- Paperback: 176 pages
- Publisher: Doubleday (Oct 21 2003)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0385507941
- ISBN-13: 978-0385507943
- Product Dimensions: 19 x 14.5 x 1.3 cm
- Shipping Weight: 227 g
- Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #1,369,709 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Description
From Publishers Weekly
Whitehead (The Intuitionist; John Henry Days) lays out a wildly creative view of New York City. To out-of-towners, Gotham is about famous places, but Whitehead's New York is not. It's more about a way of seeing. For example, "No matter how long you have been here, you are a New Yorker the first time you say, That used to be Munsey's, or That used to be the Tic Toc Lounge... when what was there before is more real and solid than what is here now." Whitehead begins with the bus ride into Port Authority, complete with impossibly heavy baggage, bathrooms braved by only the desperate and the seating strategies of experienced bus riders. He cuts to city feelings: the morning's garbage truck noises; the problem of rain; coping with rush hour. When he does write of celebrated places-Central Park, Coney Island, the Brooklyn Bridge-it's for the role they play in our ritual life: when we go, how we are when we're there and how it feels to leave. Whitehead is a master of the minutiae of the mundane. He takes you to the moment of a subway train leaving without you: could you have made it if you'd left a few seconds earlier? Should you take a taxi? You check the tunnel for the next train, fusing with thoughts of time as new passengers accumulate on the platform. This 13-part lyric symphony is like E.B. White's Here Is New York set to the beat of Ellington or Cage.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Lovers of adventurous literary fiction relished Whitehead's novels, The Intuitionist (1998) and John Henry Days (2001), recognizing him as an original, sardonic, yet compassionate writer. Anointed with a MacArthur "genius" grant, Whitehead now presents a ravishing cycle of imaginative and evocative prose poems in tribute to his home, New York City, the quintessential metropolis of dreams. Writing in short, emphatic sentences, Whitehead riffs poignantly and playfully on myriad strategies for urban survival as he incisively distills the kaleidoscopic frenzy of the city into startlingly vital metaphors and cartoon-crisp analogies. Intensely sensory in his details, wistful and funny in his psychological disclosures, he makes everything come to mythic life, from the fury of rush hour to the strained etiquette of subway riders to Central Park, Times Square, Coney Island, and the Brooklyn Bridge. The mad choreography a rainstorm puts into motion, the rituals of downtown nightclubs, the horrors of the 9-to-5 routine, the waxing and waning of the self against the backdrop of so many other souls are all given a sharp, metaphysical twist in Whitehead's gorgeous rendering of New York as a colossal, ever-metamorphosing phantasm. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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Most helpful customer reviews
1.0 out of 5 stars
Free Association At Its Worst,
This review is from: The Colossus of New York: A City in 13 Parts (Paperback)
People that laud this type of 'work' are the type that can read something significant into anything because they don't want to admit that they don't get it. He tries to paint a picture of Gotham using mawkish free association which comes across as pseudo-intellect at its worst/best. I was really looking forward to this book because it sounded like a very cool exercise and interesting look into the greatest city on the planet. Hardbound pretentious excrement.
4.0 out of 5 stars
Fantastic.,
By
This review is from: The Colossus of New York: A City in 13 Parts (Paperback)
Colson Whitehead, The Colossus of New York: A City in Thirteen Parts (Doubleday, 2003)When one encounters the name "Colson Whitehead," one is apt to think of an old Irish immigrant viewing the city through a jaundiced eye, bleary from another night of stumbling home in rush hour only to find he's locked himself out of his bachelor pad and can't get to the can of beans sitting on the counter seductively calling his name. Instead, what we're given is a young (younger than I am, anyway) born-and-raised New Yorker writing about the place he calls home. But Colson Whitehead's The Colossus of New York is not just another travelogue. Oh, no, my friends. In fact, it is anything but; I seriously doubt the NY tourism board is going to be recommending this one. At times loving and ominous, sweet and sassy, laugh-out-loud funny and painfully depressed, The Colossus of New York is much like New York itself. There are eight million stories in the naked city, Whitehead wryly quotes, and one would think from reading this that every one of them is feeling a completely different emotion from any of the others at any given moment, and that it's all a constantly swirling chaotic mass. Amen. Perhaps the most interesting thing about the book is how Whitehead manages to take this odd, impressionist look at New York and map it onto you, the reader. You're liable to find at least one or two snatches of sentence per page you can identify with, even if you've never set foot within an hundred miles of the place. Thus, even if you care nothing about New York, it's probable he's going to keep you interested in its goings-on. A beautiful thing, that. But the draw of the book, and its continuing majesty throughout, is Whitehead's ability with language. His diction takes us from the language poetry of Charles Olson to the Nuyorican-style street rap that passes for poetry among slammers, but with Whitehead the language never loses its poetic drive. All of it, even the ugliness, is beautiful. And above all, The Colossus of New York is a love song, the kind that one would write to one's spouse after seventy years of marriage if one could find a way to include all one's spouse's faults and still make it beautiful. This is a powerful little book, and highly deserving of the widest possible audience. A shoo-in for the top ten list this year. ****
5.0 out of 5 stars
Colossal!,
By A Customer
This review is from: The Colossus of New York: A City in 13 Parts (Paperback)
The observations in this magnificent little volume--and the way they are expressed by the author--are just exquisite. So much has been written about the great city, but this captures its spirit best of all (better even than E.B. White's "Here Is New York"--a great achievement indeed). The writing is pure poetry. I don't know why New York provokes such veneration in a way that few other cities do (certainly not my hometown, London), but for someone who spent a few years living on the Upper West Side, it certainly made me want to return. The book will make you homesick for New York even if you've never been there.
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