Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Exhilirating and Convincing Characters!, 19 Dec 2002
Jonathan Lethem is a true original. His latest, "Motherless Brooklyn" manages to spin a tale of orphan misfits, detectives, gangsters and a main character that suffers from Tourette Syndrome into an impressive, rapid paced melee. The descriptions of the Brooklyn area, the characters and all the necessary sensory perceptions needed come through in snappy prose. Lethem's description of the 'impulses' and 'partly contollable' symptoms of Tourette are dead-on. Never has this reviewer read anything that so accurately captures the essence of Tourette and the personality in a novel. The reader can feel the symptoms of Tourette welling up in themselves as strongly as the character does on the page.Half detective story and half a case study of a young man with Tourette, Lethem intertwines the two deftly, giving the reader little time to breathe between events. The detective story may be slightly hackneyed and the closeness of the orphans and thier Fagan-like detective mentor could have been more intimately detailed, but Lionel Essrog and his Tourette's make fantastic fodder. Lethem goes for broke. This novel describes Tourette and real life on the streets like no other author has before.
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14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Accurate, Heartbreaking and Funny, 8 Jan 2003
Jonathan Lethem is a true original. His latest, "Motherless Brooklyn" manages to spin a tale of orphan misfits, detectives, gangsters and a main character that suffers from Tourette Syndrome into an impressive, rapid paced melee. The descriptions of the Brooklyn area, the characters and all the necessary sensory perceptions needed come through in snappy prose. Lethem's description of the 'impulses' and 'partly contollable' symptoms of Tourette are dead-on. Never has this reviewer read anything that so accurately captures the essence of Tourette and the personality in a novel. The reader can feel the symptoms of Tourette welling up in themselves as strongly as the character does on the page.Half detective story and half a case study of a young man with Tourette, Lethem intertwines the two deftly, giving the reader little time to breathe between events. The detective story may be slightly hackneyed and the closeness of the orphans and thier Fagan-like detective mentor could have been more intimately detailed, but Lionel Essrog and his Tourette's make fantastic fodder. Lethem goes for broke. This novel describes Tourette and real life on the streets like no other author has before.
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6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Lionel Essrog lives., 14 Oct 2003
Not a detective story in the conventional sense, Motherless Brooklyn is as much the story of Lionel Essrog as it is the story of a murder, and in this sense it is particularly appealing. Essrog is doubly removed from the mainstream--he has grown up in an orphanage without the kind of nurturing which gives humans their ability to empathize with each other, and he has Tourette's Syndrome, which makes him involuntarily touch and pat objects, count or repeat actions, and, most annoyingly for him, blurt out nonsense, rhymes, and sometimes obscenities at oftentimes inappropriate moments. He is not an easy character to identify with.Lionel is trying to find the murderer of Frank Minna, a somewhat shady character who has mentored Lionel and three others from the orphanage since they were young teenagers. He comes to believe that he may be the only one who cares enough about Frank to be able to solve his murder, and he begins to think that Frank counted on him to do this by the statements and actions he made in the moments immediately before and after he received his fatal wounds. As Lionel works to find Frank's killer, as he tries to attract a woman and sustain a relationship, and as he evaluates the relationships he has had with the other orphans, Lionel becomes more mature and more aware of his unusual relationships with the outside world. Jonathan Lethem, the author, does not use Lionel's Tourette's symptoms as a literary trick. He makes the reader care about Lionel without pitying him. His imaginative descriptions, especially those presented from Lionel's point of view, are often both humorous and uniquely offbeat, and his ability to keep the reader fascinated with this character and his story is dazzling. Mary Whipple
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