Customer Reviews

Rl's Dream

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book has a relationship that would be strange and eccentric to most Americans.Yet, if readers can drop their middle-class values and judgments long enough to get to know the characters, they will, by the book's end, have experienced a story of love between people that they feel they know and care about themselves, and understand goals they themselves would never have.

This is a revelatory tale of losers and the lost, who nonetheless strive to love and to fulfill their dreams, and most readers who can find the newness of a world and people foreign to their own experiences will hope the dreams of these characters come true.

Mosley is a wonderful presence in the American literary scene, not just a mystery/crime writer as some have "written him off" as being. His smooth prose and flow of language, as well as his sensitivities to people and places that make them become more real than comfortable suburbanites in comfortable suburbia, glow with an intellect and emotional intonation found in few modern writers.

Mosley knows the world does not belong only to the middle-class or wealthy, and he makes his readers know it, too, in ways that touch their hearts and make them re-examine their own definitions of love and the natures of their goals.

Walter Mosley was always an uneasy fit in the detective genre, and except for Blue Light, his works outside that genre were more compelling than the stuff that made him famous -- Gone Fishin' and Always Outnumbered both outshine his mysteries.

I think this is because what Mosley is best at is creating characters deeply affected by their roots in Southern poverty and racism. Having to shoehorn the characters and incidents he wants to talk about into even the unconventional format of the Easy Rawlins mysteries makes for an uneasy fit. Always Outnumbered, Gone Fishin', and RL's Blues are less plot-oriented, more freewheeling, and they give Mosley the room to spread out. Like a musician, Mosley is often at his best when he is just riffing. Much as he describes blues lyrics in this book, putting words together that don't make sense unless you are there hearing them with the audience, Mosley puts scenes together in ways that defy traditional narrative yet increase their emotional power.

Freed of the constraints of his mysteries, Mosley has created a very powerful work containing several exquisitely drawn characters and some of the most moving prose I've read in years. RL's Dream ranks among the best works of one of the few popular novelists today who I think we'll still be reading, even studying, a hundred years from now.

Together with "Always Outnumbered,..." this is Mosley's greatest achievement. It puts Mosley on the same level as James Baldwin and Richard Wright; it has Baldwin's epic qualities combined with the pride and outrage of Wright's best moments. Mosley is very much his own man, though, and it all makes for one hell of a great novel. Probably an American classic of the late 20th century.

I thought this guy just wrote mystery novels. Then I went to hear him read from his latest, "Gone Fishin'" He riveted the room sufficiently for me to feel compelled to ask him which of the titles in his opus was personally his favorite. Not skipping a beat or paying attention to my earnest gaze, he answered, "RL's Dream. It's the one I like best."

"Good enough for me," I called, scurrying over to the table piled high with books written by Mosley, each of which was doubtless the favorite of many. The author inscribed my freshly printed copy of his book with, "Rosalind, we miss you back east." Then I strolled home ready to read.

I teach expository writing; I read for a living; I talk for a living; and it's frankly hard to capture my unwavering interest--least of all with a should-have-been mystery novel by the author of "Devil in a Blue Dress." Nevertheless I couldn't put this book down. From the first page it held me in a life, breathing with the main character, a dying blues guitarist, RL, who is put out on the street with cancer in his bones and too many memories of the blues life down south to let him sit down and die in peace.

The book chronicles his last days of documenting bygone gigs with Robert Johnson, the mythical bluesman who is said to have sold his soul to the Devil to play like no other could. But Mosley's work extends beyond that man and that myth to another lesser-known, also talented blues guitarist who walked in Johnson's shadow to get a handle on his greatness. RL winds up defining the blues, as does every soul, in his own unique fashion.

This book should be required reading for anybody who listens to the Blues, or to its grandchild, Rock, or its stepchild, Grunge. "RL's Dream" helps us understand the roots of all those forms that seep into our veins and order our lives around the rhythm, stroke, and cadence of our hearts.

"Pain moved up the old man's hipbone like a plow breaking through hard sod." The old man is Soupspoon Wise, a Delta blues musician who's just been put out on the street in the East Village because he can't pay his rent. Things look dim until a white girl named Kiki from Hogston, Arkansas, who has her own issues, finds him, is outraged that the landlord is evicting an old sick black man, and takes him in. Mosley moves the plot on from there, creating some of his best characters and painting an unforgettable picture of human kindness against all odds. But this ain't sentimental, no sirree. Bluesmen have gritty lives. Soupspoon and his idol Robert Johnson are no exceptions. Robert Johnson's spirit comes so alive in this book you can almost hear him play and it will make you run out and buy his blues recordings if you are so unfortunate as not to own them.

The dialogue and the situations ring as true as the blues themselves. Mosley is an eloquent writer and reading this book, you can feel where some of the musicality of his language originates. Soupspoon undergoes a physical and emotional healing rebirth thanks to the love of Kiki and her friends and plays the blues again, putting people in touch with their own pain and lifting them out of it at the same time, including himself.

This is not a perfect book. As much as I liked it, I think that the reviewer who mentioned the sagging plot about 2/3 of the way through has a good point. When I reread it, I will notice whether or not all this midway character development is really necessary. But it gets five stars from me because there aren't many books I reread and this is one.

The source book Mosley "quotes" on the preface page, "Back Road to the Blues," by Soupspoon Wise, doesn't exist - but this book is convincing enough that I had to search it. Elijah Wald's book on the origins of Robert Johnson's music would be a good read to put this novel in historical perspective.

But I doubt if Elijah Wald's writing can equal this paragraph by Mosley on the blues:

"Robert Johnson with his evil eye looking around the crowd for a woman. His fingers so tight that they could make music without strings. Music in his shoulders and down in his feet. Words that rhyme with the ache in your bones and music so right that it's more like rain than notes; more like a woman's call than need. Not that pretty even stuff that they box in radios and stereos. Not even something that you can catch in a beat. It's the earth moving and babies looking from side to side."

I enjoyed this book while I was reading it. I really did. Even through the descriptions of Soupspoon's pain and squalor -- which came close to turning my stomach -- I still wanted to know what would happen to this old bluesman. But when I wasn't reading it, I dreaded picking it up again. I remembered how it reminded me of (and amplified) my own pain and sorrow, and didn't really want to go back to that place again. But I eventually did, every time, and somehow feel the better for it. It's kind of like a blues song that way, in that it can simultaneously sadden and cheer you at the same time.

The relationship between it's main characters is key. Atwater "Soupspoon" Wise is dying of cancer, and wants an opportunity to record his story for posterity. That story encompasses the history of the Delta Blues, and features prominently the great Robert Johnson (Robert Leroy, the RL of the title). He is rescued from penilessness and homelessness by Kiki, a stranger in his building. Kiki has her own problems to deal with (including her alcoholism and her tortured past), but sees enough in Soupspoon to arouse her compassion. They make for an odd, but interesting couple. This is all serviced by Mosley's simple and lightly poetic prose. He does a wonderful job conjuring up images and emotions using the sparest of sentences.

If given my druthers, I would have liked to spend more time exploring Soupspoon's history, especially the legend of Robert Johnson. I know that not much is known about him, but it might have been fascinating if Mosley tried his hand at hypothesizing even more than he already does. Without that, the story becomes a requiem for Soupspoon, where the crux of the suspense hinges on whether or not he'll get his history recorded before inevitably succumbing to cancer. His end manages to be both sad and uplifting. Kind of like a blues song.

RL's Dream is a haunting story that will change the way you see your life. Through this book, you will see ways that facing up to your pain can bring redemption.

The book opens as elderly black Jazz musician, Atwater "Soupspoon" Wise, painfully returns to his apartment in lower Manhattan. His respite is brief when the landlord's men evict him for many months of not paying his rent and call Social Services to pick him up to be returned to a homeless shelter. It's cold as Soupspoon lies amidst his few belongings on the sidewalk, and it's getting dark. He's so sick he can barely speak, and has a horrible pain in his hip. He feels death standing over him.

While he's been going through this, one of his neighbors, Ms. Kiki Waters, a young white woman is also painfully coming home after being released from a hospital after being stabbed by a young boy. She is appalled to find Soupspoon on the street, for he is the man whose happiness had just cheered her a few days before the attack on her. Knowing her duty as a human being, she orders the men to move Soupspoon into her apartment along with some of his belongings.

Kiki nurses Soupspoon back to health, but uses methods that leave her life at risk.

In the course of their evolving relationship, each one learns how to turn pain into beauty and goodness. Soupspoon does it by playing and singing the blues. Kiki does it by facing up to and overcoming her fears.

The story is beautifully developed around the memories that Soupspoon and Kiki carry around of their younger days in the South. Soupspoon is frustrated that he cannot reach the heights as a musician that his friend RL Johnson could. Kiki carries intense fear from the abuse she suffered at her father's hands. Both are prisoners of those memories until they take steps to move beyond them. Those steps are their redemption.

To me the most powerful part of the book is the opening. Imagine yourself riding home on the subway full of stitches from a knife attack. Emerging, you see a poor, old man lying on the street who is your neighbor. Would you stop to help? What would you do to help? Chances are that you would not do as much as Kiki does. Yet we are supposed to love our neighbor as ourselves. Kiki hasn't known much love, yet she gives all she has to Soupspoon. It's a beautiful story, and shows how beautiful life can be.

If you also love the Blues, this book will reward you with wonderful sketches of what is was like to create that rich music that grew out of pain in the South during the early 20th century.

In this first of Mosley titles not including his famous Ezekiel Rawlins character, Mosley attempts to recount the journies of Mr. Atwater "Soupspoon" Wise, and simultaneously define the root of his caretaker's (Kiki) mental anguish. While this is a commendable undertaking, RL's Dream is about one-hundred pages too short. The plot line is weak at best, and the reader him or herself never gets a clear chance to define whether or not Soupspoon is indeed living RL's dreams. The only way that we know this is from his ex-wife's taunts. As an avid Mosley reader and fan, needless to say I was hopelessly disappointed when the "twist" that ties everything together in his other novels was non-existent in this one. The one saving grace for this novel, as always, is Mosley's vivid use of imagery, and his ability to put you in the seperate world of a specific charcter. But you don't have to take my word for it!

Enjoyed this non-genre book by Mr. Moseley. It explained some of the mystery surrounding Robert Johnson and why people were so enthralled by him. The main character was a pathetic soul until rescued from the trash heap by Kiki. Their platonic relationship created their salvation, as she found a purpose to live and Soupspoon finished his life searching out is past. I found the characters realistic and also pitiful. Moselys' gift is to transport the reader back in time and show him the rich history that makes up our culture.I recommend this book to music lovers and lovers of fiction everywhere.

There are some writers whose talent is so special that you want to save their books and make the reading of them an occasion. Walter Mosley is one of those writers. He invests his characters with such depth, such full histories that you cannot help but care about them. RL's Dream is populated by a cast of such characters; even the most minor ones (including a baby) are fully fleshed and very real. Soupspoon and Kiki are two almost-lost souls who bring each other back to life in unexpected ways. It is a credit to Mosley's rare and splendid talent that the book itself resonates with music; its cadence is almost audible in the spare prose, the all-too-human behavior of people who, often, do things without even really knowing why. To comprehend the blues, to put words, literally, to a musical theme and to do so in a kind-hearted and deeply understanding fashion is to deliver magic in the form of a book. This is a "must read" novel.