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I have just finished DR (stayed up late last night to do so -- I read
section 1 over two evenings last week, read section 2 during the day on
Sunday, and read section 3 Sunday night). I was very moved. I think it's
an excellent book. Though the themes and subject matter are those of late
Delany -- explicitly about the experience of black, urban, gay men in the
twentieth century -- in some ways, it is different from anything Delany
has done before.
It does have what I think is the signature hallmark of late-mature
Delany--highly-charged prose that carries the reader along and lets them
feel what it's like to be in another's consciousness and body. Literate
references forming a web of allusions and names that anchors the text to
20th century letters. Looping strings of beautiful prose.
However, the consciousness of the protagonist is constituted rather
differently than most of Delany's protagonists -- the way that repression
and disappointment and self-abnegation work on him is much more overt (the
young Sam of Atlantis is perhaps the most similar); and we experience his
difficulties and poverty and isolation quite painfully.
It is a sad book, in many ways. But there are moments of reprieve. And I'm
already rolling around phrases from it in my head and looking forward to
re-reading it over the next years.
--Zvi
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