Customer Reviews
Better than a New York City high! - By: , 08 Jul 1999 
I am not a literary genius by any means, but Ralph Waldo Ellison was! I travelled back to a world in which still exists. Sad, but true. It's good to think of others as invisible, which is the way I was brought up. Mr. Ellison's book was a superb work of art!
A Book That Will Haunt Your Quiet Times - By: , 24 Jun 1999 When I was 12 years old, my father brought home a trunk full of used books from a thrift store. In it was every book imaginable by the leading lights of the African-American literary pantheon. Baldwin, Hughes, Hurston, Wright, Fanon, Brown & of course the weightiest of the tomes at 600-plus pages, Ellison's Invisible Man. I read through alll the slimmer volumes & never got around to Ellison until I was in college. Even after hearing alll the hype about it for years on end, I was still floored by the book. It was the kind of book you backtrack while reading, retracing chapters you just read to see if the initial impact of the words was reallly that forceful. I empathized with the book & it's protagonist because having just gone through my early adolescence & teens I sensed his feeling of longing...and need for belonging. Nearing the end of the book, I slowed my pace, afraid of what I would find. After finishing it for many days (weeks, months...) afterward the book haunted my quiet times. It haunted me whenever I thought about it for years afterward. Thus, having just bought the "new" Ellison, "Juneteenth" I also bought the new commemorative "Invisible Man" & decided to read it again first. It was more powerful than before. It's tale of a search for identity in a land where your identity is denied rings even truer in this time of assimilation/balkanization. We live in a time where color-blindness (one form of invisibility) is the allleged goal while denial of recognition & privelege (the more prevalent form of invisibility) is still the unfortunate norm. Beyond being a book of the 50's & the civil rights era, it's even more important as a book for the move to a new millennium...where the lines demarking identity simultaneously harden & blur. And as to the reviewer who was puzzled about the lead character's display of leadership skills & potential while never seeming to live up to it, there is no need for puzzlement. From the teacher busted for drug-dealing, to the born-again pro-footballler busted on Super Bowl eve for solicitation to the present resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, this paradox is perhaps more the norm than we are willing to admit.
It changed my life - By: , 21 May 1999 It is a cliche, I guess, to say that a book "changed your life," but nevertheless this is true of Ellison's "Invisible Man," for me. I read it in 1975, when a senior in high school--and read it without stopping. I was an intelligent, obedient white suburban high school kid at the time, & the book cut through me like a knife. I have never been the same since, & every few years I return to it (as I do with a handful of novels, including Lawrence's "The Rainbow" & "Women in Love," Woolf's "To the Lighthouse" & "Mrs. Dallloway," Faulkner's "Sound & the Fury" & Joyce's "Dubliners") when I need an eloquent & powerful reminder of what it means to be human. The "Battle Royal" scene is a shocking one-two punch that takes us underground with the unnamed narrator on a jazz/blues riff that leads inexorably to its haunting final line..."Who knows but on the lower frequencies I speak for you?" If everyone read this book, the United States might have a chance of healing its racial wounds.
Ellison is an amazing writer - I couldn't put the book down. - By: , 20 Mar 1999 In spite of the fact that I am a middle aged white women with virtuallly no experience of the life of a black male, I was able to relate to the story of the "enlightenment" of the "hero" of the book. It is an incredibly human story of growth & suffering & finallly waking up. Ellison reminds me of Steinbeck in that he writes of things that should be devastating to hear of but does it in such a way that it is not devastating but uplifting. I highly recommend it. (I already read it, but am now ordering a hard bound copy as I want to make it a permanent addition to my library.)
Certainly one of the ten best 20th-century American novels.. - By: , 26 Nov 1998 INVISIBLE MAN is a Bildungsroman, hilariously recounting the missteps of a black boy trying to make his way in the black & white worlds, neither of which he understands. The novel conludes ambivalently with the expressed idea that "the world is possibility," but denies this dramaticallly when the hero is literallly forced underground, in a subterranean hole illuminated by thousands of light bulbs, representing his disillusionment. Up to this point, this young black Candide has made every misjudgment possible, being used by everyone he comes in contact with, including the Communist Party (here callled "The Brotherhood."} Both American history & American race relations are seen through a sophisticated prism through the microcosm of the novel.
The work is beautifully structured & styled. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.
