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R.L.'s Dream
 
 
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R.L.'s Dream (Paperback)

by Walter Mosley (Author)
5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)

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Product details

  • Paperback: 273 pages
  • Publisher: Serpent's Tail (5 Oct 1995)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 1852423757
  • ISBN-13: 978-1852423759
  • Product Dimensions: 21 x 13.2 x 2 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 996,852 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

    Popular in this category:

    #56 in  Books > Crime, Thrillers & Mystery > Authors, A-Z > M > Mosley, Walter

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Product Description

Product Description

Ageing Bluesman Soupspoon Wise is alone and dying. He has played his music in 1000 bars, but nothing could ever beat playing with Robert "RL" Johnson. Now Soupspoon is haunted by that brief encounter with the great musician, the genius who sold his soul to the Devil.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Redemption, 3 May 2004
By Professor Donald Mitchell "Jesus Makes Me a P... (Boston) - See all my reviews
(TOP 10 REVIEWER)      
This review is from: R L's Dream (Paperback)
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.

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