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The Fortress of Solitude Jonathan Lethem 9780571219353 Books

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The Fortress of Solitude Jonathan Lethem 9780571219353 Books

This is the story of Dylan Ebdus growing up as a lonely white boy in the middle of Black and Puerto Rican Brooklyn in the early 70s. I especially liked how the language gets more complex as Dylan grows up. Dylan spends most of his life getting "yoked" meaning put in a head lock and shaken down for money or pizza or whatever. Being the lone white kid in this neighborhood is tough. Dylan eventually meets Mingus Rude who is a year older and helps him a little bit in being accepted, but not really enough. Neither Dylan nor Mingus have a mother present and the fathers are basically useless, caught up in their own passions of art and drugs. The last section brings the characters together again after Dylan has established the beginning of a journalism career and writing liner notes for CD collections. Music of the 70s provides a big backdrop for the stories

I was lucky in school; I was never an outcast; I wasn't in the most "in" group but I was a satellite. I knew people like Dylan in elementary, junior high, and senior high school. This book is a beautifully told view of the down and and kids.

The first section of this 3 section book is almost unbearably good. Section 2 is very short and sets the stage for section 3. Section starts strong but turns to fantasy when the Flying Man's ring makes a reappearance. It really seems forced and a complete turnaround from the extreme realism in the first section. I liked the ending, but not the way it was managed. Had I read this first, I not have followed up with Motherless Brooklyn. Good thing I Motherless Brooklyn first.

And, I think Motherless Brooklyn would have been a better title for this book.

Having said all that, I highly recommend this book; but if you don't like how the ending is managed don't give up on Lethem; read Motherless Brooklyn


Tags : The Fortress of Solitude [Jonathan Lethem] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. From the funked-up, messed-up Brookyn of the 1970s to the present day, this stunning novel spans thirty years in the life of two best friends,Jonathan Lethem,The Fortress of Solitude,Gardners Books,0571219357,Modern fiction,Fiction

The Fortress of Solitude Jonathan Lethem 9780571219353 Books Reviews

This is my first Lethem though he has been on my list for some time. What prompted me was reading a re-release of A.J. Davis' A Meaningful Life and finding that Lethem wrote the introduction. He reveals an interesting connection with Davis leading me to believe that the characters Abraham Ebdus and Barrett Rude Junior were partially influenced by him. But enough of my theories. In short, the book was a great read and my only complaint is with the speed in which I read it. I plan to revisit it in a few years and slow my pace. Each sentence is a paragraph, each paragraph a chapter, and each chapter a book - in a good way.

The residential resurgence of Brooklyn in the early seventies provides a tremendous backdrop for characters who try to live within its complexity and reality. Lethem and I are roughly the same age and though I grew up in a very white neighborhood in Canada, I connected with the influence of comic books (I thought I was cool when I read more Marvel than DC), the trauma of witnessing my first physical fight and wondering if I was really there or if I had formed the memory from the resulting stories, the impact of music on one's life, the linguistic expressions understood only within a few blocks, and the dull shock of returning to the neighborhood years later and mentally cataloguing what has changed and what has remained seemingly constant.

The book is a cultural history of three decades, a hipster biography of rich characters, and a jarring remembrance of growing up. It is honest and engrossing. Lethem lets us know that the world is a complex place regardless of how big your world is. His rifts on the comic book worlds are an analogy for our own - messy and disjointed. So Mr. Lethem, in my neighborhood in Winnipeg in the seventies, if things were good they were "Ten bears". If things were really good they were "Ten bears up a tree". Your book is the latter.
Bittersweet, 70s NYC magical realism (perhaps?) story of race, pop culture, maturity, crime, and the prison of memory and the freedom of making choices.
I enjoyed the quirkiness of "Motherless Brooklyn" and found this book even more of a pleasure. The bulk of the text deals with the 70s and evokes much of that era in terms of mood, race relations, and music. The book also captures the atmosphere of a gentrifying neighborhood and the world of offspring of self-conciously outre' parents. The book is strongest in dealing with Dylan & Mingus' younger years. The prison section proceeds oddly and the very end seems like a "tack-on" drawing on themes from Lethem's other writing. Ditto Robert Woolfolk's death and the lame set-up. For someone whose main character is a music writer, there are odd errors like attributing a Supremes classic to Gladys Knight & the Pips. Also, any place with a Bloomington, Indiana Rural Route is unlikely to be even close to the interstate and the Kinsey Institute's creepiness (a likely byproduct of Hoosier repressiveness) would have helped set-up the oddity of the mother winding up in a southern Indiana commune (though such places existed). Bloomington hipsters are people too narrow and afraid to go some place like New York, and a Brooklyn kid would not have lasted very long there. Unlike other reviewers, I did not find the book particularly slow. Nor did I find it pretentious with regard to its subject matter. The book's lampoons of hipsters (of various stripes), self-indulgent parents, the insularity of Berkeley, the shallowness of music journalism, and the sliminess of real estate people are all on target. Yes, the last 40-50 pages could have re-written or even deleted, but the rest of the book is a great piece of fiction. It captures how difficult it can be to escape our past and how we can overcome the most problematic of attachments. In a very naturalistic way, it also describes the fragility of race relations and manages to make a proto-slacker into a likable protagaonist.
Compelling, introspective, sad. The work was a compelling interplay between fictional characters and real life situations fueled by real life events. The lines between fact and fiction, blurred, which I found highly stimulation. The book reminded me of the many events, situations, embarrassments and highlights that I had experienced. This work is my generation searching for its space.
This is the story of Dylan Ebdus growing up as a lonely white boy in the middle of Black and Puerto Rican Brooklyn in the early 70s. I especially liked how the language gets more complex as Dylan grows up. Dylan spends most of his life getting "yoked" meaning put in a head lock and shaken down for money or pizza or whatever. Being the lone white kid in this neighborhood is tough. Dylan eventually meets Mingus Rude who is a year older and helps him a little bit in being accepted, but not really enough. Neither Dylan nor Mingus have a mother present and the fathers are basically useless, caught up in their own passions of art and drugs. The last section brings the characters together again after Dylan has established the beginning of a journalism career and writing liner notes for CD collections. Music of the 70s provides a big backdrop for the stories

I was lucky in school; I was never an outcast; I wasn't in the most "in" group but I was a satellite. I knew people like Dylan in elementary, junior high, and senior high school. This book is a beautifully told view of the down and and kids.

The first section of this 3 section book is almost unbearably good. Section 2 is very short and sets the stage for section 3. Section starts strong but turns to fantasy when the Flying Man's ring makes a reappearance. It really seems forced and a complete turnaround from the extreme realism in the first section. I liked the ending, but not the way it was managed. Had I read this first, I not have followed up with Motherless Brooklyn. Good thing I Motherless Brooklyn first.

And, I think Motherless Brooklyn would have been a better title for this book.

Having said all that, I highly recommend this book; but if you don't like how the ending is managed don't give up on Lethem; read Motherless Brooklyn