Mark Binelli
Autor von Detroit City Is the Place to Be: The Afterlife of an American Metropolis
Werke von Mark Binelli
Zugehörige Werke
Getagged
Wissenswertes
- Geschlecht
- male
- Wohnorte
- Detroit, Michigan, USA
New York, New York, USA - Ausbildung
- University of Michigan
Columbia University - Berufe
- journalist
- Organisationen
- Rolling Stone
- Kurzbiographie
- Mark Binelli is the author of the novel Sacco and Vanzetti Must Die! and a contributing editor at Rolling Stone and Men’s Journal. Born and raised in the Detroit area, he now lives in New York City.
http://markbinelli.com/author.html
Mitglieder
Rezensionen
Listen
Auszeichnungen
Dir gefällt vielleicht auch
Nahestehende Autoren
Statistikseite
- Werke
- 4
- Auch von
- 2
- Mitglieder
- 400
- Beliebtheit
- #60,685
- Bewertung
- 3.5
- Rezensionen
- 34
- ISBNs
- 11
Starting out, I was unclear whether the book was supposed to be read as a fictionalized biography of Hawkins or as something else, something weirder. Some sections read as straight-up biography, laying out facts in a journalistic style, providing block quotes, and even citing print sources, before transitioning into fictional-sounding vignettes that couldn’t possibly be true (could they . . . ?). That uncertainty bothered me more than it should have; nevertheless, the constant detours for Internet fact-checking proved off-putting to my reading experience.
The sequence of vignettes in the first fifty pages or so comes across mostly as a series of non sequiturs, bouncing back and forth through different periods in Hawkins’s life—sometimes interesting, but unsatisfying as a whole. I was looking for even a vaguely plotted through line to establish and anchor the narrative. After setting the book aside for months and then picking it up again around page sixty, I was able to read the main character as merely a fictional character, not agonizing anymore over whether I was reading a fictionalized account of a real person or not. I was at least enjoying much of the writing, if not the actual novel itself.
There’s a bit somewhere in the middle of the book about Jay’s myriad offspring meeting up at a reunion of sorts (an event that’s apparently based in fact), which struck me as a perfect ending to the novel. But sticking it in the middle, with no lead-in or follow-up, was a puzzling authorial choice, and left the remainder of the book feeling like a long, drawn-out epilogue of sorts.
Part of the back cover text uses the term “collage” in describing the book, and that’s very much what it is—a collection of intriguing pictures from Screaming’ Jay Hawkins’s life that manages to cover up an area on a blank wall with a lot of colorful images, but without painting a coherent and focused view of the man. This was an interesting but ultimately frustrating read that I probably would have enjoyed more if it had either been a straight biography of Hawkins or a novel featuring a character like him.… (mehr)