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bluepigeon's review
5.0
Some books, you flip through the pages to see if you will like it, read a paragraph or two and find yourself extremely confused, because you did not understand anything; no, the words themselves are known, but put together they make up a foreign language, like some un-heard-of world-building that you have to start reading from the very beginning to be able to even begin to understand. Black Deutschland is one of those books. Someone said, in their review of the book, that it is unapologetically intellectual, and that it wholly is, and that is part of what makes Black Deutschland difficult to grasp at times. But there is much more to it than that, in making one grasp it and in making one get completely lost, only to climb back of the murky waters with some profound, back-of-the-mind understanding that is surreal and clear at the same time.
Spending the entire novel in Jed's mind, the world-building is complex, deep, confused, and total. Without getting to know Jed, the words that make up the novel are incomprehensible when strung together into sentences, though each one might be looked up in a dictionary to yield some undeterred meaning of its own. The amalgam that is the novel not only accomplishes to deliver the (sur)realities of the bohemian life in a divided country for expats, queers, Africans, African-Americans and artists, but also manages to tell the bleary post-rehab reality of Jed, the African-American gay man who uses the city to search for life without ever being with others, to learn to love alone, to grow up to find himself standing after everything that ever was is gone to dust and the world has moved on.
Darryl Pinckney brings the race politics of America to the very nooks and crannies of Berlin shadowed by the tall wall. He digs in with intellectual relish the straddling of many marginalized identities, from the "Negro Achiever" to the black gay G.I., from black power to the drug-addicted failures of everyday life. Often, there is discourse that I would define as "UN talk," meaning a bunch of serious sounding words that say nothing, especially when Jed is trying to justify his existence in the employ of the famous architect in Berlin, that is hilarious in its meandering lack of meaning for anyone, so much so that, at some point the said-architect has to throw up his hands and declare that he does not understand any of the words himself. Often, too, there are sentences that slap you in the face in their incisive brilliance, that crystallization of something so simple and true and usually very sad.
Black Deutschland is not for everyone and is not an easy read. But it is well worth the time and effort for the astute reader. Recommended for those who like televisions, Susan Sontag, haircuts, shawls, ambitious architectural projects, Schwinn bicycles, Mercedes Benz, communes, and soccer.
Spending the entire novel in Jed's mind, the world-building is complex, deep, confused, and total. Without getting to know Jed, the words that make up the novel are incomprehensible when strung together into sentences, though each one might be looked up in a dictionary to yield some undeterred meaning of its own. The amalgam that is the novel not only accomplishes to deliver the (sur)realities of the bohemian life in a divided country for expats, queers, Africans, African-Americans and artists, but also manages to tell the bleary post-rehab reality of Jed, the African-American gay man who uses the city to search for life without ever being with others, to learn to love alone, to grow up to find himself standing after everything that ever was is gone to dust and the world has moved on.
Darryl Pinckney brings the race politics of America to the very nooks and crannies of Berlin shadowed by the tall wall. He digs in with intellectual relish the straddling of many marginalized identities, from the "Negro Achiever" to the black gay G.I., from black power to the drug-addicted failures of everyday life. Often, there is discourse that I would define as "UN talk," meaning a bunch of serious sounding words that say nothing, especially when Jed is trying to justify his existence in the employ of the famous architect in Berlin, that is hilarious in its meandering lack of meaning for anyone, so much so that, at some point the said-architect has to throw up his hands and declare that he does not understand any of the words himself. Often, too, there are sentences that slap you in the face in their incisive brilliance, that crystallization of something so simple and true and usually very sad.
Black Deutschland is not for everyone and is not an easy read. But it is well worth the time and effort for the astute reader. Recommended for those who like televisions, Susan Sontag, haircuts, shawls, ambitious architectural projects, Schwinn bicycles, Mercedes Benz, communes, and soccer.
kbc's review
3.0
The prose is beautiful and so is Berlin. An interesting work exploring what happens when you never quite belong anywhere and the world of African American expats in West Berlin in the years before the fall of the Wall.
(I feel like I'd have understood it more if I had a better grip on the history of Berlin.)
(I feel like I'd have understood it more if I had a better grip on the history of Berlin.)
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