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Black Deutschland
An intoxicating, provocative novel of appetite, identity, and self-construction, Darryl Pinckney's Black Deutschland tells the story of an outsider, trapped between a painful past and a tenebrous future, in Europe's brightest and darkest city.
Jed―young, gay, black, out of rehab and out of prospects in his hometown of Chicago―flees to the city of his fantasies, a museum of modernism and Berlin. The paradise that tyranny created, the subsidized city isolated behind the Berlin Wall, is where he's chosen to become the figure that he so admires, the black American expatriate. Newly sober and nostalgic for the Weimar days of Isherwood and Auden, Jed arrives to chase boys and to escape from what it means to be a black male in America.
But history, both personal and political, can't be avoided with time or distance. Whether it's the judgment of the cousin he grew up with and her husband's bourgeois German family, the lure of white wine in a down-and-out bar, a gang of racists looking for a brawl, or the ravaged visage of Rock Hudson flashing behind the face of every white boy he desperately longs for, the past never stays past even in faraway Berlin. In the age of Reagan and AIDS in a city on the verge of tearing down its walls, he clambers toward some semblance of adulthood amid the outcasts and expats, intellectuals and artists, queers and misfits. And, on occasion, the city keeps its Isherwood promises and the boy he kisses, incredibly, kisses him back.
Jed―young, gay, black, out of rehab and out of prospects in his hometown of Chicago―flees to the city of his fantasies, a museum of modernism and Berlin. The paradise that tyranny created, the subsidized city isolated behind the Berlin Wall, is where he's chosen to become the figure that he so admires, the black American expatriate. Newly sober and nostalgic for the Weimar days of Isherwood and Auden, Jed arrives to chase boys and to escape from what it means to be a black male in America.
But history, both personal and political, can't be avoided with time or distance. Whether it's the judgment of the cousin he grew up with and her husband's bourgeois German family, the lure of white wine in a down-and-out bar, a gang of racists looking for a brawl, or the ravaged visage of Rock Hudson flashing behind the face of every white boy he desperately longs for, the past never stays past even in faraway Berlin. In the age of Reagan and AIDS in a city on the verge of tearing down its walls, he clambers toward some semblance of adulthood amid the outcasts and expats, intellectuals and artists, queers and misfits. And, on occasion, the city keeps its Isherwood promises and the boy he kisses, incredibly, kisses him back.
294 pages, Hardcover
First published February 2, 2016
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About the author
Darryl Pinckney
31 books63 followersDarryl Pinckney is an American novelist, playwright, and essayist.
Pinckney grew up in a middle-class African-American family in Indianapolis, Indiana, where he attended local public schools. He was educated at Columbia University in New York.
Pinckney grew up in a middle-class African-American family in Indianapolis, Indiana, where he attended local public schools. He was educated at Columbia University in New York.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 108 reviews
January 30, 2019
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.
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.
December 17, 2024
This is a beautifully rendered story, past flashback- dreamlike, surreal, and candid. It's also a haunting travelogue, an ode to Isherwood's Berlin; and a homage to the final days before the collapse of the Berlin Wall and of the 1980s.
Jed's adventures- all at once crushing, splendid, and bittersweet all pierce the heart. His relationship with Duallo, a needy young stranger with whom he falls in love with, and who finally kisses him back; his eccentric cousin Cello, juxtaposed with harrowing flashbacks to the Chicago of his youth, his drug addiction; and of his turning his life around as a Black expatriate in Berlin is definitely a haunting novel, a novel of dreams and unrequited love and the uneasiness of it all.
Jed's adventures- all at once crushing, splendid, and bittersweet all pierce the heart. His relationship with Duallo, a needy young stranger with whom he falls in love with, and who finally kisses him back; his eccentric cousin Cello, juxtaposed with harrowing flashbacks to the Chicago of his youth, his drug addiction; and of his turning his life around as a Black expatriate in Berlin is definitely a haunting novel, a novel of dreams and unrequited love and the uneasiness of it all.
March 9, 2016
As Rome is the Eternal City, Black Deutschland, an exploration of race, identity and expectations in mid-80’s West Berlin, is the Eternal Novel. Weighing in at fewer than 300 pages, Darryl Pinkney’s story of a gay, African American ex-pat in West Berlin looking to live the “Isherwood promises” of the city, was one of the more laborious and disjointed reads I’ve ever experienced. I’d get lost—not in a good way—in every third sentence. Pronouns were used without antecedents. Sentences were sometimes jammed together in positively Moroccan bazaar fashion: crowded, clamorous, and sequenced in an ancient or alien logic. I did more re-reading—not in a good way—than any book I can recall.
And yet…yet. Pinkney chocks Black Deutschland with so many hilarious, heartbreaking, trenchant and sharp-eyed observations about race in America and abroad, that it’s impossible to not admire and enjoy aspects of the novel. The scenes of Jed, Deutschland’s protagonist, with his upper middle class family in Chicago flow far more coherently than the portions abroad and better hit (what I believe to be) the mark for his wryly-observed, searching, self-critical and somewhat bitchy voice. I get what Pinkney is going for (it seems) with the more disjointed, illogical and distanced narrative in the West Berlin scenes (where Jed is uncomfortable and somewhat at sea). This understanding of the device doesn’t make the reading experience any less exhausting.
I wouldn’t not recommend Black Deutschland; there’s so much here that’s well done. There’s also so much that’s, to me, overdone. In this case, I’ll cop to the possibility of user error without reservation.
For me, I’ll most fondly look back on the ending of Black Deutschland for it being the end of my reading Black Deutschland.
And yet…yet. Pinkney chocks Black Deutschland with so many hilarious, heartbreaking, trenchant and sharp-eyed observations about race in America and abroad, that it’s impossible to not admire and enjoy aspects of the novel. The scenes of Jed, Deutschland’s protagonist, with his upper middle class family in Chicago flow far more coherently than the portions abroad and better hit (what I believe to be) the mark for his wryly-observed, searching, self-critical and somewhat bitchy voice. I get what Pinkney is going for (it seems) with the more disjointed, illogical and distanced narrative in the West Berlin scenes (where Jed is uncomfortable and somewhat at sea). This understanding of the device doesn’t make the reading experience any less exhausting.
I wouldn’t not recommend Black Deutschland; there’s so much here that’s well done. There’s also so much that’s, to me, overdone. In this case, I’ll cop to the possibility of user error without reservation.
For me, I’ll most fondly look back on the ending of Black Deutschland for it being the end of my reading Black Deutschland.
March 2, 2017
It's said that we should be careful what we wish for because we might get it. I've been made sick by gratuitous gore, and overcome by oceanic tears, from recent highly-touted misrepresented novels of gay literary fiction. In Black Deutschland I was hoping for something different.
And, yes, thankfully there is no blood, and only a few dry tears! But, absent these plot elements, what does Darryl Pinckney replace them with? Only intellectual pretension and an awkwardly arranged story not matching too well with the publisher's book description. (Like those other recent novels).
For readers wondering whether to read this book, I won't compare in detail (like I did with those other novels) the differences between the published descriptions (also the ethereal 5-star reviews) and the actual book content. Instead, this is what it's about. You might find it interesting to compare the list here with the jacket copy:
1) Growing up in the city of Chicago, experiencing the terrible racism it afforded.
2) Escaping to Berlin for sex, but in reality getting a job, and spending most of your time in your room alone, packing to return to Chicago an uncountable number of times. I lost count.
3) An impressive, but confusingly disorganized tour of the author's intellect.
4) The major theme of this book is race, not Berlin, not boys.
5) What else? Oh yes, the Berlin Wall comes down at the end. That's not a spoiler, we know it happens from our own knowledge of history.
That's it. I've omitted many forgettable subtleties, of course. I am weary of this book and this review. Need to get on with it.
What about sex? Is there any in a book supposed to be about a young man looking for "boys" in Berlin? (This according to the book description and the very first paragraph of the book itself.) Why yes, you will be pleased to read of two kisses. There's also exactly one sex scene, entirely encapsulated, from start to finish, in the following two sentences on page 242, very nearly the end of the book: "It was never less than wondrous that he consented. I'd just pulled off the condom, making it snap, when they knocked." Anyone wanting a literary, or even simply explicit, treatment of the "boys of Berlin" must look elsewhere. And…I can't ever remember, uh, "snapping" one, can you?
Maybe the characters make up for the disappointing story. Here's a list of them, at least those I remember:
1) Chicago, mostly (yes, I mean as a character--in default of interesting human characters, the cities fill the gap)
2) Berlin, in a credited supporting role
3) The Mercedes-Benz star revolving over the Europa center in West Berlin (similar symbolic function as the "eyes" in The Great Gatsby but not done as smartly)
4) Cello, the narrator Jed's somewhat interesting sister (she played classical piano semi-professionally)
Yes, there were more, again forgettable. What about Jed, the Narrator? Hmm…not on the list.
Lovers of this book may take exception to this review by suggesting that I was expecting pornography, not the literary fiction Mr. Pinckney surely delivered. Not so. I really wanted a high-toned work examining the fabled Berlin scene of the 1980's. This would be linked with insightful comparisons to Christopher Isherwood's experiences in the 1920s and 1930s which that author has unforgettably recorded in his classic, genre-gender-bending The Berlin Stories: The Last of Mr Norris/Goodbye to Berlin and his later memoir of those times, Christopher and His Kind.
Regrettably that's not what we get. Instead, we are served pompousness. That hefty indigestible meal is wrapped in a flailing timeframe which whips the wildly swinging reader to insensibility. The poor soul is beat up trying to follow the narrator's trips back and forth in space (Chicago-Berlin-Chicago) and in time (the narrator's 1960s childhood along with anecdotal African-American history snippets going back to the 1700s). To illustrate the author's eclectic knowledge, here are two quotes:
The following anecdote is nice, linking my favorite type of music to a scientist I greatly admire. Surely you recognize the names and references:
We are now, finally, at the end of the book, and this review. After the Berlin Wall came down in the novel's final pages (not a spoiler, of course) it seemed to be a fitting dramatic close.
Nope. He had to go on.
I was floored by the self-important pretentiousness of the following passage at the very end. I remember Isherwood's moving scene referenced in the quote below very well. Pinckney now switches to the authorial "I". This is not necessarily a surprise: the line between the narrator "Jed" and Pinckney himself was always thin. Now it evaporates:
No, you're not. It will take a far better writer to do that. Greatness cannot be assumed simply by association.
And, yes, thankfully there is no blood, and only a few dry tears! But, absent these plot elements, what does Darryl Pinckney replace them with? Only intellectual pretension and an awkwardly arranged story not matching too well with the publisher's book description. (Like those other recent novels).
For readers wondering whether to read this book, I won't compare in detail (like I did with those other novels) the differences between the published descriptions (also the ethereal 5-star reviews) and the actual book content. Instead, this is what it's about. You might find it interesting to compare the list here with the jacket copy:
1) Growing up in the city of Chicago, experiencing the terrible racism it afforded.
2) Escaping to Berlin for sex, but in reality getting a job, and spending most of your time in your room alone, packing to return to Chicago an uncountable number of times. I lost count.
3) An impressive, but confusingly disorganized tour of the author's intellect.
4) The major theme of this book is race, not Berlin, not boys.
5) What else? Oh yes, the Berlin Wall comes down at the end. That's not a spoiler, we know it happens from our own knowledge of history.
That's it. I've omitted many forgettable subtleties, of course. I am weary of this book and this review. Need to get on with it.
What about sex? Is there any in a book supposed to be about a young man looking for "boys" in Berlin? (This according to the book description and the very first paragraph of the book itself.) Why yes, you will be pleased to read of two kisses. There's also exactly one sex scene, entirely encapsulated, from start to finish, in the following two sentences on page 242, very nearly the end of the book: "It was never less than wondrous that he consented. I'd just pulled off the condom, making it snap, when they knocked." Anyone wanting a literary, or even simply explicit, treatment of the "boys of Berlin" must look elsewhere. And…I can't ever remember, uh, "snapping" one, can you?
Maybe the characters make up for the disappointing story. Here's a list of them, at least those I remember:
1) Chicago, mostly (yes, I mean as a character--in default of interesting human characters, the cities fill the gap)
2) Berlin, in a credited supporting role
3) The Mercedes-Benz star revolving over the Europa center in West Berlin (similar symbolic function as the "eyes" in The Great Gatsby but not done as smartly)
4) Cello, the narrator Jed's somewhat interesting sister (she played classical piano semi-professionally)
Yes, there were more, again forgettable. What about Jed, the Narrator? Hmm…not on the list.
Lovers of this book may take exception to this review by suggesting that I was expecting pornography, not the literary fiction Mr. Pinckney surely delivered. Not so. I really wanted a high-toned work examining the fabled Berlin scene of the 1980's. This would be linked with insightful comparisons to Christopher Isherwood's experiences in the 1920s and 1930s which that author has unforgettably recorded in his classic, genre-gender-bending The Berlin Stories: The Last of Mr Norris/Goodbye to Berlin and his later memoir of those times, Christopher and His Kind.
Regrettably that's not what we get. Instead, we are served pompousness. That hefty indigestible meal is wrapped in a flailing timeframe which whips the wildly swinging reader to insensibility. The poor soul is beat up trying to follow the narrator's trips back and forth in space (Chicago-Berlin-Chicago) and in time (the narrator's 1960s childhood along with anecdotal African-American history snippets going back to the 1700s). To illustrate the author's eclectic knowledge, here are two quotes:
Aunt Jemima was hired to cook pancakes and tell stories at the Chicago Exposition. Her booth was a giant flour barrel. They said she made more than a million instant pancakes at the fair that one summer. Buttons featured her image, the fat, shiny-cheeked, big-eyed black woman in a kerchief: "I'se in town, honey." They called her the most famous colored woman in the world.
Aunt Jemima liked to run her mouth, but black people didn't like her, because she told stories about how happy she'd been on the plantation. In one story, she cooked such delicious pancakes she saved her master's life. The Yankees decided to spare her master; or the Yankees were so enjoying their pancakes he had time to sneak away.
The following anecdote is nice, linking my favorite type of music to a scientist I greatly admire. Surely you recognize the names and references:
[W]hen Peter Serkin's father, Rudolf Serkin, made his debut in 1921, he played the fifth Brandenburg. He then asked Adolf Busch what he should play as an encore. The Goldberg Variations, the violinist who would be his father-in-law said. "So Serkin did. All thirty. Busch had been joking. When Serkin finished, six people were left in the hall: Adolf and Frieda Busch and Mr. and Mrs. Artur Schnabel and Mr. and Mrs. Albert Einstein.
We are now, finally, at the end of the book, and this review. After the Berlin Wall came down in the novel's final pages (not a spoiler, of course) it seemed to be a fitting dramatic close.
Nope. He had to go on.
I was floored by the self-important pretentiousness of the following passage at the very end. I remember Isherwood's moving scene referenced in the quote below very well. Pinckney now switches to the authorial "I". This is not necessarily a surprise: the line between the narrator "Jed" and Pinckney himself was always thin. Now it evaporates:
I'd read Isherwood's novel so often I had no trouble inserting myself into its scene. I am the negro boxer—small n of the British 1930s—whom Isherwood sees at the far end of Potsdamerstrasse, working at a fairground, in an attraction of fixed boxing and wrestling matches. I take my turn knocking guys out and getting knocked out. And I, the black boxer in his stance, am going to meet Otto's brother, Lothar, a smoldering Nazi whose bed Isherwood was given when he moved in with the working-class Nowaks. I am going to guide him to the light and we will never age. [Italics mine.]
No, you're not. It will take a far better writer to do that. Greatness cannot be assumed simply by association.
May 12, 2016
I can understand why this book has its champions. It's so defiantly dull that it might fool you into thinking it's a classic. Not only does Mr. Pickney manage to do everything wrong, like substituting caricatures for character, artiness for art, rehash for narration and believe me I could go on, but he gives the impression of having worked hard to be so incompetent. There is the occasional lyric passage in "Black Deutschland" but it's about as incongruous as finding a nightingale nesting in a junkyard. It's a waste of beauty.
If you find novels about American expatriates in Europe to be inherently fascinating, then "Black Deutschland" might fit on your bookshelf between "Tropic of Cancer" and "The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas." Pickney lacks Miller's vitality or Stein's playfulness, but he's heir to the former's knack for self-indulgence and the latter's penchant for name-dropping (Susan Sontag makes a brief appearance in one chapter for no discernible purpose other than to be Susan Sontag). Pickney's narrator is a late 20-something gay black man named Jed who is so insecure about his status as an African-American intellectual that he needs to drop a high-culture reference into every other sentence (or maybe that's the author). Jed's experiences in Berlin might be interesting if someone else were having them. However, Pickney refuses to give his characters any dimension, and instead of evoking Berlin, he depends on allusions to other works of art (Isherwood is mentioned on every other page) to give readers a sense of the milieu, which makes "Black Deutschland" a 300-page exercise in Bohemian elitism (which is probably an oxymoron). I almost engaged with the book when Jed left Berlin to return to his native South Side of Chicago for a chapter or two and describes the aftermath of Mayor Harold Washington's death in 1987, most likely because I'm from Chicago and was able to bring my own history to the narrative, since Pickney can't or won't convey a sense of time or place.
I hated this book. Jesus, did I hate this book.
If you find novels about American expatriates in Europe to be inherently fascinating, then "Black Deutschland" might fit on your bookshelf between "Tropic of Cancer" and "The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas." Pickney lacks Miller's vitality or Stein's playfulness, but he's heir to the former's knack for self-indulgence and the latter's penchant for name-dropping (Susan Sontag makes a brief appearance in one chapter for no discernible purpose other than to be Susan Sontag). Pickney's narrator is a late 20-something gay black man named Jed who is so insecure about his status as an African-American intellectual that he needs to drop a high-culture reference into every other sentence (or maybe that's the author). Jed's experiences in Berlin might be interesting if someone else were having them. However, Pickney refuses to give his characters any dimension, and instead of evoking Berlin, he depends on allusions to other works of art (Isherwood is mentioned on every other page) to give readers a sense of the milieu, which makes "Black Deutschland" a 300-page exercise in Bohemian elitism (which is probably an oxymoron). I almost engaged with the book when Jed left Berlin to return to his native South Side of Chicago for a chapter or two and describes the aftermath of Mayor Harold Washington's death in 1987, most likely because I'm from Chicago and was able to bring my own history to the narrative, since Pickney can't or won't convey a sense of time or place.
I hated this book. Jesus, did I hate this book.
April 30, 2016
DNFed, expected it to be a mixture of Baldwin and Isherwood and what I got was very fragmented, muddled and very uneven story... Some great, witty observation of race mixed with super boring visits to Berlin gay clubs and soul searching meanders. If he only got drunk and had some fuck in those clubs, that would be more interesting, but those were the old days, now he only refers to it being sober... way too long for such a short book.
April 12, 2017
DNF at 50%
I found the premise of the book and some things Pinckney had to say interesting but my interest got lost among the buildings of Chicago and Berlin and unfortunately Boredom. I think this is because of how this book is written. Everything is reported so I get Jed's view only and it is a rather confused and disjointed one at that.
Anyway life is too short - so I'm moving on.
29th Annual Lambda Literary Award Finalist
I found the premise of the book and some things Pinckney had to say interesting but my interest got lost among the buildings of Chicago and Berlin and unfortunately Boredom. I think this is because of how this book is written. Everything is reported so I get Jed's view only and it is a rather confused and disjointed one at that.
Anyway life is too short - so I'm moving on.
29th Annual Lambda Literary Award Finalist
March 17, 2016
This is an incoherent read with a muddled cast of characters that are not very interesting. Not sure what Mr. Pinckney was trying to accomplish here, but for this reader it all adds up to an epic fail.
The grammatical construction leaves a lot to be desired, but there are moments of greatness, just not nearly enough to make up for the shortcomings. I struggled to get to the finish line, but I made it.
The grammatical construction leaves a lot to be desired, but there are moments of greatness, just not nearly enough to make up for the shortcomings. I struggled to get to the finish line, but I made it.
February 8, 2016
4.5
wow...nearly perfect
wow...nearly perfect
November 27, 2017
2.5/5
There's a lot I haven't gotten to yet or haven't done in a while. I still haven't read Isherwood, and the last book translated from German I read was by Zweig, and his was the world of turn of the century Austria, which mocked Weimar rather than finding refuge in it. I can't even remember the last history I read concerned with Germany, and the books I have are more likely than not obsessed with the Nazi issue, as most white non-Germans are. As such, I was woefully underprepared for reading his, leastwise on the national front. On the blackness front, though, I was surprisingly fit, and there was nothing I enjoyed more than the main character's meditations on black history in conjunction with both the US and Europe. Thus the rounding up, but I still wish I had appreciated this more.
The last pre-Berlin Wall item I engaged with was 'Atomic Blonde', and I'm sure other readers were expecting something as slap dash sensationalized queering bang as that film was. Couple with gay and black and sober and freelance writing on the border of the more stable capitalistic machinations of small time drug dealing, and you have big heads, soft bodies, domestic drama, and not much resolution. I certainly learned a lot, and I'm sure much could be written about the main character's relationships with his composer-housewife cousin (alter ego? foil? reflections on sex/gender/blackness/talent/cultural contribution?), but it was a very forced engagement. THe work still doesn't deserve the average rating it has, but this is typical of the ivory tower sentiment on one end and the anti-ivory tower sentiment on the other. A cosmopolitan yet nonfetishizing work such as this takes far more effort to write than what's usually lauded, so my lack of interest is rather depressing. I can only hope readers who are more familiar with the cultural cues of Berlin can use them to center themselves in the narrative, rather than be bowled over by them.
This year seems to be one of lackluster reads, whether new or revisited. This may pick up after grad school apps are through, but frankly, the discouragement I've had from even the people writing me rec letters is making me sick of it and all of its associated paraphernalia. Money is money, after all, and I need to move on.
There's a lot I haven't gotten to yet or haven't done in a while. I still haven't read Isherwood, and the last book translated from German I read was by Zweig, and his was the world of turn of the century Austria, which mocked Weimar rather than finding refuge in it. I can't even remember the last history I read concerned with Germany, and the books I have are more likely than not obsessed with the Nazi issue, as most white non-Germans are. As such, I was woefully underprepared for reading his, leastwise on the national front. On the blackness front, though, I was surprisingly fit, and there was nothing I enjoyed more than the main character's meditations on black history in conjunction with both the US and Europe. Thus the rounding up, but I still wish I had appreciated this more.
The last pre-Berlin Wall item I engaged with was 'Atomic Blonde', and I'm sure other readers were expecting something as slap dash sensationalized queering bang as that film was. Couple with gay and black and sober and freelance writing on the border of the more stable capitalistic machinations of small time drug dealing, and you have big heads, soft bodies, domestic drama, and not much resolution. I certainly learned a lot, and I'm sure much could be written about the main character's relationships with his composer-housewife cousin (alter ego? foil? reflections on sex/gender/blackness/talent/cultural contribution?), but it was a very forced engagement. THe work still doesn't deserve the average rating it has, but this is typical of the ivory tower sentiment on one end and the anti-ivory tower sentiment on the other. A cosmopolitan yet nonfetishizing work such as this takes far more effort to write than what's usually lauded, so my lack of interest is rather depressing. I can only hope readers who are more familiar with the cultural cues of Berlin can use them to center themselves in the narrative, rather than be bowled over by them.
This year seems to be one of lackluster reads, whether new or revisited. This may pick up after grad school apps are through, but frankly, the discouragement I've had from even the people writing me rec letters is making me sick of it and all of its associated paraphernalia. Money is money, after all, and I need to move on.
December 8, 2016
I found this to be a most frustrating read. I can truthfully say that it never really captured my attention. I could never really follow, or find a story line.
January 27, 2022
There is so much beauty in this book. The first person narration feels so secure, and the way Jed interacts with his world and himself feels so authentic. I got such a stunning sense of self from Darryl Pickney’s writing. And, I wasn’t disappointed by the portraits of Germany Pickney draws in this novel—Jed’s Germany. I was also pleasantly surprised by the descriptions of Chicago, and the parallels between two cities with divided culture. I wrote down so many choice lines for my notebook of quotes from this one, just so many beautiful haunting lines and metaphors and similes and reflections. Pickney has such command over the English language, and utilizes it here to create a book that often made me reflect about my own city and my connection to it.
That being said, I did find this book somewhat difficult to get through. Jed’s melancholy and sobering attitude towards the world made particular scenes that could have felt like plot points feel unexciting and uneventful. To me, Jed’s life is quite an interesting one, but it doesn’t seem to him that it is, and more importantly at times I feel like Pickney is uninterested in telling Jed’s story. There was just an aspect of “grippingness” that was missing for me.
I picked this up in an effort to read more LGBT fiction by Black authors, and on that front I wasn’t disappointed at all. Jed’s relationships and the relationships he wants feels very authentic, but also I sometimes felt like the characters he interacts with don’t feel real and unique to him. But maybe that’s how it really is in real life.
That being said, Darryl Pickney is an excellent writer and I look forward to reading more from him.
That being said, I did find this book somewhat difficult to get through. Jed’s melancholy and sobering attitude towards the world made particular scenes that could have felt like plot points feel unexciting and uneventful. To me, Jed’s life is quite an interesting one, but it doesn’t seem to him that it is, and more importantly at times I feel like Pickney is uninterested in telling Jed’s story. There was just an aspect of “grippingness” that was missing for me.
I picked this up in an effort to read more LGBT fiction by Black authors, and on that front I wasn’t disappointed at all. Jed’s relationships and the relationships he wants feels very authentic, but also I sometimes felt like the characters he interacts with don’t feel real and unique to him. But maybe that’s how it really is in real life.
That being said, Darryl Pickney is an excellent writer and I look forward to reading more from him.
probably-not-for-me
March 29, 2017this sounds actually awesome and it's set in Berlin where I live, so
the negative reviews with their criticism of dullness and a protagonist they didn't know enough and care for nearly turned me off
another book where I have to pay more for the eBook than a paperback/hardcover? now that breaks the deal. call me petty...
the negative reviews with their criticism of dullness and a protagonist they didn't know enough and care for nearly turned me off
another book where I have to pay more for the eBook than a paperback/hardcover? now that breaks the deal. call me petty...
June 27, 2016
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)
As regular readers know, I have mixed feelings about slow-moving, heavily character-based stories; but when they're done well, in a way that I can easily engage in, like is the case with Darryl Pinckney's Black Deutschland, such novels tend to be some of my favorite reading experiences of the entire year. A deliberately rambling tale that's presented much like how a person might tell a story over beers at a bar -- that is, in no particular order, with certain mentions triggering digressions from completely different periods of their lives -- this is the story of a young gay black intellectual in the 1980s, raised on Chicago's southside but who has a Romantic-with-a-capital-R fascination with pre-unified Berlin, basically because of falling in love with Christopher Isherwood's old '50s tales about debauchery there and mistakenly thinking that he's going to be able to find the same thing.
Although never laid out explicitly, we get the sense over the course of this book that our hero Jed spent a whole series of summers in his youth traveling back and forth between the two cities, first as a genteel alcoholic (his drug of choice is white wine) who engages in a whole series of sloppily homosexual affairs; but then at a certain point he decides to dry up, at which point he accidentally falls in with a controversial architect from IIT who then pays him to travel to Berlin regularly, now sober and with his job being essentially to write articles that rationalize and justify this architect's sometimes hated plan to build a new "anti-Bauhaus" housing project in that city, where Jed is now forming a new relationship with a once estranged cousin who is a classical pianist in Germany and has her own complicated history with being a "black nerd role model."
The point of this book, though, is not to follow along with this timeline, but rather to sink luxuriously into the complex characterization and inner thoughts of all these people, and to lounge like a fellow intellectual in their high-minded conversations about art, love, post-war Europe and American urban blight. Granted, that's a slow and long process that will drive some people crazy -- for example, I usually burn through two to three books every week as a CCLaP reviewer, yet this 300-page book took me nearly a month of daily reading to get through, just because the story is so dense and rich and needs to be sipped rather than gulped. If you have the patience and inclination, though, you'll find an immensely rewarding tale that utterly transports you to a time and place most of us would never find ourselves in our own lives, giving us a look at brainy people of color as they flit and flirt their way as expats among a world of European artistes who treat them like sexy space aliens. For those like me who think they can get into a story like this, it comes strongly recommended, and will likely be making our best-of-the-year lists at the end of 2016.
Out of 10: 9.7
As regular readers know, I have mixed feelings about slow-moving, heavily character-based stories; but when they're done well, in a way that I can easily engage in, like is the case with Darryl Pinckney's Black Deutschland, such novels tend to be some of my favorite reading experiences of the entire year. A deliberately rambling tale that's presented much like how a person might tell a story over beers at a bar -- that is, in no particular order, with certain mentions triggering digressions from completely different periods of their lives -- this is the story of a young gay black intellectual in the 1980s, raised on Chicago's southside but who has a Romantic-with-a-capital-R fascination with pre-unified Berlin, basically because of falling in love with Christopher Isherwood's old '50s tales about debauchery there and mistakenly thinking that he's going to be able to find the same thing.
Although never laid out explicitly, we get the sense over the course of this book that our hero Jed spent a whole series of summers in his youth traveling back and forth between the two cities, first as a genteel alcoholic (his drug of choice is white wine) who engages in a whole series of sloppily homosexual affairs; but then at a certain point he decides to dry up, at which point he accidentally falls in with a controversial architect from IIT who then pays him to travel to Berlin regularly, now sober and with his job being essentially to write articles that rationalize and justify this architect's sometimes hated plan to build a new "anti-Bauhaus" housing project in that city, where Jed is now forming a new relationship with a once estranged cousin who is a classical pianist in Germany and has her own complicated history with being a "black nerd role model."
The point of this book, though, is not to follow along with this timeline, but rather to sink luxuriously into the complex characterization and inner thoughts of all these people, and to lounge like a fellow intellectual in their high-minded conversations about art, love, post-war Europe and American urban blight. Granted, that's a slow and long process that will drive some people crazy -- for example, I usually burn through two to three books every week as a CCLaP reviewer, yet this 300-page book took me nearly a month of daily reading to get through, just because the story is so dense and rich and needs to be sipped rather than gulped. If you have the patience and inclination, though, you'll find an immensely rewarding tale that utterly transports you to a time and place most of us would never find ourselves in our own lives, giving us a look at brainy people of color as they flit and flirt their way as expats among a world of European artistes who treat them like sexy space aliens. For those like me who think they can get into a story like this, it comes strongly recommended, and will likely be making our best-of-the-year lists at the end of 2016.
Out of 10: 9.7
September 24, 2017
Some books, you flip through the pages to see if you will like it, read a paragraph or two and find yourself extremely confused, because you did not understand anything; no, the words themselves are known, but put together they make up a foreign language, like some un-heard-of world-building that you have to start reading from the very beginning to be able to even begin to understand. Black Deutschland is one of those books. Someone said, in their review of the book, that it is unapologetically intellectual, and that it wholly is, and that is part of what makes Black Deutschland difficult to grasp at times. But there is much more to it than that, in making one grasp it and in making one get completely lost, only to climb back of the murky waters with some profound, back-of-the-mind understanding that is surreal and clear at the same time.
Spending the entire novel in Jed's mind, the world-building is complex, deep, confused, and total. Without getting to know Jed, the words that make up the novel are incomprehensible when strung together into sentences, though each one might be looked up in a dictionary to yield some undeterred meaning of its own. The amalgam that is the novel not only accomplishes to deliver the (sur)realities of the bohemian life in a divided country for expats, queers, Africans, African-Americans and artists, but also manages to tell the bleary post-rehab reality of Jed, the African-American gay man who uses the city to search for life without ever being with others, to learn to love alone, to grow up to find himself standing after everything that ever was is gone to dust and the world has moved on.
Darryl Pinckney brings the race politics of America to the very nooks and crannies of Berlin shadowed by the tall wall. He digs in with intellectual relish the straddling of many marginalized identities, from the "Negro Achiever" to the black gay G.I., from black power to the drug-addicted failures of everyday life. Often, there is discourse that I would define as "UN talk," meaning a bunch of serious sounding words that say nothing, especially when Jed is trying to justify his existence in the employ of the famous architect in Berlin, that is hilarious in its meandering lack of meaning for anyone, so much so that, at some point the said-architect has to throw up his hands and declare that he does not understand any of the words himself. Often, too, there are sentences that slap you in the face in their incisive brilliance, that crystallization of something so simple and true and usually very sad.
Black Deutschland is not for everyone and is not an easy read. But it is well worth the time and effort for the astute reader. Recommended for those who like televisions, Susan Sontag, haircuts, shawls, ambitious architectural projects, Schwinn bicycles, Mercedes Benz, communes, and soccer.
Spending the entire novel in Jed's mind, the world-building is complex, deep, confused, and total. Without getting to know Jed, the words that make up the novel are incomprehensible when strung together into sentences, though each one might be looked up in a dictionary to yield some undeterred meaning of its own. The amalgam that is the novel not only accomplishes to deliver the (sur)realities of the bohemian life in a divided country for expats, queers, Africans, African-Americans and artists, but also manages to tell the bleary post-rehab reality of Jed, the African-American gay man who uses the city to search for life without ever being with others, to learn to love alone, to grow up to find himself standing after everything that ever was is gone to dust and the world has moved on.
Darryl Pinckney brings the race politics of America to the very nooks and crannies of Berlin shadowed by the tall wall. He digs in with intellectual relish the straddling of many marginalized identities, from the "Negro Achiever" to the black gay G.I., from black power to the drug-addicted failures of everyday life. Often, there is discourse that I would define as "UN talk," meaning a bunch of serious sounding words that say nothing, especially when Jed is trying to justify his existence in the employ of the famous architect in Berlin, that is hilarious in its meandering lack of meaning for anyone, so much so that, at some point the said-architect has to throw up his hands and declare that he does not understand any of the words himself. Often, too, there are sentences that slap you in the face in their incisive brilliance, that crystallization of something so simple and true and usually very sad.
Black Deutschland is not for everyone and is not an easy read. But it is well worth the time and effort for the astute reader. Recommended for those who like televisions, Susan Sontag, haircuts, shawls, ambitious architectural projects, Schwinn bicycles, Mercedes Benz, communes, and soccer.
March 9, 2016
Complete, original review available here: https://herewearegoing.wordpress.com/...
Not going to lie, I had a tough time getting through this. I got it because it was blurbed by Edmund White and compared to Isherwood. No. Aside from troublesome syntax and construction, it really didn’t have anything to say (to me) & far too much meandering detail, seeming — again — as if the narrative was interrupted with pieces from his journals about which Mr. Pinckney said, “Oh, this is lovely” and wanted to use but which added nothing. It needed to be better edited and the time jumping was unclear, a muddle. I kept falling asleep while I read it and wishing I had stopped early on. The last eighty pages were such a slog, but I was determined. Again, sorry to be negative, but Mr. Isherwood’s Berlin Stories is one of my favorite books and to compare this to that, well, no. Borrowed from library.
Not going to lie, I had a tough time getting through this. I got it because it was blurbed by Edmund White and compared to Isherwood. No. Aside from troublesome syntax and construction, it really didn’t have anything to say (to me) & far too much meandering detail, seeming — again — as if the narrative was interrupted with pieces from his journals about which Mr. Pinckney said, “Oh, this is lovely” and wanted to use but which added nothing. It needed to be better edited and the time jumping was unclear, a muddle. I kept falling asleep while I read it and wishing I had stopped early on. The last eighty pages were such a slog, but I was determined. Again, sorry to be negative, but Mr. Isherwood’s Berlin Stories is one of my favorite books and to compare this to that, well, no. Borrowed from library.
March 21, 2016
It took me less time to finish A Little Life which was 720+ pages than it did to get through Black Deutschland which was half that. The complexity in sentence structure and the author's unpacking a fictional life full of cultural and historical references made the wading a little deep but Jed's self-deprecation and charming wit made the slog worth it. Jed wasn't exactly a hot mess, but he was smart and awkward leaving you no choice but to feel for him. I was really rooting for Jed to find love, success, or at least get laid.
April 9, 2017
Pinckney's "Black Deutschland" is an intriguing cross-section of race, place, and space set in West Berlin of the 1980s. It explores themes from architecture, racism, sexuality, and isolation. The book is loosely modeled off of Isherwood's "The Berlin Stories". At times, the reader must have background with German History, Black American History, and various other subjects. Although the backtracking and research may dissuade some, I found it almost to function as a "suggested reading list". To me, the book captures what it feels like to be caught between spaces, where you've removed yourself from one but aren't fully accepted or integrated into the other.
May 15, 2016
This is a difficult book, and it's difficult on purpose, and it's so worth it.
But, I bet that if you just sat down on Saturday morning and didn't have anything else to do that day, you could get through it. And I sort of think that is the way it ought to be read. The style is elliptical and challenging in a way that, I think, encourages moving through the book quickly rather than reading a chapter before bed. What I mean is something like this: there's enough fragmentation here that you don't want to introduce any of your own cracks if you don't have to.
But, I bet that if you just sat down on Saturday morning and didn't have anything else to do that day, you could get through it. And I sort of think that is the way it ought to be read. The style is elliptical and challenging in a way that, I think, encourages moving through the book quickly rather than reading a chapter before bed. What I mean is something like this: there's enough fragmentation here that you don't want to introduce any of your own cracks if you don't have to.
May 29, 2018
I was disappointed by this book. I picked it up in Auckland, New Zealand - excited that it was set in two cities I plan to visit later this year for the first time (Berlin and Chicago). That said - from the moment I commenced this novel it was all down hill. There is no real plot - it rambles a lot and there is no genuine dialogue (rather we are subjected to the central characters internal musings and thoughts which are, at best, disjointed and hard to follow). I really didn't take away much from this experience - a book to shelve and move on.
April 5, 2016
Outstanding. This is disjointed and chaotic and tragic in many respects. I can understand why this novel would be unappealing to some and inaccessible to others, but I found it to be hilarious, insightful, and poignant. It is the universal tale of trying to forge/determine one's identity, set against the backdrop of a very specific time and place. Even if one is not a gay black man in 80s Berlin fleeing family, white wine, and AIDS, though, the tale has much wisdom amongst its asides. Lovely.
February 22, 2016
“Black Deutschland” is about a young man (black, gay and directionless) in the early 1980s, fresh out of rehab, trying to escape his hometown of Chicago for a second chance in Berlin, which he imagines as the Berlin of Christopher Isherwood’s stories and Brecht and Weill’s song lyrics. And despite the gravity of Jed’s burdens and dilemmas (race, success, sanity, America, Germany, etc.), the overall tone is comic and the prose often breaks into witty one-liners.
"Symbolic, unchaste Berlin was still the barracks town of Frederick the Great, but the once-teeming capital had also become a small town with a big past. You could crawl into the disfigured city as into a shell. You could treat it as either inhabited ruin or blank space. You could write your own ticket, regard the city as backdrop, a theatrical setting, and appropriate the citizens as extras for your daily dramas, your tremendous inner opera buffa."
Pinckney’s depictions and evocations of both Berlin and Chicago are beautifully rendered, but the ones of Berlin especially captured me as they were point on descriptions of a Berlin I personally knew; I saw the production of “Threepenny Opera” at the Theater des Westens on Kantstraße and was there during Berlin’s 750th year anniversary celebrations, I knew the Wall and what it was like to cross into the East.
I also loved the fairly frequent cultural references i.e. "I've given up, knowing what I knew in junior high school, that I was only going to be so good at [speaking] German and that Tadzio was not my type." (referring to Thomas Mann’s “Death in Venice”, of course)
"Symbolic, unchaste Berlin was still the barracks town of Frederick the Great, but the once-teeming capital had also become a small town with a big past. You could crawl into the disfigured city as into a shell. You could treat it as either inhabited ruin or blank space. You could write your own ticket, regard the city as backdrop, a theatrical setting, and appropriate the citizens as extras for your daily dramas, your tremendous inner opera buffa."
Pinckney’s depictions and evocations of both Berlin and Chicago are beautifully rendered, but the ones of Berlin especially captured me as they were point on descriptions of a Berlin I personally knew; I saw the production of “Threepenny Opera” at the Theater des Westens on Kantstraße and was there during Berlin’s 750th year anniversary celebrations, I knew the Wall and what it was like to cross into the East.
I also loved the fairly frequent cultural references i.e. "I've given up, knowing what I knew in junior high school, that I was only going to be so good at [speaking] German and that Tadzio was not my type." (referring to Thomas Mann’s “Death in Venice”, of course)
March 12, 2025
(spelling and grammar corrected March 2025, otherwise unaltered)
I hated this novel, it reeked of pretentiousness, I am so sick of people going to Berlin and 'searching' for the Berlin of Christopher Isherwood - how can anyone even pretend to do that when it was skewered so definitively in 'The Captain's Fire' by J.S. Marcus back in 1996. Admittedly J.S. Marcus wasn't black and that seems to be a very important reason this novel has attracted the accolades it has but if you want really fine writing by a black author which deals with a lot of the same themes (even gay/queer ones) read Randall Kenan - a superb and way to little read author in comparison to Mr. Pinckney - though you have no visits to Berlin in Kenan's work.
I keep thinking I should provide analysis, but why? the novel is mediocre and life is too short to waste on this type of meretricious rubbish that has clearly been written with a crib sheet of 'important' issues/themes to mention.
It bored me, maybe you won't be bored, if you aren't I am sad for you.
I hated this novel, it reeked of pretentiousness, I am so sick of people going to Berlin and 'searching' for the Berlin of Christopher Isherwood - how can anyone even pretend to do that when it was skewered so definitively in 'The Captain's Fire' by J.S. Marcus back in 1996. Admittedly J.S. Marcus wasn't black and that seems to be a very important reason this novel has attracted the accolades it has but if you want really fine writing by a black author which deals with a lot of the same themes (even gay/queer ones) read Randall Kenan - a superb and way to little read author in comparison to Mr. Pinckney - though you have no visits to Berlin in Kenan's work.
I keep thinking I should provide analysis, but why? the novel is mediocre and life is too short to waste on this type of meretricious rubbish that has clearly been written with a crib sheet of 'important' issues/themes to mention.
It bored me, maybe you won't be bored, if you aren't I am sad for you.
December 12, 2016
I really wanted to like this book. The premise was intriguing -- a young black gay man in recovery who flees Chicago for West Berlin in 1980s. But ultimately I abandoned the book because after 155 pages in I realized I simply did not care at all about this character and couldn't be bothered to finish the book. He is such an opaque and distant narrator that it is hard to relate to him and the people in his life and maintain interest in his story. Such a disappointment.
July 26, 2016
A novel that goes back and forth between black Chicago and gay Berlin, Jed struggles with addiction, class, and race. He finds a commune and a community of black expats before he knows where home is. A little bit Christopher Isherwood and a little bit James Baldwin.
December 8, 2016
Could not get into this book. Too many complicated Berlin references for someone like me, whose historical knowledge of Berlin is lacking. Couldn't really care much about the characters either. Had to abandon it. I much prefer a more straight forward type of story telling.
February 9, 2016
I really really wanted to like this book, but I don't, and the only reason I can offer is because I do not find it engaging or interesting...wish I did, but I don't
March 8, 2016
Read my review here: http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainm...
March 18, 2016
Not very interesting...let's leave it at that.
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