A native of Los Angeles, Since its debut, Paul Betty showed to get to know the reality of the ghettos, the evolution of cities and especially the history of race relations in America that emerges violently in all the pages of The white boy blues . Ironic title because Gunnar Kaufman and Sharp, the main protagonist, is black with no way out (the story of his family tree to the great-grandfathers and great-grandparents is hilarious and dramatic at the same time), lives in Hillside, Los Angeles, a neighborhood high risk, to put it mildly: the cops running with the name of Babe Ruth (the famous baseball champion, for the avoidance of doubt) affected the billy entering middle school, there are metal detectors, gangs, and eleven years lord it is not so strange to have a gun tucked into his trousers. This outpost of the Middle Ages near future Gunnar Kaufman discovers his friends and his vocation, basketball and poetry, as well as the dark side of America (the novel is set in the early nineties, at the time of the beating of Rodney King, process and the subsequent bloody clashes in Los Angeles), which translates as "five hundred years have been delicious, but it's time to go. We are abandoning the sinking ship America, lightening its load by throwing overboard our stories, throwing in the sea and pulling in this dry in the future. Black America has abandoned its needs in a world where expectations are illusions, has refused to develop ideals and traditions in a society that applies the principles without principle. " In his youthful exuberance The white boy blues suffers from a certain prolixity, but it is easy to believe is due to an excess of enthusiasm: Paul writes and tells Betty always on a knife edge between sarcasm and irony, between farce and tragedy, from a poetic reality at all to get to compete with large African-American storytellers. Has anyone bothered to present the names (always white) by Tom Robbins and Kurt Vonnegut and Paul Beatty perhaps dreaming The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison and writes (burning, slang, rhythm) as Chester Himes: it is not racial affinity, but an elastic way, multifaceted understanding of language, Storr, the same art of writing and storytelling. Between the lines Paul Beatty cites Céline, Amiri Baraka (formerly LeRoi Jones), John Dos Passos and then writes: "It occurred to me that perhaps the poems are like colds. Maybe I heard to get a poem. I felt a weight on my chest and I would come his eyes moist and fever, and ultimately a whistle in my ears would announce the emergence of eternal lines ". Funny, caustic, chaotic The white boy blues is also a kind of subtle, laconic stance: there are few ways out of the ghetto (whichever it is) and the poems are second to none, at least until people like Gunnar Kaufman'll write on the walls.
0 comments:
Post a Comment