"Tell your story walking."
St. Vincent's Home for Boys, Brooklyn, early 1970s. For Lionel Essrog, a.k.a. The Human Freakshow, a victim of T... read full description
St. Vincent's Home for Boys, Brooklyn, early 1970s. For Lionel Essrog, a.k.a. The Human Freakshow, a victim of T... read full description
reviews
Dec 17, 2009
Alison
rated it: 
Motherless Brooklyn is a beautifully written novel about a complicated man named Lionel Essrog who is an orphan and a sufferer of Tourette's. As we all know about Tourette's, the syndrome causes you to spurt out words (sometimes profanity) during periods of stress in order to ease an internal undying mental angst. Lionel also suffers from OCD and the infinite need to count things...to mix words in his head and regurgitate them in order to sort through the chaos that is everday life for a hood
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2 comments
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(7 people liked it)
Jul 15, 2010
Jason
rated it: 
Way too gimmicky! About Motherless Brooklyn Newsday calls Jonathan Lethem "one of the most original voices among younger American novelists;" while Entertainment Weekly describes him as "one of our most inventive, stylish and sensous writers." I strongly disagree. I think these organiztions have confused originality with gimmickry.
Goodreads interviewed Jonathan Lethem in their November newsletter. I'd never heard of him. I checked out a couple of his books More...
Goodreads interviewed Jonathan Lethem in their November newsletter. I'd never heard of him. I checked out a couple of his books More...
11 comments
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(13 people liked it)
Feb 19, 2008
Keith
rated it: 
Remember in 1999, when DVD players were just becoming affordable and snot noses in college were getting them for their dorm rooms? They invited you over to watch and the only DVD they had was The Matrix. Why? Don't know. It was just the first choice everyone made. But, it sure did look cool.
Motherless Brooklyn is the book version of that for any newbie moving into Brooklyn (or quasi-Brooklyn like myself). Either the title compelled them to buy it ("I live in Brooklyn, this MUST More...
Motherless Brooklyn is the book version of that for any newbie moving into Brooklyn (or quasi-Brooklyn like myself). Either the title compelled them to buy it ("I live in Brooklyn, this MUST More...
May 21, 2007
dave
rated it: 
This is a book that Slavoj Zizek, in my little imagined world, wishes he had written, wishes each time he rereads it in obsessive delight. Motherless Brooklyn entails the little imagined world of Lionel Essrog, a tourettic orphan become tourettic detective. Essrog isn't your classic hero, nor is he a pitiful anti-hero.
As a first-person narrative, Motherless Brooklyn throws its story at you as you walk into the story with Essrog's mouth full of a greasy White Castle burger. Dietary More...
As a first-person narrative, Motherless Brooklyn throws its story at you as you walk into the story with Essrog's mouth full of a greasy White Castle burger. Dietary More...
2 comments
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(3 people liked it)
Feb 02, 2010
Michelle
rated it:
Oh, Jonathan Lethem. I could see how that plot was going to unfold from a mile away. Do you think I missed my calling as a police detective? I think I've just seen too many episodes of Law & Order (et. al.) in my day. I was fond of Lionel, though.
10 comments
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(2 people liked it)
Feb 13, 2009
Logan
rated it:
I have been on a bit of a mystery bender lately and I'm not quite sure what to make of that. Perhaps it's the return to the overcast North-West that sends me wanting to plumb the depths of human behavior. The gray skies and early sunsets bring out a curiosity about people's inner darkness which is always matched, measure for measure, by the capacity for redemption. Toughs with no visible qualities reveal a fierce dedication to recently killed compatriots. Prima facie immorality is revealed
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3 comments
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(6 people liked it)
Aug 06, 2009
Kim
rated it:
Tell me to do it muffin ass …. to rest the lust of a loaftomb! …. Barnamum Pierogi lug!
Meet Lionel Essrog. Viable Guessfrog, Lionel Deathclam, Liable Guesscog, Ironic Pissclam. Lionel is a Minna Man. A full fledged Hardly Boy… A freakshow… A member of Motherless Brooklyn.
I love Lionel. Not in my special groupie way. Hold your hats here; I might be growing as a person. Nah. I just really love Lionel’s brain. Peirogi kumquat sushiphone! Domestic marshmallow More...
8 comments
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(15 people liked it)
Aug 07, 2008
Becca
rated it:
Though it was decent enough, knowing Lethem's other work made me still think that this book was a let down. The book is filled with brilliant writing, brilliant language, brilliant images- and it's worth the read for that alone.
The premise is awesome, but Lethem doesn't follow it through to it's full potential. It is written from the perspective of a detective with Tourettes, but the language of the first person narrative itself isn't at all Tourettic despite the speech of the narrator eve More...
The premise is awesome, but Lethem doesn't follow it through to it's full potential. It is written from the perspective of a detective with Tourettes, but the language of the first person narrative itself isn't at all Tourettic despite the speech of the narrator eve More...
0 comments
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(2 people liked it)
Dec 09, 2008
Zerbe
rated it:
I've got this bad habit. Sometimes, in half a frenzy, not even knowing what I'm doing, I find myself on the way out of a bookstore with a bag of books that I've just bought for no other reason than the fact that I felt like I needed a book. I am not at my most discerning in these shopping sprees, judging books not only by their covers, but by their font, their publisher and their author's name and it's corresponding coolness. Sometimes, I come out on top, and I stumble upon amazing authors befor
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0 comments
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(1 person liked it)
Jan 30, 2008
Dan
rated it:
I like Lionel Essrog more as time goes by, and I find my morning bus commute past the super-old-school Italian social club on 3rd Ave every morning oddly evocative. Lethem knows how to make a place in his fiction, and let his characters really live there. This is really an excellent novel, especially if you live in Brooklyn. And if you don't, and you have an open heart, it will want to make you move here.
For me, two things keep this book from being a five-star review. The first More...
For me, two things keep this book from being a five-star review. The first More...
0 comments
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(1 person liked it)
Dec 15, 2007
Daniel
rated it:
A well written, quirky detective novel. I gave this book longer than I give most books to convince me it was worth reading. It's hard for me to enjoy a novel if I don't identify with the protagonist... or at least find them extremely charming. Lionel Essrog, the story's unlikely hero, is neither particularly likable nor particularly unlikable. I didn't get sucked in until I was almost a third of the way through, was very engaged for about 150 pages and then chugged through the final 50 only
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0 comments
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(1 person liked it)
Jan 31, 2009
Betty
rated it:
I love books that play with language, and Paul Auster has given me a taste for meta-detective novels. This encompasses both. Instead of the smooth-talking, sharp metaphor-spewing detectives of Dashiell Hammett or Philip Marlowe, we get a narrator whose thoughts are a jumble of half-remembered jokes, compulsive counting, and constant, unstoppable wordplay. Brilliant and funny and sad.
3 comments
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(1 person liked it)
Dec 28, 2008
patience
rated it:
A hard-boiled detective novel with a detective who has Tourette's syndrome. Sounds gimmicky but really fascinating and well-done.
0 comments
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(1 person liked it)
Dec 16, 2009
Lee
rated it:
I loved this book for the first 3/4. The writing is terrific and the main character, Lionel, (a private detective with Tourette's Syndrome) is completely arresting. Through this main character, Lethem does wonderful things with language. This book made me love words all over again. However, this is a mystery novel, and the "mystery" wears thin after a while. I found myself wanting to get to the end, not to see how the plot would play out, but to see how Lionel would handle it. I lost i
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0 comments
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(1 person liked it)
Aug 16, 2007
Laurie
rated it:
I might have a affinity with the main character of this book that goes beyond the typical, and so that might be why this novel delighted me so much. Probably if you are someone who has said to me recently that my lifelong obsessive-compulsive mimic behavior is delightful and that my parents were heinous for trying to shame me out of down my god-given talent for recreating accents, bells, jangly phrasing, and rev-rev-revving motor sounds, you will love this book. Also, if you like words like "
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0 comments
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(1 person liked it)
Dec 18, 2011
Sabra
rated it:
It doesn't look it, but Motherless Brooklyn is a swift trip into the multi-faceted borough which has been made over from a mugger's playground, to a hipster's paradise in the last ten years (thanks to Giuliani). It's swiftness is derived by Lethem's keen goading of narrative. The maestro's pacing is also kept in check, due to well placed fermatas taking shape in rows of triple asterisks.
It's obvious Lethem's a master of language, more than say: style, or dialogue; he's also master o More...
It's obvious Lethem's a master of language, more than say: style, or dialogue; he's also master o More...
0 comments
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(3 people liked it)
Nov 18, 2011
Nicholas
rated it:
All the hype around this book got me to read it, but it can't get me to like it. I've read enough Raymond Chandler to know that Lethem did his homework, but I've never been able to care too deeply for the "hard-boiled" detective novel genre, which in my severely limited experience is mostly image over substance with spots of wit and brilliance. It's like the literary version of Rockabilly Music.
Lethem had a wonderful idea in taking the peculiar language of the genre and con More...
Lethem had a wonderful idea in taking the peculiar language of the genre and con More...
Sep 28, 2011
Lou
rated it:
Motherless Brooklyn is to narrative what E.E. Cummings is to poetry. Initiating the book was heavy and slow, as Lethem's narrative style is loose and impressionistic. Once you get used to the narrative style, it is a tragicomedic coming-of-age tale, Lionel Essrog is the hapless young Everyman who has severe Tourett's Disorder as his defining attribute. At first we want to believe that Lethem's narrative style was meant to put you inside Lionels head and think through his Tourettic obsessional
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Jul 30, 2011
absolutely fantastic. a novel such as "motherless brooklyn" is a pretty risky prospect. not only does the promise of a top-notch detective story have to be fulfilled, but the author also has to worry about creating an accurate and believable portrait of a main character with tourette's syndrome, a condition that few people understand to be anything more than swearing uncontrollably in public. lethem fires on all cylinders here, crafting not only a detailed and intricate mystery, but
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Jul 27, 2011
Steve
rated it:
Frank Minna was a small fish in a big city pond full of piranhas and scum. He was nimble, though; good with angles. His best move was when he recruited four young guys from the local orphanage, before they were old enough to shave, to be errand boys. These young bucks were eager, loyal assistants that somebody dubbed Motherless Brooklyn. Frank treated them to bigger boy delights like twenty dollar bills and bottles of beer for their efforts, and they just stayed on staff as they got older an
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2 comments
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(1 person liked it)
Apr 04, 2011
Lindsey
rated it:
If there are two things I truly love in a novel it's a.) a socially stunted but totally endearing narrator and b.) unabashed obsession with the borough in which I live. And in Motherless Brooklyn, both are very tangible characters exalted to new levels by Lethem's unique and undeniable talents. The framework of the story is very rooted in traditional noir crime novel, but Lethem is not attempting to reinvent the genre so much as pay homage to it in the most literary ways he can think of. This em
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0 comments
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(1 person liked it)
Mar 12, 2011
Greg
rated it:
In his treatise On Writing, Stephen King says the spark for many of the best novels is when a writer combines two or more disparate ideas/topics/themes and then figures out how they can complement each other in interesting or unexpected ways. Jonathan Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn is one of the best examples you'll ever find of this theory in action.
To explain why, let's try to follow (an absurdly abbreviated version of) what must've been Lethem's thought process before actually sitt More...
To explain why, let's try to follow (an absurdly abbreviated version of) what must've been Lethem's thought process before actually sitt More...
0 comments
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(1 person liked it)
Jan 11, 2011
Michael
rated it:
Courtesy 1980s LA Law, that glossy, technicolor descendent of Miami Vice and Dynasty, full of soap opera and courtroom intrigue, a response, perhaps, to the gritty reality of another show, another 80s icon, Hill Street Blues.
I don’t remember the character, although I think he may have been a lawyer. I just remember him screaming, loudly, randomly, and bewilderingly.
I was just a teenager, an adolescent who hadn’t yet seen enough of life to understand the infinite diversities More...
I don’t remember the character, although I think he may have been a lawyer. I just remember him screaming, loudly, randomly, and bewilderingly.
I was just a teenager, an adolescent who hadn’t yet seen enough of life to understand the infinite diversities More...
Sep 05, 2010
David
rated it:
A private detective with Tourette's Syndrome...the possibilities for linguistic pyrotechnics were endless...but hardly ever explored.
Because of this it was a disappointing book.
No real play with language, no genuine exploration of the marginalization of its sufferers, and then there was the narrative.
The characters, plotting, asides, crises just never engaged me in any deep or arresting manner.
The blending of the literary novel (character driven) and genre More...
Because of this it was a disappointing book.
No real play with language, no genuine exploration of the marginalization of its sufferers, and then there was the narrative.
The characters, plotting, asides, crises just never engaged me in any deep or arresting manner.
The blending of the literary novel (character driven) and genre More...
0 comments
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(1 person liked it)
May 10, 2010
Sara
rated it:
Noir detective fiction with Tourette's syndrome.
The protagonist is an orphan rescued from his bleakly institutionally upbringing by a petty gangster who uses him essentially for muscle. And oh yeah -- he has terrible, uncontrollable Tourette's which complicates things when he tries to find out who killed his gangster mentor.
I picked up the book because I was intrigued what the idea of a Tourettic relationship with language might do to the very familiar conventions of the de More...
The protagonist is an orphan rescued from his bleakly institutionally upbringing by a petty gangster who uses him essentially for muscle. And oh yeah -- he has terrible, uncontrollable Tourette's which complicates things when he tries to find out who killed his gangster mentor.
I picked up the book because I was intrigued what the idea of a Tourettic relationship with language might do to the very familiar conventions of the de More...
Apr 22, 2010
Loren
rated it:
From ISawLightningFall.com
If you've studied literature, you know that narratives haven't always been populated with fully rounded people. For quite a long time, writers filled their works with flat characters either due to their relative unimportance in the plot or to emphasize universal qualities or out of some allegorical or archetypal impulse. But in the past century or two, the proverbial pendulum has swung the other way, and complex, realistic characters have become badges of au More...
If you've studied literature, you know that narratives haven't always been populated with fully rounded people. For quite a long time, writers filled their works with flat characters either due to their relative unimportance in the plot or to emphasize universal qualities or out of some allegorical or archetypal impulse. But in the past century or two, the proverbial pendulum has swung the other way, and complex, realistic characters have become badges of au More...
Apr 19, 2010
Mike
rated it:
Man handicapped by Tourette's must solve the mystery of his mentor's death. To do it he uses Raymond Chandler's method, but his pathology complicates things.
This exercise in genre unfolds with the same natural ease as that of a dog licking its own balls. In the hands of an artist genre becomes the equivalent of an invitation to examine etchings (or a time machine) in the bedroom: you know they're planning to fuck with you even if you're not exactly sure of all the sweaty details, and More...
This exercise in genre unfolds with the same natural ease as that of a dog licking its own balls. In the hands of an artist genre becomes the equivalent of an invitation to examine etchings (or a time machine) in the bedroom: you know they're planning to fuck with you even if you're not exactly sure of all the sweaty details, and More...
Mar 27, 2010
Justine
rated it:
Motherless Brooklyn has been sitting on my shelves since my sophomore year in college, when Nancy Brokaw gave it to me on a trip to Bloomington. For some reason, I never got around to it. We have been blissfully reunited through a 90 minute conversation in which my mother read the titles of all the books at home in her broken English, and I sorted them into "yes, mail them to me" and "no, i'm so ashamed i even own that."
Morgan describes Lethem as a "literary More...
Morgan describes Lethem as a "literary More...
Nov 24, 2009
[close:] From America's most inventive novelist, Jonathan Lethem, comes this compelling and compulsive riff on the classic detective novel.
Lionel Essrog is Brooklyn's very own self-appointed Human Freakshow, an orphan whose Tourettic impulses drive him to bark, count, and rip apart our language in startling and original ways. Together with three veterans of the St. Vincent's Home for Boys, he works for small-time mobster Frank Minna's limo service cum detective agency. Life without F More...
Lionel Essrog is Brooklyn's very own self-appointed Human Freakshow, an orphan whose Tourettic impulses drive him to bark, count, and rip apart our language in startling and original ways. Together with three veterans of the St. Vincent's Home for Boys, he works for small-time mobster Frank Minna's limo service cum detective agency. Life without F More...
