RL's Dream

Rating:
Summary: Redemption
Review: RL's Dream is a haunting story that will change the way you see your life. Through this book, you will see ways that facing up to your pain can bring redemption.

The book opens as elderly black Jazz musician, Atwater "Soupspoon" Wise, painfully returns to his apartment in lower Manhattan. His respite is brief when the landlord's men evict him for many months of not paying his rent and call Social Services to pick him up to be returned to a homeless shelter. It's cold as Soupspoon lies amidst his few belongings on the sidewalk, and it's getting dark. He's so sick he can barely speak, and has a horrible pain in his hip. He feels death standing over him.

While he's been going through this, one of his neighbors, Ms. Kiki Waters, a young white woman is also painfully coming home after being released from a hospital after being stabbed by a young boy. She is appalled to find Soupspoon on the street, for he is the man whose happiness had just cheered her a few days before the attack on her. Knowing her duty as a human being, she orders the men to move Soupspoon into her apartment along with some of his belongings.

Kiki nurses Soupspoon back to health, but uses methods that leave her life at risk.

In the course of their evolving relationship, each one learns how to turn pain into beauty and goodness. Soupspoon does it by playing and singing the blues. Kiki does it by facing up to and overcoming her fears.

The story is beautifully developed around the memories that Soupspoon and Kiki carry around of their younger days in the South. Soupspoon is frustrated that he cannot reach the heights as a musician that his friend RL Johnson could. Kiki carries intense fear from the abuse she suffered at her father's hands. Both are prisoners of those memories until they take steps to move beyond them. Those steps are their redemption.

To me the most powerful part of the book is the opening. Imagine yourself riding home on the subway full of stitches from a knife attack. Emerging, you see a poor, old man lying on the street who is your neighbor. Would you stop to help? What would you do to help? Chances are that you would not do as much as Kiki does. Yet we are supposed to love our neighbor as ourselves. Kiki hasn't known much love, yet she gives all she has to Soupspoon. It's a beautiful story, and shows how beautiful life can be.

If you also love the Blues, this book will reward you with wonderful sketches of what is was like to create that rich music that grew out of pain in the South during the early 20th century.

Rating:
Summary: Wonderfully touching
Review: There are some writers whose talent is so special that you want to save their books and make the reading of them an occasion. Walter Mosley is one of those writers. He invests his characters with such depth, such full histories that you cannot help but care about them. RL's Dream is populated by a cast of such characters; even the most minor ones (including a baby) are fully fleshed and very real. Soupspoon and Kiki are two almost-lost souls who bring each other back to life in unexpected ways. It is a credit to Mosley's rare and splendid talent that the book itself resonates with music; its cadence is almost audible in the spare prose, the all-too-human behavior of people who, often, do things without even really knowing why. To comprehend the blues, to put words, literally, to a musical theme and to do so in a kind-hearted and deeply understanding fashion is to deliver magic in the form of a book. This is a "must read" novel.

Rating:
Summary: Love and goals most don't know
Review: This book has a relationship that would be strange and eccentric to most Americans.Yet, if readers can drop their middle-class values and judgments long enough to get to know the characters, they will, by the book's end, have experienced a story of love between people that they feel they know and care about themselves, and understand goals they themselves would never have.

This is a revelatory tale of losers and the lost, who nonetheless strive to love and to fulfill their dreams, and most readers who can find the newness of a world and people foreign to their own experiences will hope the dreams of these characters come true.

Mosley is a wonderful presence in the American literary scene, not just a mystery/crime writer as some have "written him off" as being. His smooth prose and flow of language, as well as his sensitivities to people and places that make them become more real than comfortable suburbanites in comfortable suburbia, glow with an intellect and emotional intonation found in few modern writers.

Mosley knows the world does not belong only to the middle-class or wealthy, and he makes his readers know it, too, in ways that touch their hearts and make them re-examine their own definitions of love and the natures of their goals.

Rating:
Summary: first mosley experience, probably not the last
Review: this is the first book i have purchased written my mr. mosley. his descriptions and character development are very good as is the plot. the only issue i have with his work were the romantic relationships and the sexuality described in them. i am hardly a prude and i know that this is fiction but i felt that the sexual liasons that took place were not beleivable and not relevant to the storyline. other than this one issue, this is a very good book and i would recommend it.

Rating:
Summary: first mosley experience, probably not the last
Review: this is the first book i have purchased written my mr. mosley. his descriptions and character development are very good as is the plot. the only issue i have with his work were the romantic relationships and the sexuality described in them. i am hardly a prude and i know that this is fiction but i felt that the sexual liasons that took place were not beleivable and not relevant to the storyline. other than this one issue, this is a very good book and i would recommend it.

Rating:
Summary: Heard on 6 cassettes-Best reader ever heard, Great book!
Review: This patchwork quilt of a story is masterful. It weaves in and out, in no chronological order, the history of the blues with slavery, and post slavery era in the Mississippi Delta, incest, loss of a child.

How people affected by these circumstances deal with them by burying themselves in blues or alcohol or imaginery children.

The history and meaning of blues is worth the book alone, but although I usually don't like such heavy material, all the main characters stay with me. Moseley is the best writer of characters, dialogue, place. He doesn't ever explain motivation, his characters just demonstate how they deal with their pain. Its the best audio tape I ever heard. The reader of this, Michael Kramer enhances it with every word, every infection of his voice.

Rating:
Summary: Heard on 6 cassettes-Best reader ever heard, Great book!
Review: This patchwork quilt of a story is masterful. It weaves in and out, in no chronological order, the history of the blues with slavery, and post slavery era in the Mississippi Delta, incest, loss of a child.

How people affected by these circumstances deal with them by burying themselves in blues or alcohol or imaginery children.

The history and meaning of blues is worth the book alone, but although I usually don't like such heavy material, all the main characters stay with me. Moseley is the best writer of characters, dialogue, place. He doesn't ever explain motivation, his characters just demonstate how they deal with their pain. Its the best audio tape I ever heard. The reader of this, Michael Kramer enhances it with every word, every infection of his voice.

Rating:
Summary: mosley at his very best
Review: Together with "Always Outnumbered,..." this is Mosley's greatest achievement. It puts Mosley on the same level as James Baldwin and Richard Wright; it has Baldwin's epic qualities combined with the pride and outrage of Wright's best moments. Mosley is very much his own man, though, and it all makes for one hell of a great novel. Probably an American classic of the late 20th century.

Rating:
Summary: Mosley steps out of genre to create a classic
Review: Walter Mosley was always an uneasy fit in the detective genre, and except for Blue Light, his works outside that genre were more compelling than the stuff that made him famous -- Gone Fishin' and Always Outnumbered both outshine his mysteries.

I think this is because what Mosley is best at is creating characters deeply affected by their roots in Southern poverty and racism. Having to shoehorn the characters and incidents he wants to talk about into even the unconventional format of the Easy Rawlins mysteries makes for an uneasy fit. Always Outnumbered, Gone Fishin', and RL's Blues are less plot-oriented, more freewheeling, and they give Mosley the room to spread out. Like a musician, Mosley is often at his best when he is just riffing. Much as he describes blues lyrics in this book, putting words together that don't make sense unless you are there hearing them with the audience, Mosley puts scenes together in ways that defy traditional narrative yet increase their emotional power.

Freed of the constraints of his mysteries, Mosley has created a very powerful work containing several exquisitely drawn characters and some of the most moving prose I've read in years. RL's Dream ranks among the best works of one of the few popular novelists today who I think we'll still be reading, even studying, a hundred years from now.