DThe fact that snakes live in heaven can be read from the first page. The potholes allowed Ray Carney to take an adventure on the West End Highway, which was completed only a few years ago. The black self-made Ray from Harlem is fighting for his interior design business. He allowed too many customers to buy in installments and allowed many payers who were in arrears. Obviously, the company no longer supports him and his small family. He knew it himself. Circumstances forced him to steal and go hiking at the southern end of Manhattan, where he circulated the hot goods that landed with him.
Behind Coulson Whitehead’s new book is a novel about a furniture store owner, starting with a novel about a gangster. Although Ray would never say that. He is a middleman: “He is a wall between the criminal and the honest world. This is necessary because he is burdened.”
Funny, faster, worse
“Harlem Shuffle” is the title of this book. It will appear in the German translation before the original English version this week. It tells the story of Lei being forced to move in an unwanted direction. As a well-tested seller of beautiful things, he is elegant Picked up. Although the title of the book is completely adapted from an old song, according to the author, all of this has been included in the second half of the title, which can very well reflect the thorough poetic art of the narrator. The shuffling is back and forth, tricky dodges, dance moves and shuffles. Effort, lightness, luck, and opportunity, as the title implies, dominate the entire work. Starting from Ray’s successful Harlem entrepreneurial dream, doing something on himself, “dressing up”, but in the broken houses and streets go ahead.
Since Whitehead won the Pulitzer Prize (“Underground Railroad”) for the first time, critics and readers have been eagerly looking forward to the new novel by the author who was born in New York in 1969. Start with the second “Nickel Boy”. What is he going to do next? how? “Harlem Shuffle” is more intimate, funny, faster, more disgusting, and humorous than the previous novels. It proves once again that the author wants to have something new in each work, even though he uses short scenes and long scenes. The radian creates his dense structure. The numbers outlined with a few clear lines rely on repetition, correspondence, correspondence, and the non-temporal, non-causal relationship of distant text moments.
The more peaceful the space is an illusion
Whitehead rules the material and narrative process as confidently as Ray rules his shop. The architecture and interior design of the novel was created by a master who pushed everything around until it was placed in the right light, in the presence of a young black couple expecting a child, a white police officer investigating Ray, or “Harlem Washing”. Buyers of “brand” leave the best impression on people. Whitehead wrote another forgotten and repressed black history in contemporary American literature. He is a middleman like Ray, a middleman of today’s historical consumers, the arrangement of the past and present in the art gallery. By.
However, this time, at least it seems that, apart from one or another small scam, it is actually only related to rooms, apartments, and houses. It is not about slavery countries and the real subway to freedom, nor about coercion and neglect of dormitories and graves in the welfare system. Compared with slaves in the pre-civil war era or children who were helplessly abused by adult authorities, adult Harlem residents in the late 1950s and early 1960s faced less risk. On the contrary, it is about sofa covers, soft plastic covers and music boxes. Advances in consumer electronics have slowed them down.
