Conjugating Hindi - (American Literature) by Ishmael Reed (Paperback)
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<p/><br></br><p><b> Book Synopsis </b></p></br></br><p>California is still the world's biggest hideout. The only thing more western is the Pacific Ocean, where, if the Big One happens, California might find a home at the bottom.</p> <p>One of those hiding out is Peter Bowman, a former army brat, and lecturer at Woodrow Wilson Community College, who is being hunted for a quality most men would crave. But for Bowman, nicknamed Boa, it has become burdensome. When an opportunity comes, he has to choose between becoming financially solvent or exposing himself to his pursuers. Along the way, he runs into some memorable characters both in reality and in his dreams, including Ishmael Reed. In Ishmael Reed's <i>Conjugating Hindi</i>, stories, histories and myths of different cultures are mixed and sampled. Modern issues like gentrification addressed. It is the closest that a fiction writer has gotten to the hip-hop form on the page. </p> <p> Once again, Ishmael Reed has pioneered a new form. If his first novel, <i>The Free-Lance Pallbearers</i>, was an early Afro-Futurist novel, <i>Mumbo Jumbo</i> recognized as "a graphic novel before we used the term" (according to Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Margo Jefferson), <i>Yellow Back Radio Broke Down Blazing Saddles</i>'s "important precursor," <i>Flight To Canada</i> his Neo Slave Narrative, a concept that he coined-<i>Conjugating Hindi</i> is his global novel. One that crosses all borders.</p><p/><br></br><p><b> Review Quotes </b></p></br></br><br>As a top-flight postmodern novelist and feisty cultural critic, Reed consistently challenges our status quo sociopolitical arrangements.-- "The Dallas Morning News"<br><br>Even nearer to Whitehead's derailment of antebellum history is Ishmael Reed's <i>Flight to Canada</i> (1976). A satirical "neo-slave narrative" (Reed's term), the novel wittily conjoins the past of slavery to the present of America's bicentennial. The two times are bound by humorous, incisive anachronisms--none more unforgettable than the runaway protagonist's escape. Skipping the usual swamps and frozen rivers, Raven Quickskill takes a jet plane to Canada: "Traveling in style/Beats craning your neck after/The North Star and hiding in/Bushes anytime, Massa."-- "New York Review of Books"<br><br>His own groundbreaking literary output over six decades, in multiple languages and every form--essays, fiction, poetry, film, even editorial cartoons--has infected a generation of artists.-- "The Paris Review"<br><br>Ishmael Reed makes the language boogaloo.-- "Rolling Stone"<br><br>One of the most inventive and prolific of contemporary American writers . . . Reed's prose style resembles the youthful Ali's ring style. It is unorthodox, brash, yet controlled.-- "New York Times"<br><br>Reed has been revising the authorized edition of American history in all his novels, to give the ghosts a chance to talk.--John Leonard "New York Times"<br><br>Reed's approach to the novel is not unlike a Dixieland band's approach to music: a native American diversity that adds up to a unified style--authentic and endlessly fresh.--R. Z. Sheppard "Time Magazine"<br><br>Reed's gift is for the outrageous, for giving vivid expression to cultural controversies very much in the air . . . He is one of the most underrated writers in America. Certainly no other contemporary black writer, male or female, has used the language and beliefs of folk culture so imaginatively, and few have been so stinging about the absurdity of American racism.-- "New York Review of Books"<br><br>The novel [<i>Conjugating Hindi</i>] is what some academics have dubbed a trickster text, a text informed by the mischievous, shape-shifting, slippery figure of the trickster, found in folklore throughout the world. Implicit in Reed's formal style, as well as his content, is the trickster disregard for caste of any kind. Heedless of boundaries and resistant to being pinned down or hemmed in, the novel is driven almost entirely by Reed's deep, free-wheeling curiosity about why things are the way they are in regard to the use of the model minority myth against Black communities....As the United States's ideals come under increasing attack, we need more flame-throwers like septuagenarian Ishmael Reed -- more fighters, more tricksters, more eagle-eyed observers with an incendiary spirit, more dazzlingly original artist-writers -- willing to defy what is permissible to say, willing to catch it on all sides, and willing to run over boundaries of all kinds into genuinely new or neglected territory.-- "Anita Felicelli, Los Angeles Review of Books"<br><br>The only novelist who is a match for the comic intensity of Richard Pryor.-- "Chicago Tribune"<br>
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