Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Book That Will Haunt Your Quiet Times, 24 Jun 1999
By A Customer
When I was 12 years old, my father brought home a trunk full of used books from a thrift store. In it was every book imaginable by the leading lights of the African-American literary pantheon. Baldwin, Hughes, Hurston, Wright, Fanon, Brown and of course the weightiest of the tomes at 600-plus pages, Ellison's Invisible Man. I read through all the slimmer volumes and never got around to Ellison until I was in college. Even after hearing all the hype about it for years on end, I was still floored by the book. It was the kind of book you backtrack while reading, retracing chapters you just read to see if the initial impact of the words was really that forceful. I empathized with the book and it's protagonist because having just gone through my early adolescence and teens I sensed his feeling of longing...and need for belonging. Nearing the end of the book, I slowed my pace, afraid of what I would find. After finishing it for many days (weeks, months...) afterward the book haunted my quiet times. It haunted me whenever I thought about it for years afterward. Thus, having just bought the "new" Ellison, "Juneteenth" I also bought the new commemorative "Invisible Man" and decided to read it again first. It was more powerful than before. It's tale of a search for identity in a land where your identity is denied rings even truer in this time of assimilation/balkanization. We live in a time where color-blindness (one form of invisibility) is the alleged goal while denial of recognition and privelege (the more prevalent form of invisibility) is still the unfortunate norm. Beyond being a book of the 50's and the civil rights era, it's even more important as a book for the move to a new millennium...where the lines demarking identity simultaneously harden and blur. And as to the reviewer who was puzzled about the lead character's display of leadership skills and potential while never seeming to live up to it, there is no need for puzzlement. From the teacher busted for drug-dealing, to the born-again pro-footballer busted on Super Bowl eve for solicitation to the present resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, this paradox is perhaps more the norm than we are willing to admit.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Certainly one of the ten best 20th-century American novels.., 26 Nov 1998
By A Customer
INVISIBLE MAN is a Bildungsroman, hilariously recounting the missteps of a black boy trying to make his way in the black and white worlds, neither of which he understands. The novel conludes ambivalently with the expressed idea that "the world is possibility," but denies this dramatically when the hero is literally forced underground, in a subterranean hole illuminated by thousands of light bulbs, representing his disillusionment. Up to this point, this young black Candide has made every misjudgment possible, being used by everyone he comes in contact with, including the Communist Party (here called "The Brotherhood."} Both American history and American race relations are seen through a sophisticated prism through the microcosm of the novel.The work is beautifully structured and styled. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
Better than a New York City high!, 8 Jul 1999
By A Customer
I am not a literary genius by any means, but Ralph Waldo Ellison was! I travelled back to a world in which still exists. Sad, but true. It's good to think of others as invisible, which is the way I was brought up. Mr. Ellison's book was a superb work of art!
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