Slumberland
By Paul Beatty

It's official. Berlin is hip.
It is not just that this year is the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, that symbol of the Cold War. It is also the fact that the city has been steadily making its way into the cultural zeitgeist.
The New York Times picked it as one of the 44 places to visit this year, it was one of the key settings in the critically acclaimed 2008 Broadway musical Passing Strange, and here it plays a central role in the story of a man on a quest while navigating the cultural burdens of being black.
Ferguson Sowell, or DJ Darky, has come up with the perfect beat. After listening to it, one of his mates declares that “anything I have heard on pop radio in the last five years feels like a violation of my civil rights”.
All he needs now is the kiss of approval from a credible and influential source. This leads him to seek out the mysterious Schwa, a little-known avant- garde jazz musician, so nicknamed because “his sound, like the indeterminate vowel, is unstressed, upside-down and backward”.
The only clue to his whereabouts is a videotape of a man having sex with a chicken featuring the elusive one’s music, mailed to DJ Darky from a German address. Which is how the DJ ends up at the Slumberland bar in Berlin as a jukebox sommelier.
More than just a setting, the city is a character. And the pivotal moment of the fall of the Wall is beautifully described from an outsider’s point of view.
The themes of identity and the weight of history culminate in the erecting of a new Berlin Wall, a wall of sound that is “inspiration, encouragement, and hope” heard from the western side, and a “wailing wall” when heard from the east.
Beatty’s razzle-dazzle prose-poetry is energetic and rhythmic, and it approximates a free-form jazz piece transcribed to the page. The writing can be dense with obscure name-dropping and slang but just hang on for the ride. It's an exhilarating one.

If you like this, read: High Fidelity by Nick Hornby. A funny novel about heartbreak, growing up and music – listening to it, arguing about it and obsessing about it.
(ST)