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Product Details
- ISBN13: 9780375703362
- Condition: New
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Customer Review
Hindsight is 20/20
I discovered this book in a college course this year (2002). This review is aimed specifically for those who have always cast a skeptical eye at the literary offerings of the last half of the twentieth century. If, like me, you have always scoffed and balked at the notion that there were numerous undiscovered great pieces of American literature, buy this book.When I think of this century's great writers I think mainly of Eliot, Kafka, Naipal, Wright, Hemingway, Wolfe, Proust, and Orwell. There are others, but I make this list to illustrate that I am a rather conservative reader, a "Canon Man". All of this to say one thing:I truly believe that this book will only be fully revealed for what it is in a decade or two...and when that day comes, when scholars are tripping over each other in the rush to sift through what is left to us of Murray's life, thoughts and writings, they will all be wondering what kept the current generation of scholars from seizing upon...
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April 4, 2002
(Reston, Virginia United States) | Helpful Votes: 13 | Rating: 5
The also and the also of a buried treasure
I'm not sure why Murray had not recieved the attention he deserves in the canon of American authors. His work is among the finest I have ever read. This book, his first, is one of my personal favorites and deserves recognition.The most striking aspect of this book is Murray's style, which is absoloutely a joy to read. The major accomplishment that Murray makes in Train Whistle Guitar is the incorporation of the improvisational rhythms of Jazz and blues into speech. In other words, Murray's narrator and characters talk in riffs, call-and-response patters, in trading-twelve exchanges. It's awkward to talk about this but pick up this book and you will get an idea of what I am driving at. His prose is rhythmic forceful and eloquent, swift and swift and not too swift. This work was one of the first to incorporate the aesthetics of Jazz into prose and novel; the result is a profound success. This stylistic power is mated to the story of a boy growing up in...
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April 30, 2000
(Minneapolis) | Helpful Votes: 10 | Rating: 5
Bluesy prose stylings
This is a very interesting book. Murray is an incredibly erudite scholar on blues and jazz traditions as well as both idioms' place in American culture. This novel is very much in the jazz/blues vein of investigation and exploration of different form; in this case, prose. At first I found his style somewhat disconcerting, but once into the book, I was completely drawn in by the perfect rendering of deep southern speech, the affecting characters and the deeply intriguing Luzana Cholly and other juke joint characters. Murray also writes movingly of the protaganist's (many say this book is semi-autobiographical)sexual awakening and discovery of a profound twist in his life.
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September 23, 1999
| Helpful Votes: 7 | Rating: 3
