The Sellout - BokDraken

paperback

På English

Publicerades 15 januari 2016 av Pan Macmillan India.

ISBN:: 978-1-78607-017-3

A biting satire about a young man's isolated upbringing and the race trial that sends him to the Supreme Court, Paul Beatty's The Sellout showcases a comic genius at the top of his game. It challenges the sacred tenets of the United States Constitution, urban life, the civil rights movement, the father-son relationship, and the holy grail of racial equality―the black Chinese restaurant.

Born in the "agrarian ghetto" of Dickens―on the southern outskirts of Los Angeles―the narrator of The Sellout resigns himself to the fate of lower-middle-class Californians: "I'd die in the same bedroom I'd grown up in, looking up at the cracks in the stucco ceiling that've been there since '68 quake." Raised by a single father, a controversial sociologist, he spent his childhood as the subject in racially charged psychological studies. He is led to believe that his father's pioneering work will result in a memoir that …

A biting satire about a young man's isolated upbringing and the race trial that sends him to the Supreme Court, Paul Beatty's The Sellout showcases a comic genius at the top of his game. It challenges the sacred tenets of the United States Constitution, urban life, the civil rights movement, the father-son relationship, and the holy grail of racial equality―the black Chinese restaurant.

Born in the "agrarian ghetto" of Dickens―on the southern outskirts of Los Angeles―the narrator of The Sellout resigns himself to the fate of lower-middle-class Californians: "I'd die in the same bedroom I'd grown up in, looking up at the cracks in the stucco ceiling that've been there since '68 quake." Raised by a single father, a controversial sociologist, he spent his childhood as the subject in racially charged psychological studies. He is led to believe that his father's pioneering work will result in a memoir that will solve his family's financial woes. But when his father is killed in a police shoot-out, he realizes there never was a memoir. All that's left is the bill for a drive-thru funeral.

Fuelled by this deceit and the general disrepair of his hometown, the narrator sets out to right another wrong: Dickens has literally been removed from the map to save California from further embarrassment. Enlisting the help of the town's most famous resident―the last surviving Little Rascal, Hominy Jenkins―he initiates the most outrageous action conceivable: reinstating slavery and segregating the local high school, which lands him in the Supreme Court.

11 utgåvor

Björn recenserade The Sellout av Paul Beatty

None

4 stjärnor

For the most part, Swedish translators do a good job with lauded anglophone writers. This time, though, not so much. What I imagine is a tour de force of using language, from Dickens to Kanye, to turn over every rock of American race relations, ends up sounding like a European culture major trying to do a "faithful" examination of What Black Americans Think, never sure of when to use what little Swedish ghetto slang he knows and when to just do literal translations of US terms, and killing the novel in the process. There's still obviously a very good, possibly great, novel in there, but it's exactly the thing that makes it great that makes it hard, almost impossible, to translate into another language.

I keep referencing Against The Day recently, can't imagine why, but you know that bit in there where archduke Franz Ferdinand tries to engage in a …

For the most part, Swedish translators do a good job with lauded anglophone writers. This time, though, not so much. What I imagine is a tour de force of using language, from Dickens to Kanye, to turn over every rock of American race relations, ends up sounding like a European culture major trying to do a "faithful" examination of What Black Americans Think, never sure of when to use what little Swedish ghetto slang he knows and when to just do literal translations of US terms, and killing the novel in the process. There's still obviously a very good, possibly great, novel in there, but it's exactly the thing that makes it great that makes it hard, almost impossible, to translate into another language.

I keep referencing Against The Day recently, can't imagine why, but you know that bit in there where archduke Franz Ferdinand tries to engage in a game of The Dozens with black Chicagoans ca 1900? The whole novel sounds like that in translation.

Barbiche

betygsatte den

27 juli 2022