Jonathan Lethem, página 2 de 4

Uno de los sonsonetes más cantados por el mundo artístico ha sido el "deber de la originalidad". No somos nada si no aspiramos a lo auténticamente único. Jonathan Lethem toma el canto con las reservas de quien ha detectado influencias secretas y plagios descarados a todo lo largo del espectro de la cultura, y con certera provocacion desmenuza y tira por la borda los supuestos que insuflan vida y orgullo a los acolitos de la originalidad. Tras una profusion de ejemplos y argumentos, para el final del ensayo queda muy poco del templo de los "unicos" y los "renovadores".

1978 and two 14-year-old white boys are creating dubious art by using a hacksaw to cut multiple quarters into pieces. A child whos just bought ice cream from a Mr. Softee truck witnesses a daylight sidewalk shooting in 1979. At another time, a couple of blocks over, a kid gets caught trying to shoplift an adult magazine from a Puerto Rican hole-in-the-wall. A Black teenager and his white friends square up to a rival Italian gang over the right to play hockey in the street. In 1977 a white kid craters a baseball right in the centre of a Cuban guys windscreen. And so it goes. On the streets of Brooklyn, the faces of the children change but the patterns remain the same: sex; boredom; friendship; violence; a million daily crimes committed, some small, some unimaginably big. But the real action is away from the streets, played out behind closed doors by parents; cops; renovators; landlords; gentrifiers; those who write the headlines, the histories, and the laws; those who award this neighbourhood its name and control its shifting demographics. Across the decades, buildings are developed and homes are razed; communities come in and muscle other communities out; the past haunts the present and perspectives change, so that perpetrators sometimes become victims, and victims sometimes become the worst criminals of all... Written with kaleidoscopic verve and delirious wit, Brooklyn Crime Novel is a breathtaking tour de force of a quarter of a city and the humanity it contains, and an epic interrogation of how we fashion stories to contain the uncontainable: our remorse at the world weve made

The incomparable Jonathan Lethem returns with nine stories that demonstrate his mastery of the short form. Jonathan Lethem's third collection of stories uncovers a father's nervous breakdown at SeaWorld in "Pending Vegan"; a foundling child rescued from the woods during a blizzard in "Traveler Home"; a political prisoner in a hole in a Brooklyn street in "Procedure in Plain Air"; and a crumbling, haunted "blog" on a seaside cliff in "The Dreaming Jaw, The Salivating Ear." Each of these locates itself in Lethem-land, which can be discovered only by visiting. As in his celebrated novels, Lethem finds the uncanny lurking in the mundane, the irrational self-defeat seeping through our upstanding pursuits, and the tragic undertow of the absurd world(s) in which we live. Devoted fans of Lethem will recognize familiar themes: the anxiety of influence taken to reductio ad absurdum in "The King of Sentences"; a hapless, horny outsider summoning bravado in "The Porn Critic"; characters from forgotten comics stranded on a desert island in "Their Back Pages." As always in Lethem, humor and poignancy work in harmony, humans strive desperately for connection, words find themselves misaligned to deeds, and the sentences are glorious.

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From the award-winning author of The Feral Detective and Motherless Brooklyn comes an utterly original post-collapse yarn about two siblings, the man that came between them, and a nuclear-powered sup

In 1955, Rose Zimmer got screwed. It wasn't the first time, and it wasn't the last. In fact, Rose - like all American Communists - got screwed by the entire twentieth century. She doesn't take it lying down. For over forty years she pounds the streets of Sunnyside Gardens, Queens, terrorising the neighbourhood, and her family, with the implacability of her beliefs, the sheer force of her grudge. And the generations that follow Rose will not easily escape her influence, her ire, her radicalism. Foremost among these is Miriam, Rose's charismatic and passionate want-away hippie daughter, who heads for the Greenwich Village of the Sixties; her black stepson Cicero, an angry debunking machine; and her bewildered grandson Sergius, who finds himself an orphan in the capitalist now. A radical family epic, and an alternative view of the American twentieth century, Dissident Gardens is the story of a group of individuals who fought and lost, but might one day win. It is a blast of pure style and literary dazzle from one of the great and most innovative writers of the age.

From the prize-winning author of Motherless Brooklyn, a daring, riotous, sweeping novel that spins the tale of two friends and their adventures in late 20th-century America.This is the story of two boys, Dylan Ebdus and Mingus Rude. They live in Brooklyn and are friends and neighbours; but since Dylan is white and Mingus is black, their friendship is not simple.This is the story of 1970s America, a time when the simplest decisions - what music you listen to, whether to speak to the kid in the seat next to you, whether to give up your lunch money - are laden with potential political, social and racial disaster. This is also the story of 1990s America, when nobody cared anymore.This is the story of what would happen if two teenaged boys obsessed with comic book heroes actually had superpowers: they would screw up their lives.

Lethem illuminates the process by which a child invents himself as a writer, and as a human being, through a series of approaches to the culture around him. In the title piece, a letter from his aunt (a childrens book author) spurs a meditation on the value of writing workshops, the role and influence of reviews, and the uncomfortable fraternity of writers. In Defending The Searchers, Lethem explains how a passion for the classic John Wayne Western became occasion for a series of minor humiliations. In Identifying with Your Parents, an excavation of childhood love for superhero comics expands to cover a whole range of nostalgia for a previous generations cultural artefacts. And 13/1977/21, which begins by recounting the summer he saw Star Wars twenty-one times, slipping past ushers whod begun to recognize me..., becomes a meditation on the sorrow and solace of the solitary moviegoer.

A fathers nervous breakdown during a visit to a theme park; a political prisoner confined to a hole in a busy New York street; a haunted 'blog' Welcome to Lethem-land, which can be discovered only by visiting a place where the uncanny can be found lurking in the mundane, where humour and poignancy work in harmony, and a modern master of American letters entertains and dazzles us once again, as only he can.

Phillip Engstrand es un profesor de universidad que está enamorado de Alice Coombs, una física que está llevando a cabo los más extraños experimentos para demostrar una nueva teoría del origen del universo. El resultado de sus experimentos es Lack, un agujero negro que absorbe selectivamente algunas cosas: un gato, un par de calcetines, unas fresas y rechaza otras, como el amor de la propia Alice. A medida que Alice se obsesiona con Lack, el profesor Engstrand llega a tal punto de desesperación por el amor de Alice que arriesgará su propia vida lanzándose al vacío y negro agujero.

This book shows the development of Jonathan Lethem''s imagination through the movies, comics and books he read as a child - it is a rich mixture of personal memories and cultural commentaries. In the title piece, a letter from his aunt (a children''s book author) spurs a meditation on the value of writing workshops, the role and influence of reviews, and the uncomfortable fraternity of writers. In ''Defending The Searchers'', Lethem explains how a passion for the classic John Wayne Western became occasion for a series of minor humiliations. In ''Identifying with Your Parents'', an excavation of childhood love for superhero comics expands to cover a whole range of nostalgia for a previous generation''s cultural artefacts. And ''13/1977/21'', which begins by recounting the summer he saw Star Wars twenty-one times, ''slipping past ushers who''d begun to recognize me...'', becomes a meditation on the sorrow and solace of the solitary moviegoer. Novelist Lethem''s new collection of essays starts with an intriguing, if emotionally distant, consideration of his lifelong relationship with popular culture and develops into a moving memoir that transcends those references altogether. As the essays make clear, Lethem (The Fortress of Solitude) has always been obsessive: he watched Star Wars 21 times the summer it was released, then followed that with 21 viewings of 2001 a few years later; the novels of Philip K. Dick played as large a role in his growing artistic vision as did the canvases of his father, painter Richard Lethem. But the collection doesn''t find its purpose until the author strips away the pop culture references to get at what really drives him: the childhood his hippie parents provided for him, his father''s artistic influence on him, his mother''s early death. The book picks up steam especially in the essay ''Lives of the Bohemians,'' a simple and direct family history in which, for the first time here, Lethem''s depiction of himself as a child feels genuine rather than theorized, lived rather than considered. By the end, Lethem fully and beautifully bares himself, admitting that he, like so many, is driven by loss. Only then does he write the truest sentence possible: ''I find myself speaking about my mother''s death everywhere I go in this world.''

La fortaleza de la soledad cuenta la historia de Dylan Ebdus. Ebdus llega a Boreum Hill, Brooklyn, durante la primera mitad de los setenta; un niño blanco de una familia de hippies que se establecen con el beneplacito de la fundadora de la comunidad blanca local. La madre de Dylan, Rachel, una mujer bohemia y pronta a llegar a las manos, abandona poco despues a su marido Abraham; un quijotesco pintor que lleva toda su vida haciendo una pelicula con sus pinturas abstractas y que sobrevive pintando portadas para ediciones de ciencia ficcion de bolsillo. Las peripecias de Dylan para sobrevivir a lo largo de todas su educacion secundaria en un barrio de negros, asi como sus dias de ser apalizado simplemente por el dinero de su almuerzo parecen llegar a su fin cuando conoce a su hermano espiritual Mingus Rude, un negro que le introduce en otros mundos.

From the funked-up, messed up Brooklyn of the 1970s to the present day, this novel spans 30 years in the life of two best friends, Dylan and Mingus, their families and an entire neighbourhood. From their stories come the history of soul music, graffiti art, comic books and experimental film.

Cuando Don Carpenter murió en 1995, dejó tras de sí obras como Dura la lluvia que cae o A Couple of Comedians, considerada por Norman Mailer como la mejor novela jamás escrita sobre Hollywood. De manera inesperada, casi diez años despues de su muerte, aparecio entre sus archivos el manuscrito de Los viernes en Enricos, una magnifica novela que abarca aproximadamente veinte años en la vida de cuatro escritores en el San Francisco y el Portland de los cincuenta y los sesenta, en plena efervescencia del delirio de los poetas beat.Los herederos de Carpenter le pidieron al escritor Jonathan Lethem que ordenara y editara el manuscrito y, para su beneplacito, Lethem se topo con una obra maestra. Los viernes en Enricos disecciona con rotunda sobriedad las ambiciones literarias y las aspiraciones a la fama y al dinero de un heterogeneo grupo de amigos. Carpenter presenta una maravillosa e inolvidable galeria de personajes, varado cada cual en su particular atolladero de traumas y esperanzas: Dick Dubonet y Charlie Monel, empeñados en materializar el potencial que muestran desde muy jovenes; Jaime Froward y Stan Winger, que se abren paso de manera mas lenta, pero tambien mas determinada, como si su teson tuviera que forjar y conquistar un destino que pareciera que nunca terminaran de hacer suyo; y Linda, la presencia electrica que galvaniza al resto, musa de los beat y femme fatale en la que convergen el deseo y las frustraciones de los protagonistas. La losa de ser una eterna promesa, la tentacion de venderse a Hollywood, los celos profesionales, los exitos fulgurantes y pasajeros, las drogas, el alcohol, el sexo, la interminable carrera de fondo que supone la escritura y el desgaste emocional y vital que ello conlleva: Carpenter construye con absoluta maestria y pulso narrativo unas historias agridulces, que resuenan hondamente en el silencio admirado que sigue a la lectura de esta novela.

Una de las voces más frescas de la narrativa estadounidense. Dos muchachos, uno negro y uno blanco, protagonizan este viaje por el Brooklyn de los años setenta, con sus diferencias raciales y sus signos politicos y culturales, los que han prefigurado los tiempos de hoy.

Con esta novela, su autor se eleva a la categoría de gran renovador de la narrativa, inquietante y contundente. Rindiendo tributo al western, también a la aventura de anticipación, se trata del despertar sexual de una muchacha adolescente, hija de una familia que se desintegra sin remedio.