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Dec 17, 2009

Maryellen rated it:

This book was recommended to me off a list. I read some reviews before I dove in. Some said "it's about elevators" others said "it's all about race". Well...they're both kind of right, but I think they've missed the point.

This is an excellent book. It's an old fashioned murder mystery wrapped in a philosophical discussion wrapped in a metaphor. Colson Whitehead has created a wonderful "film noir" urban landscape completely centered around the world of e More...

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Dec 16, 2009

Julia rated it:

All of the typical noir elements are here - the big, industrial city, menacing boss(es) playing dirty politics, muckraking reporter, servant with a trick up his sleeve, small-town girl in the big city. But nothing, not even a single description, is cliche. The main character is principled and smart, but she's so reserved that even the reader has to make some guesses at her emotional life. The plot is unpredictable - whimsical, jarring and scary, abstract for a while, mundane.

I'm More...

0 comments like (5 people liked it)

Dec 14, 2011

A.C. rated it:

I am reading this for a class that I am taking on black postmodern fiction. The hallmarks of the postmodern style are there. It is clear that Whitehead read a fair amount of Pynchon and Barth due to the extensive presence of half-thoughts, sentence fragments, and commentary from the narrator. So, with regards to the class, I understand why it was assigned. On a personal level, I haven't been this bored reading a book in a while. I don't particularly like any of the characters. Lila Mae is rather More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Feb 20, 2008

Christy rated it:

In an interview with Salon.com following the publication of his 1999 debut novel The Intuitionist, Colson Whitehead discusses the freedom he has as an African American writer of the late 20th century. He says, "decades ago, there was the protest novel, and then there was 'tell the untold story, find our unerased history.' Then there's the militant novel of insurrection from the '60s. There were two rigid camps in the '60s: the Black Arts movement, denouncing James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison More...

0 comments like (5 people liked it)

Dec 16, 2009

Shepherd rated it:

This isn't just an allegory of race, as the many glowing reviews in the prefatory pages state. It's an allegory of everything. "Elevators" and "intuitionism" variously represent upward social mobility and its limits, the threatened gains of the civil rights movement, the anxiety of a post-rational worldview, challenges to good-old-boy cronyism, the enabling factor of the modern urban center and the possibility of its transcendence ... the list goes on. In the interest of t More...

0 comments like (6 people liked it)

Jun 30, 2011

Dree rated it:

Maybe more like a 4.5, but this book deserves to be rounded up, not down. Fabulous writing and wordplay, fabulous creation of a fascinating world that was almost real.

This novel takes place in a past that didn't exist--where the Elevator Inspectors are revered, in a great city that has achieved verticality (and seems to be c1930 New York, or even 1950). Lila Mae Watson is the first colored woman (author's terminology) to achieve her badge as an elevator inspector--and she is in Intui More...

2 comments like (1 person liked it)

Mar 23, 2011

Gpickle rated it:

In an email to a friend I said that reading this book was like eating tasty oatmeal. That is really the best I can come up with. For me eating oatmeal is work. And I like oatmeal,especially when it is tasty, I just spend a lot of time chewing it up and getting it down. And that was how this book went for me. Pretty lame as a review, I suppose, but there are many others out there that can tell you all about symbolism and pacing and craft and sentence structure and what not..

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Dec 20, 2008

Laura rated it:

I just finished Colson Whitehead's book "The Intuitionist", which is a hard book describe, but it is kind of like a murder mystery combined with a conspiracy theory novel about warring factions of elevator inspectors. Seriously.

Below is an excerpt from one of the theoretical debates the characters have about the meaning of elevator-ness. I thought the writing here was fascinating, partly for the content but more that the writer has so aptly captured the cadence of speech in More...

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Dec 17, 2009

Nathan rated it:

This sleek, stylish, one-of-a-kind novel reads like a pulp sci-fi mystery, filtered through the searing racial consciousness of Ralph Ellison. An African-American woman in an alternate 1950s, where elevators and their inspection have bizarrely become the driving force in the national culture, must battle prejudice and bureaucracy to solve the mysterious failure of a seemingly unbreakable elevator. It's an uneasy, haunted book, beautifully written and crisply imagined, and a whole lot of fun. More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jun 01, 2011

Brent rated it:

I don't think that Whitehead trusts me, the reader, or you, the reader (if you've already read it), to figure things out on my, or your, own. He likes to have his characters tell us what they're going to do, then tell us what they're doing, and then when we are good and exhausted and ready to move on (to another book, for example), he likes to tell us what they, his characters, have done. Granted, some of the telling is told well, but the redundancy doesn't read as artistic, just sloppy.
More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Feb 14, 2011

Nyra rated it:

¿Les ha pasado alguna vez, que comienzan un libro con la esperanza creada por la sinopsis de que este sea bueno para devorarlo a toda velocidad y al final resulta ser un viaje en carreta? Tortuoso, lento y nada agradable. Bueno, este libro fue para mi, uno de esos casos. Seré cruda y totalmente sincera con esta crítica, sin ofender a otros es mi opinion personal y si alguien no esta de acuerdo o no le parece me reservo la replica. Este libro no me pareció en absoluto entretenido, fue una lectur More...

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Sep 13, 2009

jordan rated it:

How to describe Colson Whitehead's debut novel, The Intuitionist, a parable of race relations through the lens of competing factions of elevator inspectors in a fictional pre-civil rights American city? Check the thesaurus for synonyms for audacious - bold, works, as does brash. Now a writer of no small renowned, with a catalogue of excellent works and awards to his name, one can only wonder at the venturesome spirit that led to this deep complex novel which brings nothing so much to mind as the More...

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Apr 19, 2009

Alan rated it:

Whitehead's first novel is about a fraternal conflict between rival philosophies of elevator inspection (!), and if that doesn't make you want to pick it up, I don't know what on earth would. It's a secret history (who would've thought elevator inspectors even had factions?), one of those crypto-historical narratives that could have happened while everyone else was looking the other way. Its backdrop is a great city, never named, that nevertheless could only be New York City in the mid-20th Cent More...

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Apr 11, 2011

Brent rated it:

It's one part The Fountainhead, one part The Invisible Man, one part pulpy gumshoe noir novel. There's a mystery and the mob and an upcoming election marred by corruption. The polemical social commentary takes over in the final chapters but it's a decent enough ending to an intriguing yarn about who controls the power to rise in the modern urban world. Where "modern" means early 1950s (I think) and "rise" literally means "go up"---because the book is about elevators More...

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Aug 04, 2011

Jonny rated it:

This socially-conscious debut novel takes place in the unspecified past of an unspecified metropolitan American city in which two competing factions of elevator inspectors battle for dominance. Just like these factions, this story has two distinct elements which are fighting each other in vain: The neo-noir feel of the mystery that makes up the heart of the novel attempts (sometimes successfully) to keep things interesting, while the subject matter which makes up the details--it is, after all, a More...

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Jul 15, 2010

Trixie rated it:

I loved the atmosphere and tone of the book. I enjoy reading about characters who are socially isolated and/or solitary by choice. I also enjoy reading about the lives of machines especially when they're described with a touch of mysticism so The Intuitionist scored with me on that level, too. All of the characters were meaty without detracting from the protagonist, pacing or plot.

I don't know how I felt about the ending; I'm not the kind of person who criticizes books for having " More...

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Jan 05, 2011

Stefani rated it:

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here

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Aug 03, 2011

Scott rated it:

Colson Whitehead's first novel which, among other honors, won the QPB New Voices/Joe Savago award (did I remember that correctly?) when it was first published in 1998. Anyway, the conceit here is clever and surprisingly exciting: the setting is a city, sort of New York, sort of in the 1950s, in which elevator inspectors are as respected, feared, fraternal, ruthless, powerful, and corrupt as the cops of a thousand hard-boiled detective novels. Whitehead sets this whole thing up beautifully, and h More...

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Aug 03, 2011

Randall rated it:

I'd have to spend some time and energy to truly explain what's so genius about this book, and that assumes I'm not missing a whole bunch of it's true brilliance.

The plot summary would likely have most shaking their head, thinking, "What the fish?" It sounds absurd. In some ways, it's really absurd.

Lots of room for interpretation here, but Whitehead is clearly tackling some major social topics and doing it with humor and a perceptive eye.

If your interest More...

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Mar 29, 2011

Jennifer (aka EM) rated it:

I'll hold off rating this one until I think about it a bit... there is a lot to like about it; but a lot I just didn't understand. My elevator sometimes doesn't go all the way to the top.

_____________

Here's the thing: at another time and place, I would probably rate this a 4. However, in this current time and place, the complexity of the structure, an allegory that I never really "got" and the flat affect of the central character all kept me at arm's length when More...

9 comments like (5 people liked it)

Jul 13, 2009

Erik rated it:

There are many things to like about Colson Whitehead’s first novel, The Institutionist: the prospect of reading about elevator inspectors (a subject, I’m pretty sure, no one has ever written about in fiction), the idealogical split between institutionist and empiricist inspectors (one group inspects elevators by observation and scrutiny, the other by ‘feel’. I’ll let you guess who does what), and elevators being a metaphor for almost everything important in life—“They go up, they go down. You More...

3 comments like (3 people liked it)

Sep 20, 2009

Raja rated it:

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here

1 comment like

Mar 28, 2009

Kamilah rated it:

I can't believe this is Colson Whitehead's first novel. The cover (at least in the paperback version) compares the book to Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man<i/>. With an eyeroll, I wrote off that bit of marketing as foolish. Why bait readers with heights that can’t be reached? I mean, Ralph Ellison? You have to be kidding. Then with five words half way through the book, the author did it. Ellison is one of the few writers who can give me chills, and Whitehead, with remarkable sparse prose More...

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Jan 13, 2012

Susan rated it:

This is a fascinating meditation on race, racism, and "racial uplift." It seemed to start slow for me, probably because of a misconception I had about the book that it was a mystery or sci fi story or both. (Not sure where that came from.) Instead it's the meticulously crafted story of an elevator inspector in a universe parallel to our own in the 1950s, i.e., just as the Civil Rights movement is beginning. The tale develops an extended metaphor for competing approaches as to how to co More...

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Jul 08, 2009

Clarice rated it:

Imagine a world where the idea of the elevator has become an almost spiritual experience. The lifting up into places before unreachable, the knowing what is wrong with an elevator just by the feel and listening to it, the desire and hope for the perfect unbreakable elevator. Contrast that with the idea of seeing rust and judging based on that what is wrong with the elevator, you have the two schools of thought on Elevator Repair. Somewhat mystical and empirical. Add into that race issues and the More...

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May 12, 2009

Dave rated it:

Whitehead is a supremely talented and intelligent writer who suffers from critics' superficial comparisons of him to great authors of the past. Whitehead is his own man. The book jacket proudly proclaims a new author "in the tradition of Ralph Ellison", but the only connection I see is that, like Ellison, Whitehead writes about an urban black experience and can write about it well. If that is the tradition of Ellison, Whitehead has a lot of contemporaries.
But, like I said, that More...

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Aug 19, 2010

Roy rated it:

This book seemingly belongs to a byogone era when writers more frequently used elaborate metaphors to make allegorical points about the human condition. Novels such as Catch-22 or The Invisible Man come to mind. The setting is the past (all clues point to mid 20th century New York), yet since it's a version of the past that differs substantially from reality, it also has a futuristic science fiction feel. The somewhat peculiar premise elevates (pun intended) the elevator to mythical status, i More...

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Jun 10, 2011

Leigh rated it:

(3 1/2)

This book's greatest flaw is its complexity, both in subject and in style. Whitehead uses the backdrop of simple, pulp, boiled-down noir fiction to present a rather intricate metaphor on race, using elevators to demonstrate it. I found myself distracted by the metaphor…what did he mean? In order to raise something (someone?), there had to be a counterweight involved…something (someone) must be forced down. What did he mean by Intuition vs. Empiricism? How on Earth would Intuitio More...

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Jul 29, 2009

Molly rated it:

What a strange and interesting book. It seems like it should have been easier to read-but it was kind of labor intensive for me-I felt like I had to re-read passages for them to make sense. It's kind of an alternate universe-but not completely so and that was tough at first-I couldn't figure out what was going on-or how to picture the city in my head-or the dress-or really anything. I think part of it is he has a very contemporary writing style-but it's set in this "alternate" past- More...

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Oct 19, 2011

Kristi rated it:

Like many others who have read and reviewed this novel, I have heard a lot of buzz around this book, especially in my college's "English major" community. I finally hunkered down to read this novel because I am attending one of Whitehead's readings in a few weeks and this is the novel he is apparently reading from.

I found the premise of the novel particularly intriguing. Learning about elevators and different theories about examining them is a really cool idea, and an insta More...

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