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(3.72) | 5 | From the National Book Award-winning author of Middle Passage, a fearless fictional portrait of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his pivotal moment in American history. Set against the tensions of Civil Rights era America, Dreamer is a remarkable fictional excursion into the last two years of Martin Luther King Jr.'s life, when the political and personal pressures on this country's most preeminent moral leader were the greatest. While in Chicago for his first northern campaign against poverty and inequality, King encounters Chaym Smith, whose startling physical resemblance to King wins him the job of official stand-in. Matthew Bishop, a civil rights worker and loyal follower of King, is given the task of training the smart and deeply cynical Smith for the job. In doing so, Bishop must face the issue of what makes one man great while another man can only stand in for greatness. Provocative, heartfelt, and masterfully rendered, Charles Johnson confirms yet again that he is one of the great treasures of modern American literature. Dr. Charles Johnson is a novelist, screenwriter, essayist, professional cartoonist and the Pollock Professor of English at the University of Washington. He is the author of more than sixteen books, including the PEN/Faulkner nominated story collection The Sorcerer's Apprentice and the novel Middle Passage, for which he won the National Book Award.… (mehr) |
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Die Informationen stammen von der englischen "Wissenswertes"-Seite. Ändern, um den Eintrag der eigenen Sprache anzupassen. "The Pauper has to die before the Prince can be born"
--Meister Eckhart "But unto Cain and to his offering the Lord had not respect. And Cain was very wroth and his countenance fell."
--Genesis 4:5 "If you sow the seeds of violence in your struggle, unborn generations will reap the whirlwind of social disintegration."
--Martin Luther King, Jr., Strength to Love "Behold this dreamer cometh. Come now therefore, and let us slay him, and cast him into one of the pits, and we will say: Some evil beast hath devoured him; and we shall see what will become of his dreams."
--Genesis 37:19-20 | |
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Die Informationen stammen von der englischen "Wissenswertes"-Seite. Ändern, um den Eintrag der eigenen Sprache anzupassen. In the Upsouth cities he visited, violence followed him like a biblical curse, but one step ahead of his assassins. | |
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▾Literaturhinweise Literaturhinweise zu diesem Werk aus externen Quellen. Wikipedia auf EnglischKeine ▾Buchbeschreibungen From the National Book Award-winning author of Middle Passage, a fearless fictional portrait of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his pivotal moment in American history. Set against the tensions of Civil Rights era America, Dreamer is a remarkable fictional excursion into the last two years of Martin Luther King Jr.'s life, when the political and personal pressures on this country's most preeminent moral leader were the greatest. While in Chicago for his first northern campaign against poverty and inequality, King encounters Chaym Smith, whose startling physical resemblance to King wins him the job of official stand-in. Matthew Bishop, a civil rights worker and loyal follower of King, is given the task of training the smart and deeply cynical Smith for the job. In doing so, Bishop must face the issue of what makes one man great while another man can only stand in for greatness. Provocative, heartfelt, and masterfully rendered, Charles Johnson confirms yet again that he is one of the great treasures of modern American literature. Dr. Charles Johnson is a novelist, screenwriter, essayist, professional cartoonist and the Pollock Professor of English at the University of Washington. He is the author of more than sixteen books, including the PEN/Faulkner nominated story collection The Sorcerer's Apprentice and the novel Middle Passage, for which he won the National Book Award. ▾Bibliotheksbeschreibungen Keine Bibliotheksbeschreibungen gefunden. ▾Beschreibung von LibraryThing-Mitgliedern
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But forget those problems, because they're not actually faults--Charles Johnson knows exactly what the fuck he's doing. He put a reference to Piltdown Man in Middle Passage, after all--and how an early-nineteenth century sailor could read into the future like that was mysterious to me until Johnson explained the thematic reasoning behind it to our grad class at Temple University. (Middle Passage, by the way, is an excellent fucking novel. You need to read it tomoorow.)
Dreamer is marvelous work--seamless, elegant, and challenging without being difficult. To capture King, his motivations, his mission, and his legacy, Johnson busts out the old trope of the doppleganger: a dude who looks exactly like MLK, whose intellect is as keen, but whose motives are less clear. Chaym Smith has had trouble because King is stirring shit up--blacks and whites are sick of King and his rabble-rousing in rioting Chicage, and Smith is bearing the brunt because he's often mistaken for the minister. Chaym has a past that includes war wounds, whores, drugs, zazen temples, Indian scriptures, a failed career as preacher, arson, and perhaps several homicides. When he meets King and offers his services as a security double, the novel takes off in two directions, with dichotomies springing all over the place (Cain and Abel, Jesus the lamb and Christ the Avenger, etc). It is in these elegant oppostions and comparisons that we can come to understand--and perhaps briefly to inhabit--a figure so immense and complex as King.
I loved it, and not only for its implication that there are many potential MLKs who never have an opportunity to take on a similar mission, but also for its powerful evocation of the hardships King dealt with daily for more than a decade. Powerful and vividly realized. ( )