Erasure

Rating:
Summary: THIS BOOK IS SO UTTERLY STIMULATING.....
Review: ....on so many different levels that I'm going to have to read it a few more times to plumb it depths completely. At once hilariously funny, disturbing, sardonic, pedantic, vicious and shocking, ERASURE is everything modern literature is lacking today. Absolutely brilliant.

If you should find this book in the "Black Interest" section of your local bookstore, please do immediately stage an irate protest (you'll have to read the book).

Rating:
Summary: ERASURE makes my list!!!!
Review: ERASURE by Percival Elliott makes my list. It's a 10 star book worth every penny.

AS THE NEW YEAR IS UPON US, I OFFICIALLY OFFER YOU MY LIST OF THE 10 BEST BOOKS THAT I'VE READ IN 2004. THIS IS OUT OF ABOUT 84 BOOKS THAT I'VE READ THIS YEAR. EVERY SINGLE BOOK ON THIS LIST IS A MASTERPIECE WORTH BUYING. YOU WON'T BE DISAPPOINTED WITH GREAT LITERATURE LIKE THE FOLLOWING:

"THE DARKEST CHILD"--Delores Phillips

The finest, most dramatic debut I've read in years. Top notch and gut-wrenching. This is by far the best book of 2004.

"BRICK LANE"--Monica Ali

Superb entry into a world foreign yet all too familiar. Flawless, beautiful writing.

"HOTTENTOT VENUS"--Barbara Chase Riboud

A True Story. Which makes this book all the more shocking and tragic. By now you've heard of the kidnapped and dehumanized South African woman paraded in the 1800's Europe as a "freak" because of her huge posterior and the apron over her genitals. Chase Riboud chronicles the tale perfectly and makes it far more interesting than just history. The fact that "Sarah" was like a Pop Superstar of her day makes it all the more chilling in my opinion. A definite Must-Read.

"FLESH AND THE DEVIL"--Kola Boof

Totally original, unexpected black love story. Chock full of African history, U.S. black history, fantastic plot twists, pulsating sex, equally dazzling "lovemaking", brilliant observations about race, color and sexism and plenty of risk-taking by the sensational Sudanese-born Kola Boof, truly a NEW STAR in the "epic" sense. Fabulous!

"ERASURE"---Percival Everett

I know. I'm late reading this one. But it's classic, fantastic, the greatest book ever written about being a "black" writer today. SUPERB. 10 Stars.

"A DISTANT SHORE"--Caryl Phillips

Great novel about "human beings" ripped apart in their own world and then thrown together in new equally dreadful surroundings. A black man and a white woman are juxtaposed in England with terribly beautiful insight by the writer. It's a hard book to explain, except that it's about human beings finding their real true minds. Superb!!!! I give this one 10 stars.

"DRINKING COFFEE ELSEWHERE"--Z.Z. Packer

The breakout debut of the new Alice Walker and Toni Morrison rolled into one. Z.Z. Packer is outrageously talented and brilliant. These sparse, witty, intelligent, insightful short stories will bring you to tears, make you laugh and truly astonish you.

"THE KNOWN WORLD"--Edward P. Jones

This book starts off kind of "slow", but once you get into it, it's quite shocking, easily one of the most important stories told in a decade. Jones deserves all the accolades and awards he's received for this masterful masterpiece of the new century.

"LOVE"--Toni Morrison

Still the undisputable greatest writer writing. Toni Morrison offers up one of her very best novels, the most underrated and overlooked novel of the year. Absolutely meszmerizing, a bute.




Rating:
Summary: He Has a Point
Review: Erasure is a difficult book. It's a brilliantly written book and up until the second half it's a funny one. Monk, the novel's hero, in a fit of anger writes a slang and stereotype laden piece of trash and is horrified to see it sell better than anything he's ever written before.

On one level, this is a book that any author could relate to. Why do garbage books always seem to be in the top ten best selling lists? It's easy to become bitter and Monk does what many authors have only fantasized about. The book starts out as a satirical hoot then its gets serious. It's very hard to put comedy and drama together and the effect here is rather like throwing a bunch of rocks into a jelly mold. When Percival L. Everett gets serious the book sinks under the weight. I wish he could've kept it funny throughout but it's still a remarkable book that slyly pokes fun at the publishing industry.

Rating:
Summary: A Phenomenally Well Written Story
Review: Erasure is a well written story about an out of sorts author competing with a litany of insulting "pop fiction" (as Margaret Johnson Hodge so eloquently puts it)pervasively conquering the African-American literature circuit today. The un-employed author is so dismayed that he writes an insulting novel that yields him a multi-million dollar movie deal and a six-figure publishing deal from a book with a title so perverse, I would not mention it here. Some of the irony is that the actual author of this novel, Percival Everett is so good that the novel within the novel or the perverse book is actually pretty interesting.

Thusly Mr. Everett makes his point, you'll have to read the book to find out what the point is. The plot was interesting, poignant and believable. Mr. Everett does a fantastic job of weaving flashbacks and the characters are completely developed without being bogged down by unneccessary detail. I do agree with another reviewer in that Mr. Everett does seem to take himself a little seriously and (in this reader's opinion)is on a well deserved soap box.

I highly recommend this intelligent read. My biggest disappointment was that the book ended and that I did not find out the reaction to "Monk's" revelation even though I could only imagine.

Rating:
Summary: Erasure is satire and truth at its wicked best.
Review: I had tried reading Percival Everett's work before picking up Erasure, but found his writing to be like that of his protagonist Monk Ellison's - confounding, challenging, complex. These are the very things that make Erasure work so well. Everett doesn't give the reader a mindless, lie-on-the-beach story with a cute ending. What he does give in Erasure are multi-faceted characters, a layered plot and twists and turns that make you alternately laugh out loud and moan with empathy. As each character appeared or was introduced, I felt they were people I know, including the changing parent and unchanging siblings. I admit that I skipped most of the novel-within-the-novel, a writing device that Everett uses effectively, but one which took up too many pages for me. The perfect ending made me want to keep on reading. This book compels a re-reading to fully savor the nuances, to look up forgotten and unknown references and to enjoy the relationships revealed.

Rating:
Summary: Witty, Intense, and Right On Target
Review: I wanted to be the first to say it but someone beat me to it. Erasure is a Awesome, a multifaceted satire of the NEW Black Literature scene, dead on target and right on time, no doubt one of the best books I've read this year.

Thelonius "Monk" Ellison is a lit professor slash writer who has had marginal success with his previous novels and now can't get a publisher for his new book because he doesn't write "black enough". While visiting his mother and sister in his hometown, Washington DC, he steps into a Border's bookstore and is mortified by the fact that one of his previous works was found in the "African American Studies" section of the store when his book has nothing to do with African American studies but instead a Greek tragedy. He comes across a book called, We Lives In Da Ghetto, and his sister lets him know that it's the hottest selling book right now and will be made into a movie. He opens the book and reads the first few paragraphs and again, mortified, "this is the black experience that they want him to write about." So he does, under an pseudonymous alter ego. The novel catapults him to instant success and money, which he is in need of badly to care for his mother who has Alzheimers.

The psuedo novel is included in Erasure and is complete with have finished sentences, Ebonics to the tenth degree and lots of explicatives that describe sex, violence and finally, life in da ghetto. Alas, he's written a "true gritty black novel." The pressure mounts when his publisher wants him to make a public appearance as Stagg R. Leigh, his alter ego. Does he show his face to the literature community that he once mocked for it's incompetence and ingnorance? The cover of the book pretty much tells the rest of the story.

Rating:
Summary: Hilarious, observant, wide-ranging, and dead accurate
Review: In Erasure, Percival Everett introduces us to the character of Thelonious Ellison, an African-American author of prodigious intellectual gifts who writes facile, interesting, left-of-center literature that is either ignored or misunderstood. When a cultually-illiterate novel about the black experience is praised for its honesty and reality, becoming a best seller as a result, Ellison angrily writes a stereotypical ghetto fabulous novel of his own. To his surprise, it becomes a critical and commercial success.

Erasure explores a variety of issues concerning race, identity, the perceptions of popular culture, and the often shallow definitions of "blackness" in America. It is all too true that American culture views the black experience through a limited prism. Any work that is done by black artists in any realm is often not judged on its own artistic merits, but on its "relevance" to the black experience. The black experience itself is limited to poverty, crime, family pathologies, and a general sense of hopelessness. Art that tries to expand beyond these limited boundaries is marginalized or ignored, and its creators are tarred with the criticism of not being "authentically black." In Erasure, Everett provides several hilarious, and at the same time resonant, examples of how popular culture shackles black artistry with its limited and often ignorant portrayals of black people. The runaway success of "We Lives In The Ghetto" and Ellison's own savage parody illustrate this point. Everett takes several broad, savage, and well-deserved swipes at daytime talk shows, literary critics, the publishing industry, and bookstores (for their categorzation of works by black authors). This is a classic novel.

Rating:
Summary: Not an easy read...in a great way
Review: My last few reads have been easy reads, just a step above watching televison in terms of depth and plot. Hey, sometimes I enjoy a nice breezy read.

With Erasure, Mr. Everett isn't making things that simple. It's not a complicated, boring textbook read but you will have to *think* (and in some cases, bust out a foreign language dictionary) and the more you think, the more layers you'll uncover.

While the main plot centers around Monk, a writer with marginal success, and his sudden fame at writing a ghetto fabulous new-wave Mantan novel, the incidents that surround this rise to fame touch deeply on other themes - family ties, socio-economic status, and love (to name a few). Everett covers a lot of ground with this book and ties it all together masterfully (and with quite a bit of humor).

If you're at all interested how race intersects with the publishing industry (i.e. "Hey, I wrote a book about plumbing and I happen to be Black, why is my plumbing book in the African-American section of the bookstore?"), pick this book up. If you want a good read that will make you think without making you choke on your own yawns, pick this book up. Hey, even if you like stereotypical novels filled with difficult to read Ebonics, pick this book up - just skip to Monk's mini-novel in the middle.

Rating:
Summary: Interesting novel
Review: To be honest, I wasn't sure if I was going to enjoy this book at first; however, it turned out to be fascinating and a real page turner. Through the character Monk, an upper class black writer, Everett explores the idea of being "black enough" in today's society. Monk struggles with not being considered black enough because he writes intellectually. To be successful, he must write about the falsehoods of black life, such as the stereotype that all black people have tons of kids out of wedlock and with many people and have no intelligence. This, Monk's publisher notes, as well as others in the book, is "real," even though it is not. When Monk finally gives into writing this way (which is done early in the book), the effects are astonishing. Monk struggles with who he has become by writing such a story. Monk's story is also included in the book, lasting about 100 pages. I forewarn everyone that this section of the book has a bunch of cursing and intimate details (to go along with the stereotype of how black people are). If you can tolerate it, the book becomes eye-opening and can make you see life, especially when you see something stereotypical or hear someone making a stereotype, differently. A definite must. A keeper on my bookshelf.

Rating:
Summary: Much more than a novel on race
Review: Written primarily as a satire, "Erasure" works on so many levels that to pigeonhole it as a novel about race is inadequate. The book succeeds on several other levels: as an oddly affecting family drama, as a spoof on the "ghetto novel," as a parody of academic pretension, as a commentary on the publishing industry's infatuation with fleeting trends.

Nevertheless, "Erasure" has received prominence largely because of its discussion of what it means to be "black." The protagonist, Theolonius "Monk" Ellison, is a professor at a major California university who writes postmodern, academic fiction but finds himself unread and ignored largely because he refuses to publish the type of work "expected" of African Americans. To an obviously significant extent, this portrayal is autobiographical: in an interview published in The Guardian (a British newspaper), Everett commented, "When I see my books in the Black Fiction or Black Studies section, I feel baffled. I really don't know what those terms mean." Similarly, in the novel, Monk has a fit when he finds his own novels shelved in the African American studies section at a major bookstore chain. After reading this book, I went to a local branch of that same chain to look for Everett's other novels and found them all, ironically, in the last place I thought to look: under African American literature.

But back to "Erasure": When another writer, after spending a few days in Harlem, writes a "ghetto novel" that becomes a national best-seller, Monk, in anger, writes a dead-on satire that is published and, to the author's surprise, taken seriously as "the best novel by an African American in years . . . a true, raw, gritty work." The novel-within-the-novel, "My Pafology" (which is "reprinted" here in its entirety) is so over the top that it's impossible to believe that reviewers wouldn't recognize it as a farce. (An example of its humor: the main character, Van Go Jenkins, has fathered, by four different mothers, "fo' babies": Aspireene, Tylenola, Dexatrina, and Rexall.) But realism is not the point: Everett intends to reduce to absurdity the idea of the "ghetto novel" and its widespread acceptance as the embodiment of black experience.

In the previously mentioned interview, Everett carefully qualified this view of literature, saying, "I have nothing against ghetto novels or rural Southern novels, except that they are the only representations out there." This partly explains why, in spite of himself, Everett can't write a truly horrible "bad novel"; "My Pafology" is bracing even when it is ridiculous; it is undeniably authentic in its very inauthenticity. Everett acknowledged, "I can't even bear to read from that section because, despite all my efforts to the contrary, it works in some weird way." It's clear from the many ambiguities throughout "Erasure" that Everett does not mean to denounce such works as much as he means to condemn their pervasiveness. After all, Everett himself makes quite clear his own admiration for Hurston's "Their Eyes Were Watching God"--the archetype of "rural Southern novels."

The aspect of "Erasure" that charmed me the most, however, was the interaction between Monk and members of his family: his aging mother, whose mental acuity is rapidly deteriorating; his sister Lisa, who works in a women's health clinic and is threatened by anti-abortion activists; and his brother Bill, who undergoes a hostile divorce when he reveals to his wife and children that he is gay. After you're done chuckling at Theolonius Ellison's antics as an author, you'll find yourself tearfully reflecting on the heartaches of his experiences as a son and brother. This storyline may seem detached from the major theme of the book--and that is, no doubt, exactly Everett's point: we all have families and experiences and backgrounds that transcend any notion of what it means to be "black"--or a member of any other blurrily defined group.