dorothynaysayer 's review for:

Pym by Mat Johnson

5.0

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Part slave narrative, part Gulliver's Travels, this strange book is an important new addition to the literary contextualization of race in America, not to mention a funny page-turning adventure. The novel is largely structured in the slave narrative tradition, but add to that the fact that it is also partly a fictional academic study by a scholar (footnotes and all), and what you have is a an ingeniously self-aware book that performs a high-wire act between the bounds of fiction and literary criticism. A cerebral, fantastical, and thoroughly clever book that had me nodding my head, laughing, and gasping along the way.