Sunday, January 24, 2010

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

What's most amazing about this book is the time that it was written - late 40s, published in the early 50s. Yet it pretty accurately predicts most facets of the civil rights movement for blacks, good and bad. In fact, the first scene in the book, the "battle royale" contains, in miniature, most of what happens later. Black man rewarded by white, reward turns out to be denigrating, blacks fight amongst themselves, whites are pulling the strings, and so on and so forth.

My advice, if you are reading this edition, is to skip the introduction - read it later if you want to. The author does quite a bit of pontificating.

The novel also is somewhat heavy-handed with the symbolism. Everything is a symbol, or can be viewed as a symbol. That gets old quickly, especially when it is so obvious.

Link to Amazon: Invisible Man

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