |
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Google Books — Lädt ... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.6Literature English (North America) American fiction 21st CenturyKlassifikation der Library of Congress [LCC] (USA)BewertungDurchschnitt:
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