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Title: Fanon
Author: John Edgar Wideman
Narrator: Dion Graham
Format: Unabridged
Length: 8 hrs and 28 mins
Language: English
Release date: 11-27-08
Publisher: Recorded Books
Ratings: 3 of 5 out of 8 votes
Genres: Fiction, Historical
Publisher's Summary:
In this fictionalized view of the revolutionary's life, an African-American writer travels the world to do research for a biography of Fanon. In a tale that is part love story, mystery, and biography, Fanon examines how a political radical's views apply in a post-9/11 world.
Critic Reviews:
"Beautifully written ..." (Publishers Weekly)
Members Reviews:
Feeding your head.
This is not a novel to read on the beech; however, if you like to be tickled on your intellectual funny bone then this is just for you. Wideman is ironically self-conscious without taking himself too seriously, as he explores issues of writing, political engagement, racism and other inequalities. In many ways the novel is a rabbit hole in wonderland and Wideman takes us on a truly illuminating journey.
Why Not Fanon?
At one point in this rambling, experimantal, or postmodern novel, the actual author's brother asks why write about Fanon. In fact, the question is a theme running throughout the work, and the answer is this: given Wideman's background and concerns, why not write about Fanon. The problem is that although Wideman writes beautifully at times, he is not a storyteller, and so Fanon seems like a device to hang words on.
This author does a lot of dithering about writing, about why write, about just who is writing about Fanon, about words, and about the impossibility of writing. The author starts out in first person, but immediately invents Thomas, a fiction, to write what we are reading for which Wideman is responsible. Does this give a taste of the style? Thomas slips in and out of the text along with Fanon, a severed head, Wideman's family, and Jean Luc Godard. It is hard to believe that Wideman actually thinks that he owes his readers, fellow travelers, much of anything even though he says he owes us an explanation and admits that we want to know what happens at the end, but when there is no story, how can there be an end.
Even if you stick with this book to the bitter end, you do not come away with much. The part where Wideman as Wideman visits his brother in prison almost seems inserted and could, however, make a good short story.
Tedious book about not writing a novel about Franz Fanon
I was startled that this book about a writer like John Edgar Wideman with a brother serving a lifelong prison sentence making a few stabs at imagining the life of Franz Fanon (1925-1961), the psychiatric theorist about the scars of colonialism on colonized and colonizer, made the New York Times list of 100 best books of 2008. I have to consider this an affirmative action pic, having epined that the book should not have been published in its turgid, massively self-indulgent and narcissistic form. (Established authors, not just black ones, publish books badly in need of firm editing, so I would not say that the publication is an instance of affirmative action.)
Wideman works in a severed head and fantasies that Jean-Luc Godard wants the narrator to write a screenplay for a Fanon biopic (as if Godard cared about screenplays... or Wideman! and Godard's "Le petit soldat" was made long, long ago).
Fanon did not live to see what the decolonized Algeria he strove for became.
