RL's Dream

By Walter Mosley

Book Overview

From New York Times bestselling author Walter Mosley, this life-affirming novel about an aging bluesman in New York City and the neighbor who takes him in after he's evicted is "a mesmerizing and... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393038025
• ISBN13: 9780393038026
• Release Date: August 1995
• Publisher: W. W. Norton
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 1.16 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.6" x 1.1" x 6.0"

Customer Reviews

mosley at his very best

Together with "Always Outnumbered,..." this is Mosley's greatest achievement. It puts Mosley on the same level as James Baldwin and Richard Wright; it has Baldwin's epic qualities combined with the pride and outrage of Wright's best moments. Mosley is very much his own man, though, and it all makes for one hell of a great novel. Probably an American classic of the late 20th century.

Love and goals most don't know

This book has a relationship that would be strange and eccentric to most Americans.Yet, if readers can drop their middle-class values and judgments long enough to get to know the characters, they will, by the book's end, have experienced a story of love between people that they feel they know and care about themselves, and understand goals they themselves would never have. This is a revelatory tale of losers and the lost, who nonetheless strive to love and to fulfill their dreams, and most readers who can find the newness of a world and people foreign to their own experiences will hope the dreams of these characters come true. Mosley is a wonderful presence in the American literary scene, not just a mystery/crime writer as some have "written him off" as being. His smooth prose and flow of language, as well as his sensitivities to people and places that make them become more real than comfortable suburbanites in comfortable suburbia, glow with an intellect and emotional intonation found in few modern writers.Mosley knows the world does not belong only to the middle-class or wealthy, and he makes his readers know it, too, in ways that touch their hearts and make them re-examine their own definitions of love and the natures of their goals.

Heard on 6 cassettes-Best reader ever heard, Great book!

This patchwork quilt of a story is masterful. It weaves in and out, in no chronological order, the history of the blues with slavery, and post slavery era in the Mississippi Delta, incest, loss of a child. How people affected by these circumstances deal with them by burying themselves in blues or alcohol or imaginery children.The history and meaning of blues is worth the book alone, but although I usually don't like such heavy material, all the main characters stay with me. Moseley is the best writer of characters, dialogue, place. He doesn't ever explain motivation, his characters just demonstate how they deal with their pain. Its the best audio tape I ever heard. The reader of this, Michael Kramer enhances it with every word, every infection of his voice.

Mosley steps out of genre to create a classic

Walter Mosley was always an uneasy fit in the detective genre, and except for Blue Light, his works outside that genre were more compelling than the stuff that made him famous -- Gone Fishin' and Always Outnumbered both outshine his mysteries.I think this is because what Mosley is best at is creating characters deeply affected by their roots in Southern poverty and racism. Having to shoehorn the characters and incidents he wants to talk about into even the unconventional format of the Easy Rawlins mysteries makes for an uneasy fit. Always Outnumbered, Gone Fishin', and RL's Blues are less plot-oriented, more freewheeling, and they give Mosley the room to spread out. Like a musician, Mosley is often at his best when he is just riffing. Much as he describes blues lyrics in this book, putting words together that don't make sense unless you are there hearing them with the audience, Mosley puts scenes together in ways that defy traditional narrative yet increase their emotional power.Freed of the constraints of his mysteries, Mosley has created a very powerful work containing several exquisitely drawn characters and some of the most moving prose I've read in years. RL's Dream ranks among the best works of one of the few popular novelists today who I think we'll still be reading, even studying, a hundred years from now.

The blues defined through a life meaningfully lived.

I thought this guy just wrote mystery novels. Then I went to hear him read from his latest, "Gone Fishin'" He riveted the room sufficiently for me to feel compelled to ask him which of the titles in his opus was personally his favorite. Not skipping a beat or paying attention to my earnest gaze, he answered, "RL's Dream. It's the one I like best." "Good enough for me," I called, scurrying over to the table piled high with books written by Mosley, each of which was doubtless the favorite of many. The author inscribed my freshly printed copy of his book with, "Rosalind, we miss you back east." Then I strolled home ready to read. I teach expository writing; I read for a living; I talk for a living; and it's frankly hard to capture my unwavering interest--least of all with a should-have-been mystery novel by the author of "Devil in a Blue Dress." Nevertheless I couldn't put this book down. From the first page it held me in a life, breathing with the main character, a dying blues guitarist, RL, who is put out on the street with cancer in his bones and too many memories of the blues life down south to let him sit down and die in peace. The book chronicles his last days of documenting bygone gigs with Robert Johnson, the mythical bluesman who is said to have sold his soul to the Devil to play like no other could. But Mosley's work extends beyond that man and that myth to another lesser-known, also talented blues guitarist who walked in Johnson's shadow to get a handle on his greatness. RL winds up defining the blues, as does every soul, in his own unique fashion. This book should be required reading for anybody who listens to the Blues, or to its grandchild, Rock, or its stepchild, Grunge. "RL's Dream" helps us understand the roots of all those forms that seep into our veins and order our lives around the rhythm, stroke, and cadence of our hearts.