![]() ![]() This book isn’t for me and it doesn’t need to be. As I read, I found myself feeling very far from the target audience, as if Beatty’s narrator was speaking to a black reader and I happened to be listening in. Some I’m familiar with and many were new to me. The Sellout is deeply rooted in a particular black community and culture and is full of references to such. This has both its supporters and detractors. In his efforts to bring Dickens back, our narrator gets his own slave and decides to reintroduce segregation. So crime-ridden an embarrassment is Dickens that the powers that be decide to literally remove it from the map and pretend it no longer exists. The United States of America) is a lifelong resident of Dickens, an agrarian ghetto of Los Angeles with a largely minority population. Our narrator, known by his neighbourhood nickname of Bonbon, of called The Sellout by others, or his last name Me (as in Me vs. I want to say it’s timely, given the recent and ongoing racial tensions in the USA, but unfortunately those tensions are not exactly new. The Sellout is satirical, uncomfortable, entertaining, eye-opening, and sometimes confusing. Once I heard a little more about his style, I was eager to read The Sellout and it happily did not disappoint. I wasn’t familiar with Paul Beatty’s work before this past year when he became the first American to win the Man Booker Prize. ![]() The Sellout – Paul Beatty (Picador, 2015) ![]()
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