Ragtime
Here’s a sample of the prose that I lifted directly from the text of the novel: “The pianist sat stiffly at the keyboard, his long dark hands with their pink nails seemingly with no effort producing the clusters of syncopating chords and the thumping octaves. This was a most robust composition, a vigorous music that roused the senses and never stood still a moment. The boy perceived it as light touching various places in space, accumulating in intricate patterns until the entire room was made to glow with its own being.”
Ragtime is dance music with a syncopated melody, usually for a piano. To syncopate means to accent a normally weak beat in a musical rhythm. The subplot of one of the major characters, who is a pianist, a Negro and poor, seems to have been given emphasis in the book. Earlier part of the narrative suggests that the rich are not aware of the state of the poor. However, this subplot is so important that it unexpectedly paved the way to the unexpected drama at the end. So, the ragtime being referred to in the title or the ragtime that is played by the pianist, who is one of the important characters in the novel, may actually be metaphoric.
Now, I understand every reader that lauds E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime and claims that the novel can make one feel what New York was like in 1906. The characters created by Doctorow in Ragtime have crossed paths with real people like Harry Houdini, Evelyn Nesbit, Freud, Emma Goldman, and J. P. Morgan, among others. The story is even made more memorable by the author’s (own take on) sensual and atmospheric writing. Hidden in the long but fluid paragraphs with sparse dialogues, in many instances, are character and/emotional development whose subtle to unexpected ramifications are likewise buried in later paragraphs.
This book is highly recommended.
{May 30, 2009}
Ragtime is dance music with a syncopated melody, usually for a piano. To syncopate means to accent a normally weak beat in a musical rhythm. The subplot of one of the major characters, who is a pianist, a Negro and poor, seems to have been given emphasis in the book. Earlier part of the narrative suggests that the rich are not aware of the state of the poor. However, this subplot is so important that it unexpectedly paved the way to the unexpected drama at the end. So, the ragtime being referred to in the title or the ragtime that is played by the pianist, who is one of the important characters in the novel, may actually be metaphoric.
Now, I understand every reader that lauds E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime and claims that the novel can make one feel what New York was like in 1906. The characters created by Doctorow in Ragtime have crossed paths with real people like Harry Houdini, Evelyn Nesbit, Freud, Emma Goldman, and J. P. Morgan, among others. The story is even made more memorable by the author’s (own take on) sensual and atmospheric writing. Hidden in the long but fluid paragraphs with sparse dialogues, in many instances, are character and/emotional development whose subtle to unexpected ramifications are likewise buried in later paragraphs.
This book is highly recommended.
{May 30, 2009}
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