Pagina principaleGruppiConversazioniAltroStatistiche
Cerca nel Sito
Questo sito utilizza i cookies per fornire i nostri servizi, per migliorare le prestazioni, per analisi, e (per gli utenti che accedono senza fare login) per la pubblicità. Usando LibraryThing confermi di aver letto e capito le nostre condizioni di servizio e la politica sulla privacy. Il tuo uso del sito e dei servizi è soggetto a tali politiche e condizioni.

Risultati da Google Ricerca Libri

Fai clic su di un'immagine per andare a Google Ricerca Libri.

Sto caricando le informazioni...

Linden Hills (1985)

di Gloria Naylor

Altri autori: Vedi la sezione altri autori.

UtentiRecensioniPopolaritàMedia votiCitazioni
582940,515 (3.84)10
The National Book Award-winning author of The Women of Brewster Place explores the secrets of an affluent black community. For its wealthy African American residents, the exclusive neighborhood of Linden Hills is a symbol of "making it." The ultimate achievement: a home on prestigious Tupelo Drive. Making your way downhill to Tupelo is irrefutable proof of your worth. But the farther down the hill you go, the emptier you become . . .   Using the descent of Dante's Inferno as a model, this bold, haunting novel follows two young men as they attempt to find work amid the circles of the well-off community. Exploring a microcosm of race and social class, author Gloria Naylor reveals the true cost of success for the lost souls of Linden Hills--an existence trapped in a nightmare of their own making.  … (altro)
Sto caricando le informazioni...

Iscriviti per consentire a LibraryThing di scoprire se ti piacerà questo libro.

Attualmente non vi sono conversazioni su questo libro.

» Vedi le 10 citazioni

Linden Hills wasn’t black; it was successful. The shining surface of their careers, brass railings, and cars hurt his eyes because it only reflected the bright nothing that was inside of them.

Gloria Naylor's Lindon Hills is somehow a perfect allegory of race, gender, and sexuality within the black community and the power structures put in place to keep the status quo. The premise is simple: friends Willie and Lester—two 20-year-old black men who decide to travel through the glittering Linden Hills to scrape enough money together for the holiday season. What they find instead a community rotting from the inside out and the deeply twisted lives that are caught up in all of it in the daunting imagery of Dante's Inferno.

The novel has at times 4 simultaneous storylines running throughout: the present, involving Willie and Lester; the other presents depicting Mr. Nedeed and another with his wife trapped in the basement; and the backstories of the characters Willie and Lester interact with through their journey through Linden Hills.

I absolutely loved the characters Willie and Lester and how who interact with as they descend into Linden Hills. It almost felt a little like a mystery novel at times; the characters revealing subtle clues as to their ills before the great reveal of their "sins". We meet a gay man marrying and making his lover be his best man to get a foot into Linden Hills, a man mourning his conveniently dead wife before he marries another, an alcoholic, burned out priest, a woman who loses all sense of meaning after leaving the warm home of her grandmother and "making it", and a creepy historian who documents every happening of Linden Hills—including the acts of our own Willie and Lester from the past few days without anyone knowing. I kept wondering each chapter who'd I'd see, what cast of characters I'd meet and chip away word by word to see who they really were.

A vivid addition to the novel was the southern gothic elements of that comes alive around Willa Nedeed in her basement. There's major Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre vibes in the calling across the hills of the trapped woman in the basement, the almost supernatural powers of Mr. Nedeed and his control over his own little section of hell. It's full of unnatural shadows and nightmares, dead children shrouded in lace and stiffening by the hour and fires (perhaps) purifying it all. It was exciting. It was something classic in an understandable, modern setting. It was amazing.

And so I really appreciated and enjoyed the ease that the book read in and the pervasiveness of the themes and symbols. For some, it may seem heavy-handed, but I think masking that in a novel such as this is would have been incredibly disingenuous and showed quite apparently the genius of Gloria Naylor. Her work in this story with the interwoven themes of and symbols of black and white, father and son, faces and identity, and material goods and their emptiness was beautiful and complex without being convoluted. It's the perfect allegory for the question of "making it" in a white man's world and a clear thesis against the philosophies of Booker T. Washington. It'll make you think, and I believe that's exactly what Naylor wanted.

"Being white was the furthest thing from his mind, since he spent every waking moment trying to be no color at all." ( )
  Eavans | Feb 17, 2023 |
Gloria Naylor passed from the literary family at far too young an age. While The Women of Brewster’s Place and Mama Day are better works, Linden Hills offers a look at the competitive natures of this wealthy black neighborhood, as well as its secrets and narcissism. What is so good about Naylor’s work is the way she controls the magical and the realistic, taking a very serious look at human nature.
Reviewed in Le Coeur de l'Artiste: http://www.djadamson.com/le-coeur-de-lartiste ( )
  DJadamson | Jan 4, 2018 |
I read this in college 20 years ago. It's been a long time, but certain passages in this book still come to mind, so while I'm not sure if/when I'll reread it, I'm confident it's worth the four stars. ( )
  Sean191 | Oct 5, 2016 |
Linden Hills is one of the creepiest books I've read, and certainly one of the most enjoyable. Gloria Naylor is a beautiful writer, hands down. Although her language is full of symbol and metaphor, she is still easily accesssable. I read Linden Hills after reading The Women of Brewster Place and expected something similar: stories of different people's stuggles with racism and class. Though I loved WBP, Linden Hills has an extra element, a feeling of being sucked down into disparity. The characters are all looking tho climb the social ladder of the bourgeois black comminuty. However, truly they seek a descent, both literally (the most coveted addresses are at the bottom of the hills) and figuratively (losing themselves and their souls to advance socially). I think this is a great book not only for its lessons about society, appearece and status, but also beacsue Naylor is a gifted storyteller. I finished this book within a day of starting it because I couldn't put it down. I'm dissapointed that Naylor isn't as highly recognized as some other contemorary authors: she definitely deserves a place beside Morrison for her beauty of language and Steinbeck for her examination of the human spirit in a crushing society. Bravo! ( )
2 vota erindona | Dec 8, 2012 |
Not much of an idea? It was a wonderful idea - colossal. Anything that put the music back in Ruth's voice as she spoke to him. He would go into Linden Hills and work his butt off. Then he'd take the money and buy her and Norm a great gift — maybe even a turkey, too. Ruth wanted him to go into Linden Hills and he would go. He was just sorry that she hadn’t asked him to go into hell for her so he could really prove himself.

Best friends and fellow poets Willie Mason and Lester Tilson, work their way down through the exclusive, and exclusively African-American, suburb of Linden Hills, doing odd jobs to earn money to buy Christmas presents. But the streets of Linden Hills correspond to the circles of hell in Dante's Inferno, and Willie (who lives in the down-market area of Putney Wayne) and Lester (whose family have lived on First Crescent in Linden Hills since the very beginning) are this book's Dante and Virgil.

Lester and Willie's friends Ruth (who during her first marriage lived on Fifth Crescent) and Norman, live in a barely furnished apartment in Putney Wayne and are happy with their lot, and unlike most of their neighbours, they don't aspire to a house in Linden Hills. Those who have already made it into Linden Hills hope to move further down the hill, and ultimately onto Tupelo Drive, just above the moated house belonging to undertaker and property developer Luther Nedeed, whose ancestor bought the hillside back before the American Civil War.

Apart from the poets and their friends, the person I had most sympathy for was Reverend Hollis, a resident of Fifth Crescent who employed Willie and Lester to help him get ready for the children's Christmas party at his church. Reverend Hollis feels his faith seeping away, quashed by the emptiness emanating from his large, wealthy and status-conscious congregation, so every year he throws a party for the children of Putney Wayne at his own expense, in the hope of encouraging some poorer people who are full of God's spirit to start attending his church. The oddest person in the book doesn't even live in Linden Hills. Maxwell Smyth has risen to a high position in General Motors despite the handicap of being black. He controls every aspect of his life to the nth degree, including his dietary and toilet habits, dedicating his life to being so perfect that no-one can doubt that he is the best man for whatever job is on offer. ( )
1 vota isabelx | Apr 28, 2011 |
nessuna recensione | aggiungi una recensione

» Aggiungi altri autori (5 potenziali)

Nome dell'autoreRuoloTipo di autoreOpera?Stato
Gloria Naylorautore primariotutte le edizionicalcolato
Defaux, GérardTraduttoreautore secondarioalcune edizioniconfermato
Miceli, JayaProgetto della copertinaautore secondarioalcune edizioniconfermato
Devi effettuare l'accesso per contribuire alle Informazioni generali.
Per maggiori spiegazioni, vedi la pagina di aiuto delle informazioni generali.
Titolo canonico
Dati dalle informazioni generali inglesi. Modifica per tradurlo nella tua lingua.
Titolo originale
Titoli alternativi
Data della prima edizione
Personaggi
Luoghi significativi
Eventi significativi
Film correlati
Epigrafe
Dati dalle informazioni generali inglesi. Modifica per tradurlo nella tua lingua.
Grandma Tilson, I'm afraid of hell.
Ain't nothing to fear, there's hell on earth.
I mean the real hell where you can go when you die.
You ain't gotta die to go to the real hell.
No?
Uh uh, you just gotta sell that silver mirror God
propped up in your soul.
Sell it to who --the devil?
Naw, just to the highest bidder, child. The
highest bidder.
Dedica
Dati dalle informazioni generali inglesi. Modifica per tradurlo nella tua lingua.
For my parents -
Roosevelt and Alberta Naylor
Incipit
Dati dalle informazioni generali inglesi. Modifica per tradurlo nella tua lingua.
There had been a dispute for years over the exact location of Linden Hills.
Citazioni
Dati dalle informazioni generali inglesi. Modifica per tradurlo nella tua lingua.
In Linden Hills they could forget that the world said you spelled black with a capital nothing. Well, they were something and there was everything around them to show it. The world hadn’t given them anything but the chance to fail—and they hadn’t failed, because they were in Linden Hills. (p. 15)
But there was no torment in Linden Hills for the white god his fathers had shaken their fists at, because there was no white god, and there never had been. (p. 16)
Linden Hills wasn’t black; it was successful. (p. 17)
Applications from any future Baptist ministers, political activists, and Ivy League graduates were now given first priority, since their kind seemed to reach the bottom faster than the others, leaving more room at the top. And whenever anyone reached the Tupelo area, they eventually disappeared. Finally, devoured by their own drives, there just wasn’t enough humanity left to fill the rooms of a real home, and the property went up for sale. Luther often wondered why none of the applicants ever questioned the fact that there was always space in Linden Hills. (p. 17)
Maxwell had discovered long ago that he doubled the odds of finishing first if he didn’t carry the weight of that milligram of pigment in his skin. There was no feasible reason why it should have slowed him down since in mass it weighed so little, and even that was consistently distributed over his six-foot frame. But the handicap had been set centuries before it was his turn at the gate. And since he knew no tract of ground but the planet earth and no competition but the human race, he had to use the rules as written and find a way to turn a consequence into an inconsequence in his struggle to reach the finish line as a man. (p. 102)
Ultime parole
Dati dalle informazioni generali inglesi. Modifica per tradurlo nella tua lingua.
(Click per vedere. Attenzione: può contenere anticipazioni.)
Nota di disambiguazione
Redattore editoriale
Elogi
Dati dalle informazioni generali inglesi. Modifica per tradurlo nella tua lingua.
Lingua originale
DDC/MDS Canonico
LCC canonico

Risorse esterne che parlano di questo libro

Wikipedia in inglese (2)

The National Book Award-winning author of The Women of Brewster Place explores the secrets of an affluent black community. For its wealthy African American residents, the exclusive neighborhood of Linden Hills is a symbol of "making it." The ultimate achievement: a home on prestigious Tupelo Drive. Making your way downhill to Tupelo is irrefutable proof of your worth. But the farther down the hill you go, the emptier you become . . .   Using the descent of Dante's Inferno as a model, this bold, haunting novel follows two young men as they attempt to find work amid the circles of the well-off community. Exploring a microcosm of race and social class, author Gloria Naylor reveals the true cost of success for the lost souls of Linden Hills--an existence trapped in a nightmare of their own making.  

Non sono state trovate descrizioni di biblioteche

Descrizione del libro
Riassunto haiku

Discussioni correnti

Nessuno

Copertine popolari

Link rapidi

Voto

Media: (3.84)
0.5
1 1
1.5
2 5
2.5 1
3 15
3.5 8
4 25
4.5 1
5 21

Sei tu?

Diventa un autore di LibraryThing.

 

A proposito di | Contatto | LibraryThing.com | Privacy/Condizioni d'uso | Guida/FAQ | Blog | Negozio | APIs | TinyCat | Biblioteche di personaggi celebri | Recensori in anteprima | Informazioni generali | 203,238,713 libri! | Barra superiore: Sempre visibile