Anatomia di un giocatore d'azzardo

by Jonathan Lethem, Andrea Silvestri (Translator)

Nel suo nuovo romanzo, Lethem immagina le avventure di un altro dei suoi antieroi teneramente disorientati. Un giocatore professionista di backgammon, Alexander Bruno, avventuriero che vive tra Singapore e Berlino. Alexander viene mandato a Berlino dal suo manager per riparare a una ondata di sfortuna, forse causata da una macchia sul suo volto, apparsa improvvisamente, che gli impedisce di vedere con precisione i bordi della tavola da gioco. Ma a Berlino la situazione peggiora. Continua a perdere al gioco, il flirt con una bionda troppo bionda si rivela inconcludente, la macchia cresce, la diagnosi medica è impietosa. Bruno deve tornare nella natia California, dopo una vita passata all’estero, per affrontare un intervento chirurgico: la macchia sul volto rischia di ucciderlo, dopo avergli danneggiato la vista. Il chirurgo e un hippie che ha messo a punto una tecnica operatoria sperimentale e opera per nove ore ascoltando Jimi Hendrix “a palla” sollevando la faccia di Bruno per arrivare a estirpare la macchia. Cosi, dopo l’operazione, Bruno si aggira per le strade d’America senza sapere bene chi è, e senza capire nulla della cultura pop del suo Paese di origine, straniero in patria, straniero a se stesso, chiedendosi se lui, giocatore d’azzardo, non sia stato “giocato” dalla vita e dai suoi modesti interpreti.

Genres: Fiction, Literary Fiction, Novels, Literature, Contemporary, Fantasy, Audiobook

437 pages, Paperback

First published October 18, 2016

About the author

Jonathan Allen Lethem (born February 19, 1964) is an American novelist, essayist and short story writer.

His first novel, Gun, with Occasional Music, a genre work that mixed elements of science fiction and detective fiction, was published in 1994. It was followed by three more science fiction novels. In 1999, Lethem published Motherless Brooklyn, a National Book Critics Circle Award-winning novel that achieved mainstream success. In 2003, he published The Fortress of Solitude, which became a New York Times Best Seller.

In 2005, he received a MacArthur Fellowship

Reviews

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Alexander Bruno is a professional backgammon player. After a run of bad luck and a chance encounter with a classmate from high school, Alexander leaves Singapore for Berlin, where he winds up in the hospital after suffering from a seizure of some kind during a game. It seems Bruno has a nearly inoperable tumor and only a doctor in the US can do the operation, a doctor that lives near Bruno's former classmate.

I got this from Netgalley.

My only other exposure to Jonathan Lethem was Gun, With Occasional Music. When I saw this up on Netgalley, I decided to give it a shot.

A Gambler's Anatomy is a delightfully odd and wonderfully written book. Bruno's voyage into self-discovery is painful, grotesque, and somewhat sweet at times. Jonathan Lethem is very talented, phenomenally so, in some instances. I caught my mouth watering a few times at his descriptions of food and Bruno's surgery made my face hurt. His word play, use of allusions, and descriptive skills were dead on in this one. I have no complaints of any sort about the writing.

The characters were quirky but not unrealistically so. Stolarsky referring to Bruno as Flashman was pretty accurate since Bruno does a few Flashman style things in this one, including not really improving much despite everything he experienced.

The plot was secondary to everything else, which is the one ding I'll lay upon the book. Bruno was a passive lead, for the most part. There really wasn't much of a build toward a decisive ending. The antagonist just gave up and Bruno wound up back where he started. I know the journey is supposed to be more important than the destination in most books of this type but it would be nice if the journey wasn't a huge circle. Four out of 5 stars.

[Darwin8u · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Not everything needed to rise to converge: It could just drift together into the indiscernible middle, and bewilder you."
- Jonathan Letham, A Gambler's Anatomy



The more I read of Jonathan Lethem, the more difficult it becomes to separate him from Michael Chabon. They seem like literary twins writing around the same hipster Brooklyn/Berkeley geography. This novel seems grown from Pynchon, Hesse, Carey, Dostoevsky, Dumas, Leroux, Nabokov, Mann, and of course Chabon.

I probably sound more irritated than I am, it just seriously is odd to read a book that centers around a hipster shop on Telegraph Avenue, written by a Jewish writer, born in the early 60s, who loves comic books, vinyl, flowery prose, etc., and discover it wasn't Telegraph Avenue. Perhaps, I should just accept that when I buy Lethem, I might get Chabon and when I buy Chabon, I might get Lethem and move on. At this point, I'm pretty good with prose, but if you did the Pepsi/Coke challenge with me on Chabon/Lethem, I'm screwed.

The plot was interesting, the prose was above average, yet the book wasn't nearly Lethem's best I'm still not pissed about reading it. There WAS something there. It was good. The chapter told from the perspective of the brain surgeon (Dr. Noah Behringer, a Hendrix obscessed "mechanic of the meat") was one of my favorites and might just have earned the book an extra star all on its own. Obviously, this novel doesn't approach Dostoevsky's The Gambler, Nabokov's King, Queen, Knave, Hesse's The Glass Bead Game, or Carey's Oscar and Lucinda in terms of literary writing about games, chance, love, and life; but if you are seeking interesting hipster dialogue and the occasional kinky scene that includes a mask, well, buy the book and keep your Eyes Wide Shut and one hand on your wallet and you other hand on your pills.

[☘Misericordia☘ ⚡ϟ⚡⛈⚡☁ ❇️❤❣ · Rating 2 out of 5]

A DNF of sorts. It went disjointedly repetitive somewhere around the middle...
Q:
The Berliners all spoke English, and even when they didn’t, the meanings bled through. In Singapore the alien tongues of Mandarin, Malay, and Tamil had left him happily sealed in his cone of incomprehension. (c)
Q:
Additionally I am probably also soon losing my life, he added in pidgin telepathy, just to see if she was listening.
She showed no sign of having read his thoughts. He was relieved. Alexander Bruno had forsaken thought transference years ago, at the start of puberty. Yet he remained vigilant. (c)
Q:
Flirtation, so effortlessly accomplished. Mention of the train had done it. Train unspecified; they both knew which. They’d ridden together and now shared the ferry, and though a thousand identical to her might have strolled past his Charlottenburg café window in two weeks, the shared destination worked its paltry magic. And both tall. This little was enough to excuse lust as destiny. (c)
Q:
I will never lie to you, he promised silently, again just in case she could hear. Bruno had only encountered a small scattering of those in whom he observed the gift of telepathy he himself had renounced. But you never knew. (c)
Q:
Since his discovery of backgammon at age sixteen, the game had acted as a funnel on Bruno’s attention, excluding the bafflement and seduction of a universe beyond the checkers and points. (c)
Q:
The result was too good—too much too soon. For the price he’d extract here tonight he owed Köhler an evening’s entertainment, some back and forth, a shred of hope, not this catastrophe. The situation exposed Bruno’s least favorite aspect of his profession. At such times he became a courtesan of sorts. A geisha boy massaging the customer’s vanity until he could make off with the loot. Backgammon’s beauty was its candidness. In contrast to poker, there were no hidden cards, no bluff. Yet because of the dice, it was also unlike chess: No genius could foresee twelve or thirty moves in advance. Each backgammon position was its own absolute and present circumstance, fated to be revised, impossible to falsify. Each roll of the dice created a new such circumstance. The game’s only true gambling device, the doubling cube, served an expression of pure will. (c)
Q:
I don’t want to be deep, the child had thought. I want to quiet the voices, the crazy shrieking voices of all of you, June included. I want to be like that bird. (c)

[Sam Quixote · Rating 4 out of 5]

Professional backgammon player Alexander Bruno discovers he has a growth behind his nose that’s pressing against his eyes and producing a permanent blot in his vision. By chance, he meets a high school acquaintance who’s since become a real estate mogul and decides to bankroll Bruno’s life-saving surgery. But what’s he expecting in return…?

There’s a lot I really liked about The Blot (published as A Gambler’s Anatomy in the US - a much better title), but it’s mostly vague things. Jonathan Lethem’s writing is entertaining, the characters’ actions, dialogue and thoughts are interesting, and elements of the story are intriguing. It’s not a plot-driven book, so it’s unpredictable and also fairly ambling pace-wise, and not a great deal happens, but it’s also never boring.

What gives me pause is: what is this novel really about??! Because I honestly have no clue. Is it simply a potboiler or is Lethem making a statement about… something? I’ve been thinking about this novel since I finished it and I’m no closer to understanding what (if anything) it was driving at. It’s almost like I have my own literary blot when I think of this book and I can’t see past it! Or maybe I’m trying to see something that isn’t there? Unless Lethem wants us to believe psychic powers are real??? Maybe this sense of uncertainty is deliberate in trying to make the reader feel the same way the main character does most of the time…? That’s probably a stretch on my part!

It’s great as it is anyway. Bruno is a likeable human wreck and Keith Stolarsky is an always amusing villain-ish character with a lot of fun chatter. Lethem’s love of Philip K. Dick is apparent here, particularly once the narrative moves to California (where Dick spent most of his life): who’s working for who, are characters being unconsciously manipulated, are they part of a master plan they can’t see yet - it reminded me of stories like A Scanner Darkly. And then there’s the Dick-ian character names like Garris Plybon and Noah Behringer.

Bruno’s German girlfriend Madchen was the only weak link in the story. Bruno meets her briefly once in the opening scene, speaks to her for a total of a few minutes over some phone calls - but she’s willing to drop everything to fly halfway around the world and play nursemaid to him while he’s convalescing!? That made no sense. They’re practically strangers but Lethem wrote their relationship as if they had been together for years. Their “love” was wholly unconvincing and contrived.

The novel also loses steam post-surgery (possibly the best part of the novel, told from the perspective of the Jimi Hendrix-obsessed surgeon Behringer). It was interesting to learn of Stolarsky’s very peculiar empire but then, as often happens with stories without a plot, the novel ends with a feeble and unmemorable shrug.

Still, I enjoyed most of The Blot and definitely recommend it to fans of this author though it’s also accessible to most readers. For a substantial and well-written novel, it feels oddly lightweight, but it’s a fun and enjoyable journey through the unusual combo of professional gambling and specialised surgery.

[Marie · Rating 3 out of 5]

A strange, unique, intellectual novel. This, my first Jonathan Lethem novel, was decidedly interesting yet eclectic. It was full of twists & turns as well as obscure references to historical, literary and film characters. I felt that this book was in a genre the opposite of “chick-lit.” It seemed geared toward men, focused on men, devoid of emotion. The women in this novel were there ministering to the needs of the men. It is about games, identity, masks, power, sex. Relationships lacked any depth within this strange book which is full of smoke and mirrors, self identity crises, puppetry, and a feeling of unreality.

This is a novel about a handsome backgammon hustler, Bruno, who helps empty the pockets of the wealthy with the assistance of his handler, Falk, who arranges these meetings. One night in Singapore, he encounters a high school acquaintance who takes it upon himself to learn backgammon and challenge Bruno to a match. This is about the same time that Bruno notices the “blot” in his vision. Of course, “blot” is also a backgammon term meaning, “a man exposed by being placed alone on a point and therefore able to be taken by the other player” making this a double entendre. This is the beginning of Bruno’s losing streak and ultimate diagnosis of a facial tumor which is causing the blot in his vision. There is a surgeon in San Francisco, Noah Behringer, who will operate and Stolarsky agrees to pay all costs. Thus, Bruno, penniless and at the mercy of others, is brought to Berkley, his hometown, a place he vowed he would never return.

Once the surgery is completed, Bruno feels naked without the blot and requests a mask. This is reminiscent of his last backgammon game during which a young woman serving food came in wearing a mask and was naked from the waist down. The gambler felt that he could communicate telepathically earlier in his life and the blot had helped to protect him from this unwanted gift. Now that the blot is gone, he feels he is exposed again (that his telepathy has returned) and wants the blot back. He feels that he was present during the surgery and remembers all that happened. In fact, that is the only chapter which is told not from the gambler’s perspective but from that of the surgeon, almost as if he was inside the surgeon’s head at the time of surgery watching it happen, a very clever twist of story-telling.

The gambler becomes a pawn of Stolarsky’s. Having no money of his own, he is living in an apartment within a building Sturgeon owns. He must wear clothing that he purchases at the store Stolarsky owns, so ends up dressed in “Abide” clothing. He is told to work at Kropotke’s burgers where he is made to wear a burlap mask with a noose around his neck. Bruno, as a character, seems like a pawn in a game other people are controlling, either Falk (his handler) or Stolarsky, at this particular interval in his life.

Madchen is a beautiful blond he met on a ferry when he was headed to Berlin. She was also the masked woman naked from the waist down who served sandwiches during his backgammon match in Berlin. She is the only person who tries to contact him during his time in Berkley, as he seems to have no close friends or family. When she is flown out by Stolarsky, she also becomes another piece in a game that Stolarsky seems to be playing, against Bruno and the anarchists with whom Bruno has taken up.

This novel is full of double entendres, irony, wit, intellectualism. It is enticing, thought-provoking and strange. For those who enjoy this type of novel, it will be dearly loved. It is definitely not main-stream. It is off the beaten path, odd, but brilliantly written.

Thanks to netgalley and Doubleday books for an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

For discussion questions, please see http://www.book-chatter.com/?p=733.

[Ron Charles · Rating 3 out of 5]

Jonathan Lethem’s new novel combines a little of the intrigue of James Bond with all the sexiness of backgammon. The result is a literary game that’s shaken not stirred. But that’s hardly the weirdest mash-up in “A Gambler’s Anatomy, ” the latest from this MacArthur “genius” who’s been splicing together disparate genres since his first novel appeared in 1994.

The story opens with another motherless hero, a professional gambler named Alexander Bruno. Raised on George MacDonald Fraser’s “Flashman” adventures, Bruno was abandoned early by his mother and raised by a gay cafe manager who taught him how to “make his newly strapping body both unthreatening and fascinating.” Now, blessed with a face of “ruined glamour,” he travels the world to strip wealthy men of their cash — and pretensions. “Bruno had for his entire life associated backgammon with candor,” Lethem writes, “the dice not determining fate so much as revealing character.” Polite and reserved, he preys on others’ overconfidence. He’s “a courtesan of sorts. A geisha boy massaging. . . .

To read the rest of this review, go to The Washington Post:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/entert...

To watch The Totally Hip Video Book Review, click here:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/...

[Jonathan K (Max Outlier) · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rating: 2.96

A staff pick at the local library, when compared to "Motherless Brooklyn", this is a major disappointment due to a lackluster pace, oddball plot and most importantly, a backgammon gambler.

Alexander Bruno grew up in Berkeley and became best friends with Stolarsky, who like himself was an oddball. As the years pass, Bruno journeys through parts of Europe making a living with his one and only skill; Backgammon. When we first meet him he mentions 'the blot' repeatedly as if it were a pet. In the midst of a losing backgammon battle with a wealthy mark, he comes to realize he's suffering and seeks medical help. Soon after he discovers his 'pet' is caused by an inoperable form of optical nerve cancer.

As luck would have it, Stolarsky surfaces and tells him of a skilled surgeon in Berkeley. Broke, homeless and destitute, he travels back to the states with his friend who promises to fund the costs of the operation as a gesture of 'no strings attached' friendship. But Stolarsky's generosity has an agenda, much as all his business endeavors. After a half day operation that requires his face to be 'removed' to access the tumor, he dons a surgical mask to hide the massive cosmetic surgery stitchings. When released from the hospital, Stolarsky allows him to live in a dingy room in one of the buildings he owns on Shattuck. As he makes his way around the neighborhood, he encounters Zombie Burger, yet another of Stolarksy's businesses and becomes friend with the oddball cook.

The story drags on from here as Bruno becomes friends with Stolarsky's distant wife Tira who for unknown reasons wants to help him. Like a poorly written romance, every chapter becomes drudgery.

I found the story tedious, the characters unimpressive and the 'mask' used to hide Bruno's surgery a bad attempt at Zorro or Batman. Nothing more need be said.

[Angus McKeogh · Rating 3 out of 5]

Unfortunately I think I've already read the best book Lethem is ever going to produce, Motherless Brooklyn. The humor, comedy, and compassion of the book have been thus far unsurpassed. His newest one, an ARC NetGalley read had a great start. Quirky and mysterious. He was clicking along as usual. I was thinking this newest one was going to far surpass some of his more "literary" efforts of the recent past. And perhaps it did. But then it devolved. Got extremely convoluted. Two major plot lines lingered and stalled. The protagonist ended up spending a load of time flipping burgers and lots of minor story lines fizzled or concluded without fanfare. It ended up being pretty average among his books. Better than some. Worse than others.

[Alison · Rating 2 out of 5]

4.0/10

What literary event did Franzen, Lethem and Chabon all go to in Berkeley together? So. Weird. Anyway this is neither the best (Chabon) or the worst (Franzen, by a f-ing mile) of the overwritten, annoying, (mostly) out of touch books about the East Bay written by the above. If you're a 45-50 year old dude who's thought, "I can totally hang with George Clooney types and hipster anarchists because I am that cool and then maybe find a hot German woman to bathe me," you'll probably love this.

Jonathan Lethem, I have given you so much of a pass over the years because of "Fortress of Solitude" that even now, after "Chronic City" (which was, if not one of the worst books I've ever read, then far and away the most disappointingly shallow), after "A Gambler's Anatomy" (which is not as much a train wreck as a midlife crisis, published and committed to posterity), I still secretly, in my heart of hearts, believe you can do better. Do better.

[L.S. Popovich · Rating 4 out of 5]

I quite enjoyed this one. A book about backgammon, which I have rarely played, but which took a few cues from Dostoyevsky's Gambler. Whenever a main character wanders around Europe on a diminishing budget, I am instantly invested.

I've typically loathed certain characters in Lethem's fiction, and the m. c. in this one is not as cuddly as I would have liked. Be that as it may, he was tolerable, and that's all I'll say.

Where does the charm of this novel come into play? Why, the games of course. How riveted will you be spectating backgammon? That depends. I knew nothing about the game beyond the basic rules, but I didn't feel lost. Rather than bog the reader down with too much jargon, Lethem employs the classic tensions inherent in games of chance, in high stakes, and Fortune's wheel. Fate twists in unexpected ways here.

The evocation of Berlin was well done. The looming uncertainty of that blot on the narrator's perception/ conscience/ future infused the book with genuine onion-like layers. Lethem remains dexterous, Chabonly flexing linguistic bohemian aplomb. Yet, as so often is the case in his oeuvre, this book contains the germ of originality, and a hint of brilliance, but founders upon the rocks by its crippling portrayal of emotional disengagement. The Pynchonian sweet spot for me was Chronic City, and I want the author to deliberately construct a more challenging and complex interplay of subtext and commentary, quit dumbing his plot down and drop the crutches of imitation.

It's difficult to not be pissy toward these authors: Chabon and Lethem and the other multiform clones from that era's prototype writer-hero, for possessing free rein, popularity, means, and great ability, but operating on the surface level and spending too much time on social media.

[Lemar · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jonathan Lethem writes with a sardonic wit and inventiveness that rescues this book from the flatness of his protagonist Alexander Bruno. It's odd but this character is interesting but uninterested.
Bruno's lack of engagement makes for a disappointing center from which we experience an otherwise compelling group of characters and settings. I was reminded of reading Eric Clapton's autobiography in which fascinating people and times are recounted by a seemingly bored individual.
The writing and the peripheral characters makes this book absolutely worth the read. Bruno is A professional backgammon player a game which Lethem describes as being,
"unlike chess: No genius could foresee 12 or 30 moves in advance. Each backgammon position was its own absolute and present circumstance, faded to be revised, impossible to falsify. Each role of the dice created a new such circumstance".
Lethem continues to show the ability to mine meaning and convey it. The book is worth reading. It may be that I was such a fan of his early work that I'm being a little stingy and exacting in this review. I never considered abandoning this book, I just wanted Bruno to be as interested in his fate as I was.
Lethem makes fascinating references in all his books. This book and his previous one, Dissident Gardens, bring up the idea of anarchism communism in America in ways that would be terrific to see pursued in the future as the central idea in a book.

[Alison Hardtmann · Rating 2 out of 5]

Back in the day, I read Motherless Brooklyn, Jonathan Lethem's brilliant and emotionally resonant noir about a private eye with Tourette's Syndrome. I always meant to read more by this talented writer, but never got around to it. So when A Gambler's Anatomy began to be reviewed and I found myself with a copy of it in my hands, I was excited to see what Lethem would do with the story of a high-stakes backgammon player, down on his luck.

The book begins brilliantly, with Bruno going to Wannsee, just outside of Berlin, to play backgammon against a man he has been assured will be easy prey. Bruno needs the money; after the disaster in Singapore he's utterly without resources. And those opening chapters are excellent, with the small exception of the stereo-typical younger and attractive woman who is drawn to the desperate and thread-bare Bruno. Bruno's descent coincides with a blot in the center of his vision, one which requires him to look at things through the corners of his eyes and may be related to the headaches and other health issues. The evening in Wannsee does not go well.

From this promising beginning, A Gambler's Anatomy turns out to be just another WMFuN*, where the world and especially the women in it, exist to spotlight what's happening to the self-absorbed main character. Add a long stretch of men being more interested in their own thought-processes than anything around them and the utter relegation of women to helpers and sex and the book ended up being quite a bit less than I had hoped. It's stylistically interesting, in the way a novel by a prominent white guy who has read everything David Foster Wallace ever wrote usually is, but at the expense of any heart whatsoever. Also, Mr. Lethem, it's 2016. Women are no longer merely props. If you can't write them as people, leave them out.

*The all-too-common White Male Fuck-up Novel. There are already too many of these.

[Carla Remy · Rating 3 out of 5]

07/2022

If this wild fantasy is a metaphor for the horrors of real life, it compares gambling with dice (or backgammon) to surgery. With the gambling risk of having your tumor removed, hoping the operation is successful. Because this is the terrifying reality people face everyday.

[Patty Shlonsky · Rating 4 out of 5]

What is a face? Is it a mass behind which we create an identity? Or is it our actual identity? What happens when the face is radically changed?

In “A Gambler’s Anatomy”, Alexander Bruno is a professional backgammon player, telepathic, debonair and mysterious, expertly relieving the wealthy and egotistical- frequently one and the same-of their money. "Relieving such men of their pretensions: Those were Bruno's services." We first meet him in Berlin, where he has fled from Singapore in an effort to escape financial and personal disaster, including an escape from his "sponsor", Edgar Falk. "Falk conducted an invisible orchestra of graft; his mantra was 'price of doing business.'...Falk stayed behind to settle affairs and collect debts. Falk always collected debts."

Bruno is suffering a blot in his visual range which he considers part of his persona until he collapses, finds himself in a Berlin hospital and discovers he has a tumor. The tumor is caught between the casing of his brain and his face and is generally inoperable. He is told that the only physician who would be willing to attempt to remove his tumor is in San Francisco, Bruno's hometown. Penniless at this point, his now wealthy high school friend, Keith Stolarsky, arranges to fly him home and provide temporarily for his medical and living needs.

Dr. Behringer is an eccentric neurosurgeon who specializes in the removal of tumors that other physicians will not consider. Behringer is bearded, unorthodox and listens to Jimi Hendrix during his surgeries, engaging in sex talk with his staff while winding down his intricate surgeries. His plan for Bruno is to remove his handsome face, extricate the tumor and put his face back. The surgery is ultimately a success.

While Bruno travels back to San Francisco and during his recovery from the surgery, he flashes back to his childhood in California and to his days in Singapore. His mother was effectively homeless and Bruno practically raised himself. He recalled a month spent in the burn unit of a hospital when he was 11 and his jobs in restaurants beginning in seventh grade. Ultimately Bruno finds himself in London and then Singapore--a professional gambler. His gambling life in Singapore was a rousing success until it wasn't!

His relationship with Keith Stolarsky and his time back in San Francisco is challenging. Stolarsky is a narcissistic, ego maniacal real estate magnate, hated by all who come in contact with him. Stolarsky owns almost all of Telegraph Avenue, including Zodiac Media, Zombie Burger and the Jack London apartments, where Bruno is temporarily housed. Bruno is completely dependent on him for food, clothing, medical bills and everything else. In fact, Bruno's entire wardrobe, consisting of tee shirts with the word Abide (The Big Lebowski) and sweat pants are courtesy of the Zodiac. Stolarsky's motives for helping Bruno are less than clear. Their relationship is very like a complex game of chess, with Bruno always one move behind. Ultimately Bruno's life on Telegraph Avenue comes to an end and he finds himself back in Singapore with Falk, doing what he does best and reflecting on life, concluding the "We're all Unknown Tragics on this bus".

The story is typical Lethem- cynical and irreverent, focused on the off beat, counter cultural community and its disaffected alienated sociopaths, and filled with various literary and media references, strange and sometimes incoherent sentences, yet enjoyable all the same. Lethem still hasn't captured the magic of "Motherless Brooklyn", but "A Gambler's Anatomy" is one of his better novels since that 1999 gem. The novel will be released in October. If you like this review and want to read more, check out www.frombriefstobooks.com and subscribe!

[N · Rating 5 out of 5]

This devilishly entertaining novel tells the story of Alexander Bruno, a psychic and handsome backgammon gambler's chance meeting with former high school frenemy Keith Solotsky and his aging, but seductive girlfriend Tira is reminiscent of the enigmatic Frank and Julia Minna of Mr. Lethem's masterpiece "Motherless Brooklyn".

Alexander, motherless and himself alone, goes from Singapore to Berlin and finally back to the Berkeley, California that he despises so much to have a tumor removed from his face that had been blotting his vision, begrudgingly paid for by Solotsky.

Mr. Lethem's motifs of gentrification, struggles against hipster culture, femme fatales, all make an entertaining and well paced book and this time.

[Daisy · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book didn't really manage to hold my attention, and at times I found it downright irritating (e.g. is his treatment of every female character meant to be ironic? If so I don't think he carries it off, and if not... yikes). Although I loved Motherless Brooklyn, I couldn't really get through Fortress of Solitude either... it's possible I'm just not much of a Lethem fan after all.

[Allan · Rating 3 out of 5]

As a fan of many of Lethem's books, I must say that I was a little baffled by this one. It has touches of the fantastical, for which some of his novels are famous, and while the story of the backgammon hustler was intriguing in a way, ultimately I was left a trifle confused by how things turned out.

I've yet to read other reviews of this book, so I'm not sure how it has been received, but it may be the case that it was the fact I listened rather than read it that was the issue. All things considered though, not really for me.

[Jo · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book never got any momentum or went anywhere, while Lethem is a great writer, this novel was loosely plotted at best. The narrator was incredibly passive, and things just seemed to happen around him. The telepathy never developed into anything, or seemed at all relevant to the plot, so it could have easily been cut which is never a good sign. Also too much backgammon.

[Dorothy · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book has been published in the U.K. with the title The Blot, which actually seems a much better title than A Gambler's Anatomy. In backgammon, which is the preferred game of the main character in the book, a "blot" is a piece that stands alone, vulnerable to attack. Alexander Bruno, the main character, adopts that term to refer to something that has gone horribly awry with his anatomy. There is something growing in his head, between his eye and his brain. Something that shouldn't be there.

It is a tumor, and when we meet Bruno for the first time, in Berlin, that unnatural growth is just about to land him in the hospital after he suffers a kind of seizure while he is playing a high stakes game of backgammon.

Bruno is a professional gambler. He travels the world, winning large sums of money from rich amateurs who are sure that they have what it takes to beat this professional. He has been inordinately successful for a long time, but then, in Singapore, his luck turns. Suddenly, he is losing more than he is winning.

He moves on to Berlin where he hopes for a turnaround in his run of luck, but, instead, the losing continues. And then his health fails.

The doctors at the hospital in Berlin diagnose his problem, but are not equipped to treat it. He learns that perhaps the only neurosurgeon in the world who may be willing to try to rid him of his unwanted "blot" is in Berkeley, California, where he grew up. Unfortunately, he doesn't have the money to get to Berkeley.

But, luckily, Bruno has an acquaintance from high school days, who now just happens to be in Berlin, and who is filthy rich. He offers to pay Bruno's way and to pay for the medical care he needs once he gets to Berkeley. Soon enough, he is back in California, undergoing major surgery that involves rebuilding his face after removing the tumor.

He emerges with a face that he cannot recognize and he takes to wearing a surgical mask after his bandages come off. No one on Telegraph Avenue where he lives seems very surprised or put off by the man wearing the mask. In fact, he fits right in there.

Jonathan Lethem is an extraordinarily inventive writer who turns out exuberant prose that is steeped in a sardonic wit. In Alexander Bruno, he has created what should be a riveting character and yet he just seemed flat to me. I couldn't really care that much about him. He gives the impression of floating through life, on the kindness of strangers, without any real passion of his own. True, he is obsessive about backgammon and rather smug about his mastery of it, but he doesn't appear to see much beyond that. He didn't really engage my interest as a reader.

When I sat down to write this review, I had the oddest sensation. I realized that even though I had just finished the book the night before, I couldn't really remember how it ended. I reread the last chapter and, quite honestly, I still don't know how it ended. Perhaps that tells you everything you need to know about my reading experience with it.

[Jake]

A new disappointment from one of my favorite writers. To be fair, I was entertained and sometimes fascinated despite myself due to the sheer quality and focus of Lethem's writing however pointless it may be. The characters have gimmicky misfit identities and the story reels from one thinly strung plot point to the next. Lethem's still a great stylist with some funny dialogue and description, but I couldn't feel anything about these characters especially the main one. There's so little sense of him that being asked to indulge his heartbreaking backstory just kind of made me roll my eyes. Like a lot of self absorbed people, he's fascinating at a distance but dull up close. The ones that work best are the minor characters that if cartoony are at least entertaining. "Mad respect" to an anarchist slider cook. I'll read anything this man writes but if you're new to his work, don't start here.

[Tyler McGaughey · Rating 1 out of 5]

A generally compelling read but man, the sentence-level writing in this thing has got to be some career-worst stuff for Lethem. Wretched, incomprehensible metaphors; smug gum-smacking similes; paragraphs constructed by God knows what logic; overly repeated words and other sloppy failures of copy editing; I could go on. The plot is almost 100% ludicrous, too, but that bothered me slightly less, although it's worth noting that a premise which here takes up almost 300 pages would likely be no more than an aside in a Pynchon novel.

UPDATE, Feb. 7 '17: After a month of stewing in my mental crockpot I've come to a firm conclusion: this book fucking sucks . I hereby drop my Official Goodreads Rating to the long-rumored, rarely-deployed, much-feared McGaughey One-Star.

[Jon · Rating 3 out of 5]

Parts of this novel were very enjoyable, but ultimately it was a frustrating and unsatisfying read with a rather dull and perfunctorily wrapped-up ending.

The novel's main antagonist is hilariously and unsubtly based upon a real life Berkeley persona who I once worked for, and I perhaps derived a little more enjoyment than I would have normally because of this.

After finishing this book, I was compelled to start re-reading Fortress of Solitude to make sure I hadn't overestimated Jonathan Lethem's writing; I hadn't Fortress is as amazing as I remembered. Phew!

[Mattia Ravasi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Video review

"A double five!" Tira squealed, unhooking her bra.
"Remember, you are cursed," Bruno stopped her. "Only sixes count."
"Fuck. I evade the monster then."
"You cannot evade the Fire Vampire. It has Ambush."
"Surely I can if the fight hasn't started?"
"Let us check the manual." Bruno's fingers tingled with anticipation.

- Excerpt from my fan fiction rewriting where Bruno is a professional Arkham Horror hustler.

[Allen Adams · Rating 4 out of 5]

http://www.themaineedge.com/buzz/a-ga...

A globe-trotting backgammon hustler possessed of a gone-to-seed glamor and a rough-and-ready telepathy that comes and goes. Oh, and he also has a massive cranial tumor sitting just behind his face.

This is Alexander Bruno, the protagonist of Jonathan Lethem’s “A Gambler’s Anatomy” (Doubleday, $27.95). It’s a sprawling story, rendered in Lethem’s typically mesmerizing prose, that explores the realities of the human condition by way of someone who has largely separated himself from his fellow man.

Bruno makes his living as one of the world’s preeminent backgammon gamblers. He travels from major city to major city all over the world, playing games against obscenely wealthy men who are willing to spend thousands for the opportunity to take down one of the best. For a long time, those rich players largely fail to do so.

But something is wrong.

His game is not what it once was. A strange obstruction of his vision – he calls it his “blot” – has resulted in real difficulty seeing the board. Nor is he able to harness the long-shelved telepathic powers so prominent in his youth. He has taken some serious hits – so many that it is unclear if his longtime backer will remain in his corner.

In an effort to restore his bankroll – as well as his dignity – he agrees to a high-stakes game with a bombastic German real estate speculator. However, his condition leaves him in less than optimal playing shape. His collapse at the backgammon board is soon matched by an actual physical collapse – a seizure that leaves him helpless and bloodied on the German’s floor. At the hospital, he learns that the steadily-growing blot is a symptom of a massive, messy tumor spreading gelatinously through the inner workings of his face.

A chance encounter with an old acquaintance from his high school days back in Berkeley leads to an opportunity; a shopworn, Hendrix-loving hippie surgeon whose entire career has been building to this moment. Bruno hasn’t got much hope, but what hope he has stems from this one-of-a-kind physician.

This means a return to his youthful stomping grounds, a trip back to the place he had walked away from years prior. His old friend is now a real-estate magnate, the sort of greed-driven boogeyman that is often anathema in such radical and liberal surroundings.

Bruno has little choice but to be swept up into a world that, while vaguely familiar, is nothing like the place he remembered. Nor does it resemble the sphere in which he has been operating. Life has changed for Alexander Bruno – he’s left making choices and picking sides in circumstances that he doesn’t fully understand.

Lethem is one of those writers who rarely wastes a word. There’s an easy complexity to the sentences he spins, creating oddly incongruent and effective descriptions and conversations that leap from the page; as per usual, the risk of literary contagion from Lethem’s prose is exceedingly high. His words linger. Even as the specificity fades, the impression remains strong.

“A Gambler’s Anatomy” is no different. Alexander Bruno is a classic Lethem outlier, one whose gifts, while undeniably impressive, have caused him to pull away into an insular isolation. When that bubble pops, when Bruno is forced to allow others access…that’s when the author cracks his knuckles and really gets down to business.

Exploring interpersonal dynamics is something that Lethem has always done masterfully. The relationships between Bruno and those around him – friends, foes and those in between – are rendered with powerful detail. As a character study, it’s magnificent – we get to venture into Alexander Bruno’s head both figuratively and literally. We bear witness to the quirks and foibles of a man whose life may be ruined by the very same things that save it.

This book might not have the narrative oomph inherent to some of Lethem’s other work; the story sometimes wanders and loses focus. That said, it’s still very much a worthwhile read. There are some tonal shifts – there an occasional noir vibe, some cold and clinical moments, a few dalliances into the speculative – that might seem a bit odd to those unfamiliar with Lethem’s oeuvre, but those (like me) already in the bag will have no problem embracing them.

“A Gambler’s Anatomy” is a thoughtful and wonderfully-crafted work, one built on an authorial foundation of intelligence, curiosity and immense skill. It’s the sort of reading experience that is very much worth a roll of the dice.

[Judy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have always meant to read all of Lethem's novels but had only so far read Motherless Brooklyn. I gave that one to my husband who loved it as much as I did. He went on to read many more by Lethem, the latest being A Gambler's Anatomy. He kept exclaiming about how good it was, so I read it too. Then we had our at home husband and wife only reading group discussion about it. Wow, I learned things I never knew about my partner with whom I have shared the last 40 plus years of life!

Anyway I loved the book too though for apparently different reasons. Bruno plays backgammon for money, has a sad past, and hits a losing streak. He also has a tumor in his skull which he calls the "blot." If you know backgammon you will get the joke. (We have been playing backgammon ever since my husband started the book, I finally learned and I beat him the first three times we played. Now he is beating me.) Playing for stakes though is an entirely different thing, especially since Bruno specializes in relieving wealthy men of large sums.

The aspect of the book that both my husband and I loved is summed up as how did Lethem ever think up the plot? Yes, I found parallels between it and Motherless Brooklyn but I never knew where he was going with it.

I tried to find all sort of meaning in the ending. My husband just took it as a good tale.

[Gayla Bassham]

Lethem delivers some great sentences in this book: every other pages offers something like "He sought consolation in the idea that he would die within the ancient preserve of Charite, the plague asylum, but in this antiseptic modern wing it was no good. Perhaps they would release him to the streets, and he would expire on the lawn before some nineteenth-century brickwork renamed for a Nazi doctor, or atop a cairn of paving stones." But the story is not great; in fact it's a bit dull, and hard to get a handle on. And Bruno, as a character, left me cold. Lethem remains a beautiful writer, but this novel fails to live up to the promise of his masterpiece, Motherless Brooklyn.

[Kathrin Passig · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ich bin ein Leseprobengimpel. Es fing so an, dass ich wissen wollte, wie es weitergeht, aber danach passiert einfach nichts mehr, beziehungsweise passieren viele Dinge, die sich aber weigern, zu einer Romanhandlung zu werden und verdächtig nach Lesereisennotizen klingen.

Update: Jetzt auch etwas ausführlicher hier https://www.piqd.de/literatenfunk/let...

[Leo Walsh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Masks. We all wear them. We all show the world one thing, which is often opposite to what we feel inside. Is the attempt to keep things hidden bad? Indeed, places like WikiLeaks make us think so. Their stated purpose is "exposing secrets" of powerful organizations, regardless the cost. Which sounds good, and idealistic. Until you stumble upon the question, "What if the Nazi's got the US's plans for the nuclear bomb?" And the answer becomes not so clear-cut.

Or are these masks, these little white lies, constructive? One may even call them necessary. Like a FaceBook post where you post a happy picture of you and your spouse on an afternoon where your spatting. Or the police withholding details of a case that they can use to trap the killer.

Are those lies bad? Or are they, at least in some sense, good because they lead to positive outcomes? Such are the questions Jonathan Lethem explores in his newest book "A Gambler's Anatomy."

After a slow start, we trace professional backgammon player Alexander Bruno as he falls ill, and then falls from grace. The illness is caused by a benign tumor. Once removed, Bruno fancies that he is able to read minds, an innate talent he claims to have had since he was a child. He despises the power, since it makes him different than the others. In his own mind, the tumor was his body's natural protection against being swamped by other's thoughts. So to replace that protection, he takes to wearing masks.

Is the mask necessary? Despite numerous attempts to read from and project thoughts into other people's minds, we see no evidence that Bruno has this power save his own assertions.

After reaching bottom, Bruno taps a former high school friend, the boisterous carnival barker Stolarsky, whose amassed a fortune by being a master manipulator. For instance, he owns a lot real estate around Cal Berkeley, and owns a popular, profitable burger joint that sounds like a Hooters without the booze. But to play to the 'other side,' he owns the seedy alternative, run by a Marxist anarchist, on the sly. So he grabs mainstream people with one hand, and stokes dissent. And then profits from the dissent as well. Sort of how Motown records would record and profit off of songs advocating controversial civil rights topics, like "Ball of Confusion" by the Temptations on one hand. And yet recorded and profited off of Pat Boone, a conservative Christian who opposed the civil rights movement in the early 70's.

As expected, Stolarsky plays Bruno and gets what he wants. And Bruno remains clueless. Which again begs the question, "Could he read minds? And does he even need the mask as protection?"

True to a real artist, Lethem does not answer these questions. And though it often feels like a genre piece -- I detected hints of William Gibson in Stolarsky, and HG Wells' "Invisible Man" while Bruno hid behind the mask -- Lethem avoids the common. Since everything he mixes in, from the alleged telepathy to the mask to the radical politics to the comic book references, seems at a double purpose.

Like, for instance, the question of whether the telepathy real or imagined. And because of this very conscious artistry, which is successfully carried off, I class "A Gambler's Anatomy" as kin to lesser Pynchons, like "Mason & Dixon."

I'm giving this four stars, though in reality it's probably a three-and-a-half star book rounded up. Because it does start off slow, and only takes off during Bruno's surgery, where we see behind the eyes of the surgeon Doctor Behringer, who calls himself a "mechanic of meat." I think many readers would ditch it before then. I know I was tempted.

[Alan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had not expected to pick up another Jonathan Lethem book so soon, after finishing Men and Cartoons in March 2017—in truth, I had forgotten about A Gambler's Anatomy (or at least pushed the thought of it to the back of my mind), but there it was on the shelf, staring at me through the blank black eyeholes of a mask seemingly cut from an antique backgammon board. I pounced upon the book eagerly enough once the opportunity presented itself, though—for while my to-read pile is often tall and tottering, there's always room on it for another Lethem.

A Gambler's Anatomy is almost too literal a title for this one, though. Alexander Bruno is a gambler, urbane and smooth-tongued, a professional backgammon player (and no, I didn't know there was such a thing) who travels the world fleecing rich, arrogant "whales" for a living. And yes, his anatomy has begun to fail him... an impenetrable "blot," as Bruno calls it, has grown to occupy the center of his visual field, forcing him to look sidelong at things when he cares to look at them at all.

Bruno doesn't need to see the board in front of him to play, of course, not at his level of expertise—but even so, the blot has begun to affect his game...


In several distinct ways, A Gambler's Anatomy seemed not so much a pure Jonathan Lethem book (whatever that's supposed to mean; Lethem is one of the least predictable novelists I've ever encountered) as an amalgam of Lethem with another Jonathan: Jonathan Carroll. Carroll makes his home in Austria and often sets his stories there, not terribly far from this novel's opening scenes in Germany. Alexander Bruno's elegant rootlessness is a trait that Carroll's characters often exhibit as well. And the admixture of the surreal and the mundane that is practically Carroll's trademark, while subtle here at first, gathers force as Bruno returns (or, rather, is required to return) to his home town: San Francisco, that most elegant and European of American cities.

If A Gambler's Anatomy really is Lethem doing Carroll, he does it well—several times, I put it down after a chapter only to pick it right back up again to read the next—but there was also a certain aimlessness about this novel that I haven't found to be typical of either author. Some fairly significant events happen to Bruno, to be sure, but he always seems more acted upon than an actor in his own right.

Perhaps that was Lethem's point, or part of it: will Bruno ever seize the dice to throw for his own destiny? Or will he continue to be swept to and fro by manipulative others and the vagaries of blind Fortune?

There's really only one good way to tell...

[Chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lethem's mostly playing here, and that's fine by me. I'm not sure this adds up to all that much, but it was a perfectly diverting audiobook. The surgery scenes, the backgammon scenes, the flipping sliders scenes--they all work. But in the end we're left with not so much. Alexander Bruno--the "psychic" and busted backgammon gambling protagonist--is the blot, the exposed checker in a gammon game awaiting the hammer, and it comes from most directions. He imagines control over his life (like he largely imagines his psychic powers), but the truth is that he floats about, blown by the spitty wind of wealthy men whose motives range from financial exploitation to petty revenge and oneupmanship.

By novel's end, he's had his face ripped off and incited a riot in Berkeley, but he doesn't seem to have learned much on the journey. He snags a clutch of Dude "Abide" shirts on the way and, again, imagines himself as a mysterious zen-like figure, but the truth is he's still a blot, less abiding than bidden.

The novel ends on an up note--Bruno in control at the poker table, wielding his psychic powers to bilk a dim-witted American who unironically dubs himself "The Titanic"--but the reader sees through the "win". That's just Bruno being Bruno, getting swatted about by the wealthy exploiters who have been moving him about the board at whim, covering him or leaving him exposed as the dice dictate, unperturbed by any of the very real dangers he might face.

And here we perhaps are at a common Lethem theme. The rich eat; the rest get eaten. The theme seems to take the novel over, discarding several other potential avenues. I'm not certain that this is the best arrangement to explore the theme, but it's a theme Lethem can rarely ignore.