| Title | : | The Man in My Basement |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 031615931X |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780316159319 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 272 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 2004 |
| Awards | : | Hurston/Wright Legacy Award Fiction (2005) |
Walter Mosley pierces long-hidden veins of justice and morality with startling insight into the deepest mysteries of human nature.
The Man in My Basement Reviews
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My friend Don gave me this book to read several years ago, and it still affects me when I think about it. The story begins with a strange request: a wealthy white man named Bennet asks to rent out the basement of the home of Charles Blakey, who is black. Bennet builds a cage in the basement, and eventually locks himself inside it. Blakey is confused by the man's actions, and after some philosophical discussions, learns that Bennet is trying to atone for something.
I was totally absorbed in the book and loved the discussions about guilt, punishment and redemption. The novel is only 192 pages, but it's very powerful.
I was reminded of this book because Don died last week. It was an unexpected heart attack, despite the fact that he was a runner and was in great shape. Walter Mosley was Don's favorite writer, and because of his enthusiasm, I've read several of Mosley's books. "The Man in my Basement" is my favorite because it is so thoughtful and well-written, and it reminds me of the good conversations I had with my friend. I'd like to think that our friends never really leave us, especially when we have good books to remember them by. -
In each of us there is a dormant power waiting to be released. For some of us, the power is evil. For others, the power is more closely attuned to charity or love. If your power were to be unleashed upon humankind today, would it be good or evil?
That is the question you have to ask yourself before reading this book. If a person stumbled upon your doorstep and offered you an immense amount of money to imprison them, without giving you a clue as to why they want to be imprisoned in your basement, could you do it? And if you could, why? If you are the type of person that can withstand the allure of money, how would you react to this proposition?
And if you did take the person up on their offer, could you remain the same person you think you are as their story unfolds through conversations and deep self-introspection?
Walter Mosley tries to answer these questions with this novel. Sometimes he succeeds; sometimes he leaves the answers vague and expects you, as the reader, to answer the questions yourself.
Overall, Mosley gets you to look and think about the world through a prism rarely glanced through. If you have the courage and stomach to attack these questions, read this book. If you don't, ask yourself: Why not?
Personal note: This was one of the best books I have read in a very long time.
VERY HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
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I started this book this morning and finished it a little while ago. Needless to say, I don't give 2 stars to many books that keep my attention throughout the whole day, but when a character just doesn't seem 'right', it really gets to me. What I mean is, believe-ability:
*Say you have no job, that you have no ambition, and you don't own up to any of your mistakes, yet you attract women from all facets of life and they think you're the bees knees.
*You scrape up money any way you can think of and borrow money from your friends for alcohol and yet, you are 'like-able' to everyone, as if they kiss your ass to be YOUR friend.
*You live in a hand-me-down house with a minimal mortgage and you're late on payments and just happen to realize that while cleaning out your basement [because of some random request from a man you don't know (the devil is in the details)] you come across a treasure trove of items that not only can get you out of debt, but also make you even more worthless by giving you more money to spend on booze.
*When a guy asks to rent from you and your friends hear about it initially...they seemingly forget conveniently throughout the rest of the book and wonder how you're 'getting money' or 'acting weird'.
These are just a few points that really got on my nerves, but it definitely held my attention throughout. I kept thinking there was more to the story, but alas, it's basically as it is. It's as if he's trying too hard to visit ideas that have been visited before through a weird story that doesn't quite affect me the way it has with others.
The Man in the Basement is the name of the book, but he's not truly the main focus. I kinda wish he had been because it would've probably been more interesting. -
مرد توی زیرزمین خانه ام اثر والتر موزلی .داستان روان،پرکشش و متفاوت،از آنها که مدتی ذهن را مشغول خواهد داشت.امتیازاین اثر در برابر سایر آثارنویسنده از دید خوانندگان من را مطمئن ساخت که باز هم سراغ وی خواهم رفت.نقل قول:"گه داشتن قول خیلى ساده تر از قدم گذاشتن به دنیاى دروغ و فتنه است"."عدالت زمانى اجرا میشه که فرد مورد قضاوت هم اونو به رسمیت بشناسه. عدالت، بدون وجود درک و ندامت… چیزى نیست جز انتقام"."او یک شیطان بود و من یک شکست خورده؛ اصلا شاید تفاوت میان آدم هاى خوب و بد این دنیا همین باشد"
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Reading Rush: A book that starts with THE
This is gonna be a quick one because I have no clue how to talk about this book.
The Man in My Basement is about the confrontation between a Black man and the White stranger who rents his basement cellar for the summer. This is such an odd little book. I'm not sure I completely understand what I just read but I'm almost positive that I won't be able to stop thinking about this book for a very long time.
The Man in My Basement is a meditation on race, Black masculinity, depression and our own battles with the darkness that lives in all of us. This book was a wholely(is that a word?) original novel. I've never read anything like it and I don't think I ever will.
No rec because this book isn't for everybody but those of us it is meant for will really feel it. -
I've read this book twice now and didn't really like it either time. In general, I like Mosley-- at least when he's writing as a crime writer. With this book, he abandons the crime genre to create a more philosophical book, which, unfortunately, failed to satisfy me. What I like about Mosley's other books are his characters and dialog. Easy Rawlins, Fearless Jones and the characters from his other books are likable enough to give you a reason to pull for them. Charles Blakey, the main character of this book, is a loser (described as so in the book) who doesn't seem to want anything from life. And Anniston Bennet the "man in the basement" never evolves into anything other than a symbol of power, evil, and whiteness who is for some reason seeking redemption in this odd way. I find the dialog between the two men highly convenient, unrealistic and dull. I don't know. This book, for me, just falls a little flat.
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Wow. What a good, different story. I don't want to give anything away. I never figured out what the goals of the "Man in the basement" were until the author revealed them.
I will be looking into Walter Moseley's other works. -
شخصيت اصلي رمان يك سياه پوست تنها و از كار بيكار شده به نام (چارلز داد بليكي) هست
روايت بسيار متفاوت و پيچيده و خواندني بود
تاثير عوامل بيروني بر تغيير ذات يك انسان
گفتگوي عجيب يك شيطان كه براي شكست خوردن توي ماموريتش خودش رو زنداني و شكنجه ميكنه
روند داستان خيلي پر كشش و جذاب بود و صحبت هاي بنت و بليكي درباره عشق و سياست و پول من رو ياد بعضي از جملات ١٩٨٤ انداخت ،
سير تبديل شدن يك شخصيت بي عرضه از (چارلز ) به آقاي (داد بليكي) و سپس (زندانبان) و روند تغييرات رفتار يك نفر در اثر شرايط بيروني و پول بسيار تامل برانگيز بود
بر خلاف توضيحات كتاب و معرفي بعضي از سايتها ، ژانر اصلا معمايي و پليسي نبود و به قول همون توضيحات كتاب و سايتها پر بود از تمثيل هاي كافكايي -
Has this ever occurred for you: You begin a book and two paragraphs in you realize you've been reading poorly written books for ages? This is what happened when I picked up this one. The story was OK, the characters were mostly unlikable or indifferent to me, but the writing was marvelous. Mr. Mosley writes so clearly and succinctly that it felt like I'd been previously breathing with a stuffed nose and didn't realize it.
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The last fifty pages of this book was hugely frustrating reading. I just wanted the book to end. The idea for the story is a good one but there wasn't enough suspense or building of the plot. A mysterious, white man rents a basement for the summer from a black man in Easthamptons. He stays in the basement in a cage, a self-imposed prisoner, as punishement for his many "crimes," which he does not consider crimes. He knows secrets about governments, the wealthy and world systems - yet, to me, he never disclosed anything that was worthy of being called "top secret." He's afraid of the dark though and is upset when he's placed in "solitary" by the black home owner, who's now his "warden." The characters were weak; I felt no sympathy or any kind of attachement or emotion for anyone in the story. I was reading and thinking about what I could read next; I was that bored.
My friends keep talking about the genius of Walter Mosley's work. I don't get it. The Tempest Tales was better than this one, but still. I'm going to try one more of his books. -
What a fabulous book. Completely different from anything else I've read by Walter Mosely.
It tells the story of a last of the line original black family that came to America, Massachusetts, as free people.
This book is about journeys to find oneself both for the Narrator, and the man who pays him a ton of money to imprison him.
It is one of the most interesting books I have ever read. -
This is a bizarre novel with intrigue. A novel with the purpose of absolution for your life sins as the center piece. Anniston Bennet, a white man wants to live in a cage in the basement of a black man's home, Charles Blakey, for absolution. Only Charles can be his warden because he knows what atrocities on human kind Anniston has committed and the extent of the damage. But, Charles has never met the man.
Charles is unemployed, attempting not to loss the family house, and dealing with his own atrocities himself. Charles and Anniston find absolution together through the game. A must read. -
I'm beginning to enjoy Mosley books more and more.
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واقعا داستان متفاوت و تامل برانگیزی بود. عالی بود
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No conocía a este autor y me he quedado enamorada de él. Qué libro maravilloso y magnífico. No sé cómo terminó en mi Biblioteca, pero ahora quiero leer más de él.
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Before this book I'd have told you I worshipped at the altar of Mosley, loved all things Mosley.
The story: Black man living in a large family home in the Hamptons, broke, unemployable, drinks too much with only two friends and pretty much no prospects is approached by a thin balding little white man who offers to pay him more than enough money to pay off his mortgage and keep him comfortable for a good long while--if he can live in the basement for a set amount of time. Well, not actually live, but be imprisoned, locked in a cage, with Blakey (the homeowner) acting as jailer.
With a premise like that, it should be interesting, but most of the real estate is taken up in conversations between Blakey and his prisoner, Aniston Bennett, and it's about as exciting as watching old men play chess. If this was the first Walter Mosley book I picked up, I'd never pick up another. Very cerebral, meaning of lifeish, what is good and what is evil, and all that without even a single epiphany.
I put it down to read
Spent: A Memoir. I put it down again to read
Can't We Talk about Something More Pleasant?. I should have left it down.
Bored. -
A very powerful book. Charles is not a likable character, he is actually quite awful, but he is so real that I couldn't help but feel for him. There is no murder to solve, but the tension is higher than many novels. Maybe because crime and human nature, are at the center of this book. It's one of those stories that will keep rattling in my head for a long time to come.
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Rich writing and complex characters. Flawless dialogue and descriptions. Only flaw I can see is character plausibility but it wasn’t distracting enough to take away from the joy of a fantastic read. I’ll be thinking about this character for a long time.
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(The following is less a review and more of an essay).
Which came first, civilization or inequality? At the risk of sounding like a pundit, I’d like humbly suggest that the conservative point of view is: civilization requires inequality. There needs to be a class system, a hierarchy which creates a scaffold on which civilization is maintained. And because this is intrinsically unfair, all kinds of (irrational) justifications are used to maintain these hierarchies, and the most pervasive of this is race.
It’s not a point of view I agree with, by the way, but it does bolster, for me, something I saw recently: “The system isn’t broken; it was built this way.” But who are the custodians of this system? It can’t be the idealists who rule from the top, and certainly can’t be the workers who slave at the bottom. Then who?
It’s the evil men who know this is how things works, and know that they must do bad things to good people to keep worse things from happening to everyone. However, the real problem is, these are human beings too, and unless they find sadistic glee in their work, they, too, will be overcome with existential angst.
Is there an out via self-punishment? That’s what we explore in The Man in My Basement. Can a man punish himself for the evil he must perpetrate? On the one hand, to do so he must become Christ-like. But how can someone who robs, rapes, and murders be even remotely Christ-like? And, as Camus points out in Sisyphus, once a person has accepted his punishment, it is no longer punishment—how can one willfully punish oneself without accepting it?
The only way, then, to truly punish oneself is submit to the very chaos that so-called civilization is supposed to protect us from. The Man in My Basement allows himself to be locked up, then goads his jailor for the purpose of giving up all control. And it works.
Except that the crime for which the man is punishing himself is not the robbery, rape, and murder of his fellow humans—no, his crime was the moment of compassion he displayed, which had the potential of destroying the systems that keep civilization erect. That moment of compassion, that succumbing to angst, was the real crime, which, if allowed to go unpunished, would have rendered all the other sacrifices pointless.
This is what I got out of reading Walter Mosley’s book. The Man in My Basement emancipates the main character not by freeing him from the history of slavery, but by freeing him from the purposelessness of his existence. By giving him a duty, as jailor, making him a willfull participant in the very civilization that required slavery in the first place, he allows him to accept his place, and by accepting it, he is no longer punished for his existence.
And I am still struggling with the irony of “making him a willful participant” -
Walter Mosley was one of the keynote authors at last week's NCIBA conference for independent book stores. I grabbed this book because I wanted to read something by him before the conference. Wow - what an amazing author! Although Mosley is best known as a creator of the Easy Rawlins mystery series, a story like The Man in My Basement really falls into the literary fiction category. We tend to judge mystery authors differently than other authors. Usually, we're looking for a good plot with lots of twists and believable characters. But we forgive our mystery authors if the writing style is lacking or even formulaic. Well, there is no need to forgive Mr. Mosley. His writing style is tight and descriptive, with each word carefully chosen and placed.
The title character of this book is Charles Blakey. At age 33, Charles has failed at everything in life. He is unemployed and blacklisted in the town because he was suspected of stealing money from the bank he worked at. He lives in his family home, but is at risk of losing it because he can't keep up with the payments. It seems like he has little hope left, when a white stranger, Anniston Bennet offers Blakey $50,000 if he can live in his basement for several weeks. Although Blakey is suspicious of this odd request, he is desperate for the money and accepts the offer. Bennet moves into Blakey's basement and Blakey assumes the strange role of warden as Bennet voluntarily imprisons himself in the basement. The book covers several complex themes of ancestry, crime, punishment, and ultimately redemption. Definitely a complicated book that will stay with me for awhile. -
What does an unmotivated, poor black man and a highly educated, mysterious white man have in common? At first glance, nothing at all, but as the story progresses it becomes clear that they were destined to meet and learn both empowering and weakening lessons from one another.
Charles Blakey was content to sleep walk through life; blaming his failures and misfortunes on anyone but himself. Anniston Bennet carried the burden of the failures of governments, the ultimate cost of power and wealth, and the evils of all humans; including his own. During their time together they both will learn the power of redemption, but will it save them or lead to their demise?
The Man in My Basement is a well written, thought provoking book. I don't know if it was the author's intention, but the strongest message seemed to be the idea that came during a conversation about a character in Moby Dick. Anniston told Charles about the cook and how he talked to the sharks. Charles offered that maybe he was simply talking to himself. That idea, repeated a few times, keeps you wondering if that is what the characters are doing in this book. Although they interact, they are really only talking themselves through their own issues and fears. -
My mother introduced me to the novels of Walter Mosley many years ago. The first book of his I read was "Gone Fishin'" which I really liked. The Man in My Basement is unlike any of the Mosley books I've read in the past. But if you like this author you should definitely read this one!
It's the story of a black man living in his family's historical home. He is unemployed and running out of money with no plan on how to provide for himself when a small white man appears on his porch offering to pay a lot of money for the use of the basement of the home.
This is a philosophical book, where the man in the basement and the owner of the home discuss the meaning of good and evil, of love and hate. Along the way the homeowner finds that he isn't really an invisible member of his community and that his actions have consequences.
It's a short book, a quick read, and worthwhile. -
What starts out as just a book about a down-and-out guy turns out into an intriguing exploration of morality and each of our role in world events. Years ago I read "Confessions of an Economic Hitman" which detailed the role of American Business men in the underworld of third world countries. Mosley develops his story through the actions of such a hitman in his character Bennett. Very disturbing and incredibly powerful book.
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A Black man, Blakely, an unemployed, layabout drunk 33 year-old failure has his entire life turned around one summer when a seemingly rich white man approaches him, offering upwards of $40,000 to hire his basement of his ancestral home. An intense thought provoking suspense filled psychological mystery thriller. 8 out of 12
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I certainly enjoyed this, but I'm not sure what to think, other than this story provokes a good deal of thought once it's all over. The premise is great, the execution is thorough and satisfying. I'm not a book club guy, but this would be a great book for discussion.
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First Walter Mosley that i've read and I found the story compelling and the characters intriguing. This one was hard to put down.
