Jonathan Lethem - The Fortress of Solitude

Здесь есть возможность читать онлайн «Jonathan Lethem - The Fortress of Solitude» весь текст электронной книги совершенно бесплатно (целиком полную версию без сокращений). В некоторых случаях можно слушать аудио, скачать через торрент в формате fb2 и присутствует краткое содержание. Жанр: Современная проза, на английском языке. Описание произведения, (предисловие) а так же отзывы посетителей доступны на портале библиотеки ЛибКат.

The Fortress of Solitude: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

Предлагаем к чтению аннотацию, описание, краткое содержание или предисловие (зависит от того, что написал сам автор книги «The Fortress of Solitude»). Если вы не нашли необходимую информацию о книге — напишите в комментариях, мы постараемся отыскать её.

If there still remains any doubt, this novel confirms Lethem's status as the poet of Brooklyn and of motherless boys. Projected through the prism of race relations, black music and pop art, Lethem's stunning, disturbing and authoritatively observed narrative covers three decades of turbulent events on Dean Street, Brooklyn. When Abraham and Rachel Ebdus arrive there in the early 1970s, they are among the first whites to venture into a mainly black neighborhood that is just beginning to be called Boerum Hill. Abraham is a painter who abandons his craft to construct tiny, virtually indistinguishable movie frames in which nothing happens. Ex-hippie Rachel, a misguided liberal who will soon abandon her family, insists on sending their son, Dylan, to public school, where he stands out like a white flag. Desperately lonely, regularly attacked and abused by the black kids ("yoked," in the parlance), Dylan is saved by his unlikely friendship with his neighbor Mingus Rude, the son of a once-famous black singer, Barnett Rude Jr., who is now into cocaine and rage at the world. The story of Dylan and Mingus, both motherless boys, is one of loyalty and betrayal, and eventually different paths in life. Dylan will become a music journalist, and Mingus, for all his intelligence, kindness, verbal virtuosity and courage, will wind up behind bars. Meanwhile, the plot manages to encompass pop music from punk rock to rap, avant-garde art, graffiti, drug use, gentrification, the New York prison system-and to sing a vibrant, sometimes heartbreaking ballad of Brooklyn throughout. Lethem seems to have devoured the '70s, '80s and '90s-inhaled them whole-and he reproduces them faithfully on the page, in prose as supple as silk and as bright, explosive and illuminating as fireworks. Scary and funny and seriously surreal, the novel hurtles on a trajectory that feels inevitable. By the time Dylan begins to break out of the fortress of solitude that has been his life, readers have shared his pain and understood his dreams.

The Fortress of Solitude — читать онлайн бесплатно полную книгу (весь текст) целиком

Ниже представлен текст книги, разбитый по страницам. Система сохранения места последней прочитанной страницы, позволяет с удобством читать онлайн бесплатно книгу «The Fortress of Solitude», без необходимости каждый раз заново искать на чём Вы остановились. Поставьте закладку, и сможете в любой момент перейти на страницу, на которой закончили чтение.

Тёмная тема
Сбросить

Интервал:

Закладка:

Сделать

Then the chalking of the skully board on the slate. Dylan could draw, though he came to understand this only by the inability of the others to match him. They’d drop their chalk at the sight of his skully boards, and he’d be enlisted by Marilla to draw hopscotch diagrams for the girls who’d otherwise scoffed at his shoes and pants-he wore what they called roachsteppers and highwaters . His skully boards were straight and clean, the four corners numbered elegantly, one, two, three, four, the winner’s zone in the center embellished with a double circle, his own innovation. This, like his choice of slate, became institutional, so much that one day Lonnie and Marilla scoffingly insisted it had always been done that way, and Dylan’s authorship of the double-ringed winner’s circle was permanently obscured.

Other innovations were resisted outright. Dylan one day designed a star-shaped skully board, where players would be expected to shoot their caps from triangular corners into center stage, as in Chinese checkers, a game which Dylan had been taught in his kindergarten class. Nobody understood, nobody played-it wasn’t skully. Dylan wiped the board away but the six heavily chalked points of the star remained etched lightly on the slate to haunt him until the next hard rain.

Then there was the making of the skully caps. Metal bottle tops from soda or beer were the standard, and the slightly heavier tops lined with cork were best, though from time to time a kid would experiment with a plastic cap, or a wide metal one from some other type of jar or bottle, ketchup, even pickles or applesauce. The notion of a monster cap, one which would drive opponents off the board with crushing blows, haunted the institution of skully. But in practice the bigger caps were unwieldy, tended to hang across the boundary lines, and were painful to shoot hard across the board with flicked fingers. You could fool with a big cap before it was filled with wax but then it would skid and slide right off the board too easily, and anyway a cap not filled with wax wasn’t really skully . You wanted wax. Candles could be bought or “boosted”-shoplifted-from Mr. Ramirez’s bodega, or volunteered by Dylan from his mother’s bedside supply. And Dylan became an expert at melting the candles, an operation always performed on the stoop of the abandoned house in the cause of not freaking out either parents or “little kids”-though Dylan and Earl were still the littlest kids around, apart from a couple of mute girls in severe cornrows-with lit matches. Then damping the wax into the cap, so it hardened into a smooth whole without seams or bumps, one which wouldn’t pop out when struck by an opponent’s cap. Like a tiny factory Dylan made rows of perfect skully caps and lined them up along the stoop: vanilla Yoo-Hoo with pink wax, Coke with green, Coco Rico, the cork of the cap still stinking of sugar, with white.

Strangely, after Dylan’s rapid rise to chief alchemist and philosopher of skully, nobody seemed to want to play the game anymore. Dylan presided over an ideal slate which was persistently shirked, deserted in favor of just about anything including standing around Henry’s front yard with hands in pockets, kicking at one another’s ankles and saying, “Fuck you, motherfucker.” Perhaps the Dean Street kids had never really been able to keep their attention on skully but only on the attendant crafts, on puzzling out the tradition. So much easier to tell a younger boy that he didn’t know to play skully than to have to play him to take his caps away, and what good were the caps anyway? Everybody lost their caps or even perversely threw them at the passing bus to watch them ding harmlessly and go wheeling into the gutter. Maybe skully sucked. Maybe to perfect a thing was to destroy it.

The Solver girls moved away. That was the first surprise. One day they were gone. Isabel Vendle peered out her window and saw the van, the movers tramping down the stoop with liquor-store boxes loaded with books and glassware, the girls on the sidewalk in the skates that seemed to grow from their ankles, whirling untouchable as ever, one final taunting pirouette. The girls’ parents hadn’t paid Isabel the courtesy of saying a word, hadn’t apparently known they were lines in a blueprint drawn by Isabel, founding participants in her Boerum Hill. So at the very start the circle shrank.

It didn’t matter much to Dylan, though. The Solver girls had gone to Saint Ann ’s for school that first year, had vanished into Brooklyn Heights. They didn’t live on Dean Street, they floated above it. Dylan had gone to first grade at Public School 38 on the next block, real school, according to Rachel, public school. “He’s one of three white children in the whole school,” he’d overheard her boasting on the phone. “Not his class, not his grade-the whole school.”

She made it sound important. Dylan didn’t want to disillusion Rachel, but in fact each day his time in the classroom at P.S. 38 was only a prelude to affairs on the block. Kids in school didn’t look at each other, they looked at the teacher. Nobody Dylan knew from the street was in his class except Earl and one of the silent girls from Marilla’s yard. Henry and Alberto and the others were older and though they were presumably at the same school might as well have been in some other galaxy during the hours Dylan spent listening to Miss Lupnick teach the alphabet or how to tell time or what were the major holidays, hours Dylan spent reading the classroom’s small collection of tattered picture books over and over until he’d memorized them, hours spent abstracted, scribbling his pencil, drawing utopian skully boards with ten, twenty, fifty corners, drawing rectangles like frames of his father’s painted film and filling them in until they were entirely black. The alphabet Miss Lupnick taught was represented on the wall above her head by a series of personified cartoonlike letters-Mr. A, Eating an Apple; Mrs. B, Buying a Broom; and so on-and something insipid about the parade of grinning letters defeated Dylan’s will utterly. He sensed that no narrative could be constructed that would make Mr. A and Mrs. B do anything other than Eat an Apple or Buy a Broom and he couldn’t bear to drag his eyes along the row of letters atop the chalkboard to discover what it was that Mr. L or Mrs. T were doomed to do. Miss Lupnick read stories, so slowly it was agony. Miss Lupnick played records, songs about crossing the street and how different men had different jobs. Was someone trying to entertain him? Dylan had never learned less in his life. He glanced from side to side but the other kids sat blank-eyed in invisible cages at his left and right, legs tangled in the chair-desks, fingers up their noses. Some of them might be learning the alphabet, you couldn’t say from their faces. Some were from the projects. One girl was Chinese, which was strange if you thought about it. Whatever, they were helpless to assist or communicate with one another. Older kids picked up the first graders after class and led them away as though retarded, shaking their heads. What had the first graders done all day in class? Nobody could really say. The teacher talked to them like they were a dog all day and by three o’clock it was like leading a dog home.

The kids in your first-grade class might be in your second-grade class or you might never see them again. It might not matter. Even the ones you knew from the block you didn’t know in school. Dylan tried to touch his nose with his tongue until someone told him to stop. One or two kids didn’t ask to go to the bathroom until it was too late and they’d peed in their chair. One kid scratched his ear until it started bleeding. Sometimes Dylan could barely recall first grade seconds after bursting out onto Dean Street again.

Читать дальше
Тёмная тема
Сбросить

Интервал:

Закладка:

Сделать

Похожие книги на «The Fortress of Solitude»

Представляем Вашему вниманию похожие книги на «The Fortress of Solitude» списком для выбора. Мы отобрали схожую по названию и смыслу литературу в надежде предоставить читателям больше вариантов отыскать новые, интересные, ещё непрочитанные произведения.


Отзывы о книге «The Fortress of Solitude»

Обсуждение, отзывы о книге «The Fortress of Solitude» и просто собственные мнения читателей. Оставьте ваши комментарии, напишите, что Вы думаете о произведении, его смысле или главных героях. Укажите что конкретно понравилось, а что нет, и почему Вы так считаете.

x