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    Slumberland: A Novel
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    Slumberland: A Novel
    Unavailable
    Slumberland: A Novel
    Ebook293 pages4 hours

    Slumberland: A Novel

    By Paul Beatty

    4/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    The hip break-out novel from 2016 Man Booker Prize-winning author, Paul Beatty, about a disaffected Los Angeles DJ who travels to post-Wall Berlin in search of his transatlantic doppelganger.

    Hailed by the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times as one of the best writers of his generation, Paul Beatty turns his creative eye to man's search for meaning and identity in an increasingly chaotic world.

    After creating the perfect beat, DJ Darky goes in search of Charles Stone, a little know avant-garde jazzman, to play over his sonic masterpiece. His quest brings him to a recently unified Berlin, where he stumbles through the city's dreamy streets ruminating about race, sex, love, Teutonic gods , the prevent defense, and Wynton Marsalis in search of his artistic-and spiritual-other.

    Ferocious, bombastic, and laugh-out-loud funny, Slumberland is vintage Paul Beatty and belongs on the shelf next to Jonathan Lethem, Colson Whitehead, and Junot Diaz.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBloomsbury USA
    Release dateJan 15, 2011
    ISBN9781608196494
    Unavailable
    Slumberland: A Novel
    Author

    Paul Beatty

    Paul Beatty is the author of the novels, Tuff, Slumberland and The White Boy Shuffle, and the poetry collections Big Bank Take Little Bank and Joker, Joker, Deuce. He was the editor of Hokum: An Anthology of African-American Humor. In 2016, he became the first American to win the Man Booker Prize for his novel The Sellout. In 2017, he was the winner the American Academy of Arts and Letters Literature Award. He lives in New York City.

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    Reviews for Slumberland

    4/5

    17 ratings12 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Like his jazz-cat heroes whose names pop up throughout "Slumberland," Paul Beatty doesn't write as much as riff. "Slumberland" is a story about a Los Angeles hip-hop dweeb and turntablist savant who decamps to Berlin in the late eighties in search of a phenomenally talented, long-missing jazzman named Charles Stone. If you'll read it, though, you'll also get acquainted with what might be Beatty's opinions of Tom Cruise, Wynton Marsalis, techno music, and the hygienic habits of modern Germans. Like a talented soloist, Beatty somehow manages to keep it all together; "Slumberland" is messy, hyperactive, and playful, but it never comes off as sloppy. Beatty's kinetic, often uproariously funny prose – keeps "Slumberland" from becoming a long series of pointless digressions. Beatty's trying to make his readers laugh, but there's a lot of serious stuff in "Slumberland," too. Beatty's fascinated by American blackness and his decision to situate his story in Berlin lets him play with this theme in some interesting and unexpected ways. Offhand, I can't think of another novel with a beautiful, biracial East German dancer in it. Though he parodies it to hilarious effect, Beatty also nails the mania that drives DJs and music nerds in general to find the coolest, most obscure sounds they can find. Beatty seems to arguing that music – especially black music – is important, and can have world-changing significance. He even writes about the experience of listening to music without resorting to journalistic cliché or vague superlatives, and that's a lot harder than it sounds. I can't imagine that "Slumberland" will be everyone's thing, but it's fierce, funny, and a whole lot more profound than you'd figure. Recommended.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      I think I was mostly drawn to this book because of the cover, which has a hilariously surprising relevance once you get far enough in. I wasn't actually aware before I started reading it that a major focus of the story was on black culture, identity, and racism, but I felt like the author handled it so deftly that it never seemed heavy or preachy. It also helped that the book is genuinely laugh-out-loud funny at several points, and a quick read to boot. I actually read most of it in one sitting. My one criticism is that the book has a sometimes confusing time period - the narrator appears to be speaking from the present day, but the events are set before, during, and after the fall of the Berlin Wall. This is occasionally confusing when anachronistic details are used to explain the main character's state of mind, and further compounded when one East German character lists off details of the next 20 years, explaining that it's all laid out in a grand master plan.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 3/5
      Paul Beatty has a unique voice - part urban poet, part wise-crackin' back of the room class clown, and he manages to do a decent job fusing the two together for Slumberland, about a musicphiliac who travels to Germany in search of an elusive musician who's score speak to the man's soul. Along the way Beatty plays with Black stereotypes, the nature of music and sex, and a host of other things. It's kind of scattered and more than a little dis-jointed, but I think that was intentional. For me, I had to look through a lot to get to the little nuggets I enjoyed, so this may prove to be a treasure to someone more attuned to its rythms.Not a bad novel by a longshot, but it definitely needs to fit your tastes.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      Before I say anything else, I should say that Beatty's White Boy Shuffle is one of my favorite books ever, so I was surprised to have as hard a time getting into this as I did. However, after a couple of false starts, I ended up finishing it in one sitting. Beatty can riff about pretty much anything and make me laugh, and he often does in this book. His voice and his humor are always the strongest aspects of his work. Slumberland is shorter on plot than White Boy Shuffle though, and so while I enjoyed it I didn't love it as much as the other. He's still on my must-read list, though.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 2/5
      I sipped my beer, the second-best beer I'd ever had,* and asked the question I imagined all great artists ask themselves before engaging in the creative process: "Is there a God?" I weighed the arguments pro (Hawaiian surf, Welch's grape juice, koala bears, worn-in Levi's, the northern lights, the Volvo station wagon, women with braces, the Canadian Rockies, Godard, Nerf footballs, Shirley Chisholm's smile, free checking, and Woody Allen) and con (flies, Alabama, religion, chihuahuas, chihuahua owners, my mother's cooking, airplane turbulence, LL Cool J, Mondays how boring heaven must fucking be, and Woody Allen), not so much to prove or disprove the existence of a powerless almighty, but to engage my increasingly tipsy thought process with so much conscious prattle that an idea might strike me when I wasn't looking*The first being a Budweiser tall boy I'd snuck into the Mothers Against Drunk Driving fundraiser. (p79)
    • 4/5
      Not quite finished with this book yet, but I'm liking it so far. Falls into the trap of being a bit of narcissistic self-loathing narrator who-is-relentlessly-clever, which I feel like I've read over and over again, but at least this book is full of charm and hilarity to compensate. Beatty writes fantastically well about hip-hop and jazz and music in general: the enthusiasm just jumps off the page. The music is elusive but palatable in the text, and totally in a good way. I may end up bumping up my review to four stars if the book keeps up the, well, beats.
    • 2/5
      This book is a merciless satire. It is hard for me to say if it is good or bad since as a whole I don't enjoy the genre, but so many people who like satire seemed to really like it so I guess it is just lost on me. There is certainly some great writing, but overall I didn't find it funny or clever and then that left me feeling kind of dumb which was not such a good feeling. I think if you loved Confederacy of Dunces, this is a book for you. If you didn't love it (like me) you should pass.
    • 5/5
      Paul Beatty has written a really scathing and hilarious tale about a Black guy, who goes by DJ Darky, on his journey of creating the perfect beat. The most significant part of this journey involves him going to Berlin to get validation from his musical hero, jazz musician Charles Stone, who he and his friends- The Beard Scratchers- have affectionately dubbed "The Schwa". This novel presents ideas of race, culture, and music with language that's lyrical and cheeky. From the opening page, DJ Darky declares that Blackness is over and while reflecting on years of tanning says: "My complexion has darkened somewhat; it's still a nice nonthreatening sitcom Negro brown, but now there's a pomegranate-purple undertone that in certain light gives me a more villainous sheen." Brilliant!I was laughing out loud from just the first few pages. This is rare that a book invokes emotion in me that's evident. This has to be my favorite book thus far for the year. That this book's focal point is music and the level of music snobbery by the host of such thoughtful characters was so on point for me as I can be quite a music snob. Slumberland is like your favorite movie from which you love to quote every other line. Yes, this book has too many lines I want to quote. I'm glad I held on to Beatty's White Boy Shuffle even though I couldn't get into it on my first attempt many years ago. I think I have more appreciative eyes towards his writing now.
    • 5/5
      Paul Beatty's novel Slumberland may leave you with more questions than answers, but somehow, that's just fine. Set in Berlin just as the Wall was coming down, Slumberland explores race, bigotry, music, fame, obscurity and about a dozen other topics through DJ Darky, Schallplattenunterhalter extraordinaire. DJ Darky, a young Los Angelino, heads to Berlin to locate a mysterious jazz musician who has been somehow forgotten behind the Iron Curtain, because only he- Charles Stone, AKA the Schwa- can complete Darky's "perfect beat," a groove so amazing, it can breaks hearts and mend them, make a man see God and simultaneously question His existence.Equal parts Confederacy of Dunces, High Fidelity, Big Fish, and some other stuff I haven't read yet, Slumberland is funny, irreverent and substantive.
    • 4/5
      Paul Beatty is a very talented writer and the elements backdropping the plot behind his new novel 'Slumberland' are very intriguing. On a quest to find a lost jazz musician icon--last known to be on the wrong side of the Berlin Wall-DJ Darky who spins records at hip hop clubs in Los Angeles takes up residence in a jazz club in West Berlin right about the time that the Berlin Wall comes down. Along with a new troop or posse of mostly West Berliner music enthusiasts and one former East German Stasi agent the good DJ finally tracks him down and agrees to get him to cooperate on some of his own musical projects. Part of the appeal of Beatty's very creative writing is a finely tuned comedic sense. He does have a problem of maybe relying on it too much and getting off the track at times. For instance the first 20 or so pages I was wondering whether the book was going to be entirely a kind of stand-up comic routine. Beatty can be laugh out loud funny and the way he skewers black/white commonplace prejudices (particularly the more unconscious kinds) with his almost mordantly objective humor--though he has a light touch--is something I wish other writers were better at. All in all it's a good book though one is left with the sense that Beatty is capable of much more-- or at least that this book could have been realized more fully. IMO he has the talent to become a major American writer by digging a little further. Time will tell whether that happens or not but here's to hoping he does.
    • 4/5
      [Slumberland] by Paul Beatty"Way back when, and probably tomorrow, in the exact place where you now stand, something happened. Whatever happened, at least one person gave a fuck, and at least one person didn't. Which one would you have been? Which one will you be?"And this is my introduction to [Slumberland]; land of candid prose, and blatant opinions. This novel is not for the easily-offended. And while I fall into the afore mentioned category, I greatly enjoyed the book.The plot took a back seat, to the author's lyrical prose and witty content. But, the reader will not tire of Beatty's words. Slumberland is a laugh-out-loud, literally, novel.The narrator's voice was distinct and well developed. I wonder if Beatty enjoyed [The White Tiger], if he has read it. I think I took a lot from this book. Namely, a man's mind is different from a woman's. While Ferguson, my have been a hilarious extreme. Beatty reminds me that I have a little bit more learning to do before I construct a book of all male characters.
    • 3/5
      I received this as part of the Early Reviewer program. I've heard good things about this book and this author and was looking forward to reading it. I thought the premise seemed interesting and I was hoping it would be a good read.The book was fine, but that is all it was. I felt the prose was intentionally pretentious and the plot was threadbare, if it was there at all. It was OK, but maybe I was disappointed because I was expecting something better.Perhaps if I was in a different state of mind, I would have enjoyed it more, but it all seemed frivolous to me.