Writers of Color 50 Books Challenge

I'm on a bit of a post-modernism kick. These books are both very, very funny and very, very different.

33. The Last Days of Louisana Red by Ishmael Reed is an abstruse and yet very nasty piece of fiction. At its surface level, it's about a black family in Berkeley navigating the turmoil of the '60s. The four children of a divorced businessman find different paths to adulthood: ultimately, the story ends in over the top tragedy for three of them. Beneath this surface layer, there are metanarratives about white-black relations, male-female relations, what it means to be authentically black in America, the function and evolution of drama, and an assortment of other topics. The titular Louisana Red becomes, in Reed's hands, a powerful metaphor for black rage.

Reed throws around a lot of offensive language. There are a number of misogynistic rants that I found stomach-churning, and as a Jew I was thrown out of the book for a moment by one of his anti-semitic screeds, where the narrator labels the Jews "Pyramid Rock Toters" and accuses them of oppressing the blacks. I paused, closed the book, and debated whether I was willing to endure potentially more of the same, and eventually decided to continue. I'm still not sure this was the right decision. Reed's undeniably a gifted writer who has something to say. I'm just not sure I'm equipped to hear it.


34. Don Dimaio of La Plata by Robert Arellano (sometimes Roberto Arellano)

A mashup of Don Quixote and the story of corrupt former Providence mayor Buddy Cianci, and it's even stranger than that sounds. Important characters in the novel include a cocaine-addicted gibbon on the lam and a talking toupee that navigates the astral plane.

The novel is full of sex, drugs, vulgarity, violence, abuse, and it's saved from all of that by a powerful sense of whimsy. Each section of the novel's narrative about Don "Pally" Dimaio, mayor of La Plata, is preceded by a punning reinterpretation of a passage from the Quixote. Sancho Panza becomes Pancho Sanchez, Dimaio's policeman chauffeur and bodyguard. The windmill turns into a a billboard that a cocaine-addled Dimaio insists is full of " 'ginas ". Dulcinella becomes a porn star named Dolly Dellabutta that Dimaio fantasizes about. It turns the whole affair deeply silly, and had me giggling hysterically through the whole thing.

Frankly, though, the book is worth it for the beautiful cover alone.

a: reed ishmael, a: arellano robert,