I found this book uneven if just about every regard. At times the prose is complex and beautiful, at other times it is just complicated, ungrammatical and ugly. Some of the characters are alive and compelling, but many are dull and irritating. In particular, I found that Duallo and Jed's mother held my attention, whereas Cello only sometimes did and anyone called Ralston had me skimming. Some scenes are vividly described, while others are baffling in a "wait, was she there all along?" kind of way.

The structure seemed unnecessarily complex and I didn't feel it added anything to the mood or meaning. I found almost all the passages dealing with Jed's time in Chicago, and especially his childhood and adolescence, convoluted and uninteresting. However, I can see how some readers might relate to those passages if they had similar experiences. Most of the allusions left me cold, and there were many of them.

If Pinckney publishes another queer-themed novel, I'll probably read it, because his talent as a writer is apparent even amongst the flaws in this novel. However, I wouldn't recommend this novel. ( )

I felt a bit like I got tricked into reading a memoir. But Berlin is entrancing, and the riskier / less linear parts of the narration are satisfying enough to make up for the rest of the style. To be clear: it's very well written and an engaging character and story, I just balk at memoir styling. ( )

Lyrical (gorgeous) and unapologetically intellectual, both at once, in a way that is almost nonexistent in modern american literature. I'm still steeped in the feeling the novel left me on the last pages. I feel as if I have spent a few hours with a person (narrator) (author) who thinks deeply about the world; someone who looks so closely at the human experience, and sees it clearly, and finds it beautiful. The rendering of Berlin in the late eighties is magnificent--the city Pinckney renders is a place where everything is both entirely artificial, and yet fundamentally true.

As I read I felt as if Darryl Pinckney went on a journey himself when he wrote his story--that he entered into a conversation with a character, one he didn't know well himself in the beginning. It feels as if Pinckney wrote this novel to learn more about his narrator, a person who is living at a very unique time and place, and who sees things; a person who shares his life with just enough detail, just enough openness, to invite us readers to enter into the conversation, as well.

One of the "Berlins" that Pinckney writes so well about is the experience of being an intellectually-inclined American expatriate with limited German skills, but with a yearning to express yourself in the native language fluently, and to discuss intellectual things with people you find interesting, or whom you want as friends. You grasp for ways to express deep thoughts, using the words you know, but all the time you're painfully aware that what you're saying is sounding unusual, vague, or at times even deep, in a metaphorical way at least, but also in a way that has nothing to do with what you meant to say. I've never read a book before now that captures this particular isolation so well.

Pinckney also nails the expatriate experience in many other ways. He is writing about the specific experience of being a gay black American man in Berlin, but what he writes is representative more generally of what it's like to have the expectations and prejudices peculiar to German culture imposed on you--the way these expectations can limit you, but also, the temptation to exploit these same expectations for your own purposes and desires. The thrill of being different, and the loneliness of being different.

A final thing I loved about the novel was the recurring, quiet theme of the narrator's books--a quiet, chance meeting with Susan Sontag who happens to mention her idea of "home" being where your books are...and then to notice when books are mentioned in the story. It's a small, lovely, thoughtful grace note throughout the novel to trace the journey of the narrator's books. ( )

A young African American man from an upper middle class family in Chicago moves to West Berlin in the early 1980s to stay with his fellow bougie cousin, a former classical pianist who has married a German man and lives a life of contented leisure. He is hired by an up and coming German architect, and is brought on more for his race than his talent, as he works to overcome alcohol and drug addiction and to become an established writer. He enjoys the party scene in West Berlin and mingles with bored, and boring, young Germans, Europeans and Americans, and engage in inane discussions about their tired existences.

Ugh. This novel bored me from the beginning, and I gave up after 68 dreadful pages. I may give it another go in the future, but not anytime soon. ( )

2.75 stars. This starts out so well, but the timeline of this book is so fractured for no good reason. I'm pretty sure I can't quite follow what time frame is what during various trips to Berlin that Jed takes. Almost no one seems to have a name beyond Cello and Manfred, so eventually all this beautiful prose and potentially meaningful...stuff...get lost in, "I'm not sure what's happening now...." ( )