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    Pym
    Pym
    Pym
    Audiobook11 hours

    Pym

    Written by Mat Johnson

    Narrated by JD Jackson

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Acclaimed novelist Mat Johnson is the winner of the prestigious Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. After being sacked, American literature professor Chris Jaynes discovers a slave manuscript that seemingly confirms the existence of an "island of pure and utter blackness" as described in Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. Soon Jaynes and a rag-tag crew embark on an epic adventure to discover the truth. "An acutely humorous, very original story ."-Kirkus Reviews, starred review
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateJun 24, 2011
    ISBN9781461809142
    Pym

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    Reviews for Pym

    4/5

    127 ratings11 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Mat Johnson's Pym is nothing less than an absolute masterpiece. It is easily among the top 5 books I have ever read in my life. Johnson continually shows a razor sharp wit in crafting his protagonist's consciousness -- at different moments, his observations had me heartily laughing out loud at his incisive or absurd insights, giggling at the silliness of the fantastical realm he finds himself in, and chuckling bittersweetly at the comically framed horrors that are sometimes described. A lot of the genius of this work inheres in Johnson's deep understanding of how absurdity can resonate profoundly with reality and his sensitivity to the poignancy of its actual presence in real life.

      If you like literary heavyweights who write compelling plots in sophisticated and original ways, try this book. If some of your favorite comedy (in any medium) is dramedy, try this book. If you are sensitive to the presence of race in American life, try this book. If you appreciate the absurd, try this book.
    • 5/5
      I have been waiting to get to this book since it was published! Now is the time! 'Pym' is the last book in the four book project that covers almost 200 years. I first had to read the inspiration of the other three books- Edgar Allan Poe's 'Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym' and then Jules Verne's 'Antarctic Mystery'. If I hadn't already read H.P. Lovecraft's 'At the Mountains of Madness', I would have read that before reading Mat Johnson's book. But I had already read the Lovecraft and loved it years ago. Reading all four was a PROJECT but a fun project. I love that Johnson mentions all of the books featured in this interesting bookish saga within his own book, not only Edgar Allan Poe's original mess, but the other two books as well, making my reading of all four books in this journey completely worth it for me. And Johnson's is the best by far! Really updating these others, giving a freshness to that mysterious Poe ending, not to mention making it a satire. I loved every page here and all the twists and turns. Much like Edgar Allan Poe's original featured Whiteness, whether a subconscious side affect of Poe being a supporter of slavery, Mat Johnson also has interesting things here to say about Whiteness. With a Black main character that sometimes can pass for white, he is trying to use books like Poe's to find why society hasn't moved past the sickness of Whiteness. Anything I say about this book won't do it justice. It's a gem! Pick it up! It's one of those things emanating greatness that I just knew I would love before delving into it and I wasn't wrong. I would fit this on a shelf in between 'Cat's Cradle' by Kurt Vonnegut and 'Parasites Like Us' by Adam Johnson. All three books have the same spirit.
    • 5/5
      I read about this book in some science fiction and fantasy round-up a few years ago -- and committed to it so hard that I bought and read The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket before reading this. As it turns out, Johnson doesn't assume you've already read this and so includes all the passages and summaries that you would really need to read Pym, but I do think having read both, I probably got a little more out of it. Because there are a LOT of echoes. A lot. Like, a lot. But a bunch of them backwards. And with SO MUCH RACE COMMENTARY. But if 300+ pages of race commentary and biting satire of a relatively unknown 180+ year old novel by Edgar Allan Poe doesn't sound like it would be a good time, then I don't know, maybe this book isn't for you? But it is also funny and insightful and irreverent and clever. Plus, there's that whole polar fiction thing going on, which earns it lots of extra points from me (plus the extreme satire of "self-reliant" libertarian right wing talk radio addicts). I was consistently impressed by this.
    • 4/5
      Some parts in the middle really seemed to drag, but overall I enjoyed the book a lot.
    • 3/5
      A very odd book. Quite an amazing riff on Edgar Allen Poe's Pym book. A weird book that fascinated me when I read it. Didn't have my ears tuned at that time to the racial overtones of the book. Johnson does an over the top job of meditating on and at the same time lampooning this book, nineteenth-century and twentiety century takes on race and racism, and literary criticism in the current century. In the end too talky and preachy, too pleased with itself (though blessedly with the humor). Just didn't come together for me. But certainly much more ambitious than your average fare. (Listened to audiobook.)
    • 4/5
      This novel takes a group of six African Americans to Antarctica at the behest of a professor who was recently denied tenure. He is trying to track down the real story of Edgar Allan Poe's only novel, the Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, with the help of the recently discovered diary of one of Pym's shipmates. In Antarctica they find large white neanderthal-like humanoids living in large, elaborate ice caves under the surface. They also find Pym who, inexplicably, is around 200 years old, and a landscape painter living in a bio-dome.

      The novel is a mash-up of a 19th Century adventure novel, a commentary on race (portrayed in many facets, but mostly starkly in black vs. the whitest of the white humanoid creatures), a comic buddy story, and an exploration of Poe's original work.

      It is all enjoyable and parts, like the depiction of the 200 year old Pym who believes all the African Americans are slaves and the Antarctic creatures are gods, is particularly humorous and well depicted. But most of the central characters are really caricatures and much of the plot development feels slightly haphazard. Nonetheless, there are not many other books like this one.
    • 3/5
      I am glad this novel brought my attention to the absolute craziness that is Poe's Pym. I have not read it, but the highlight reel presented in this book further convinces me that Poe is not a writer American culture should celebrate.More specifically to this novel, I found it interesting and enjoyable, but not particularly special. The commentary on academia will definitely entertain anyone working in that field- the main character's frustrations will probably feel very familiar. The sci-fi turn of the second half of the book is pretty funny, and would appeal to genre enthusiasts, but the two parts just don't totally hang together as a cohesive whole. I feel like the satire of the realist half disappears when things get weird and the stylistic shift was a little too much. Fun read, accurate commentary on the academy and race relations, but not quite to my tastes as far as novel construction goes.
    • 3/5
      I debated adding a shelf labelled "Racism" because that is one of the recurring themes of this fascinating novel, one of three "sequels" to Poe's problematic "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym." Johnson uses the frame of Poe's novel to structure his consideration of whiteness, racism and slavery. I found it thoughtful, relevant and insightful.
    • 4/5
      A very good book, both funny and intelligent. The academic/social satire of the first half or so was my favorite part, but I enjoyed the thoughtful, funny and erudite scheme of the second half as well. Chris Jaynes and Garth Frierson were excellent characters.
    • 4/5
      There's a lot of hugely interesting stuff going on in this book. Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym is a truly weird story, and well worth revisiting with a contemporary eye. Whiteness, blackness, and race in general do play a bizarre, symbolically-weighted role in that original text (far more opaquely than one normally sees in literature of the day), and I was excited to see a contemporary writer tackle this weirdness. Johnson's book does tackle all this stuff head on, and the story he tells is entertaining and involving. Most of the time, however, I found myself wishing he had pushed a little harder -- sometimes I felt like he had taken the easy way out, reading Poe's text in a simpler, more straightforward way than it deserved, and consequently making his own narrative a little reductive. For just one example, when the characters find the inexplicably still living Arthur Gordon Pym, he turns out to be a one-dimensional racist asshole. While there's no question that the original character was racist by our standards, he had more going on than just that.In general, the satire didn't quite work for me. It was mostly broad and gentle, with few fresh or surprising insights. There was a lot of stuff I could tell was supposed to be funny, but few real laughs. All in all, the book was fun and interesting, but never quite lived up to its brilliant premise.
    • 5/5
      Chris Jaynes, the narrator of this strange novel, has just been denied tenure at the college where he has for some years been a Professor of American Literature, “the only black male professor on campus.” One cause of his dismissal is his refusal to participate in the college’s Diversity Committee which, without him, is not diverse.Jaynes is engaged in what he sees as essential research into the roots of American racism in early American literature. A key text, he believes, is Edgar Allan Poe’s only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. Pym’s adventure begins when he stows away on a whaling ship. The ship capsizes in a storm, and Pym is one of only four survivors. Eventually he ends up on an island inhabited solely by blacks, so black that even their teeth are black. For Jaynes, this is a lost tribe of Africans, though clearly a horror to Pym (and Poe).On the final page of Poe’s novel, Pym and the only other remaining survivor come face to face with a huge humanoid figure, “and the hue of the skin of the figure was of the perfect whiteness of the snow.” That’s it—end of story; first black blacks, then a white monster.Jaynes, a rare book collector, comes across a manuscript which proves to his satisfaction that Poe’s narrative is in fact a true story. He arranges an expedition to Antarctica to find the island of blacks and by doing so, make his scholarly reputation.In the world of this novel Obama’s presidency is mentioned, but in this world there are terrorist attacks and riots in all of the major cities, and since the “Dayton Dirty Water Disaster” people drink only pure bottled water. Jaynes enlists for this expedition a cousin who sees a fortune to be made by forming a corporation to harvest glacial ice. Included in the expedition are Jaynes’ best buddy, a fat bus driver, two black lawyers (to protect the corporate interests), and two supposed water treatment engineers.The expedition does discover that Poe’s narrative is true; in fact, they find Arthur Gordon Pym still alive, living with the race of eight-foot tall white monsters in an under-ice beehive-like city. Pym has apparently been kept alive for two hundred years by consuming a repulsive alcoholic beverage brewed by the “albino monkeys.”Enslaved by the monsters, Jaynes and his buddy are the only ones to get away alive, but how and to face what—civilization having apparently ceased to exist—I leave the reader to discover. In sum, this book is an outrageous, well-written fantasy adventure and a hilarious satire on racism. The book’s ending leaves it open to a sequel, and should Pym 2 come along in a year or two, I will be first in line to check it out.