Anglo psychiatric classifications call him "hoarder" accumulators. But for the vast majority of other human beings, especially those living with them, those things that they collect are garbage, so they are trash collectors or people who may save things, even if you realize the little use to that. The truth is that everyone has some of that, at least one drawer, one closet, one room or several of these, and sometimes apartments or houses that deal to store, whatever assume it is helpful, or we can recycle, or as Langley project's that had in mind to do something useful someday.
This is the "breeding ground" on which Doctorow's novel "Homer & Langley a novel " is made off. However that is based on two historical figures of Harlem in New York USA.
The loneliness at the stage of biological decline is like going blind, deaf and mute. However, if you are already blind, the adaptation of to the lack or weakness in the systems that put you in touch with the outside world will intensifies and be more efficient, and even if you are losing some of them that is not the existential catastrophe if not adaptation happens or if you lose them right away or without having a brother like Langley. The two brothers in Doctorow's novel are: Homer Collyer, the blind, as the Greek poet, and he is the narrator with eyeless vision of those two special lives. The other was Langley Collyer, imaginative, brilliant, compassionate, with great intelligence, impractical in their strategies to confront the system, where he was committed to make David against the Goliath Cyclops, arising in every period of their lives. These two people who seems to belong to the nineteenth century gentlemen, they were engage in an anti-establishment war, even before the great protest movements that characterized the second half of the twentieth century: young hippies, the Afro-American and women, sexual diversities and so on. So in this way and were still alive, authorities posthumous.
The accumulation compulsive or "hoardering" is the reason for the stocks of everything also Langley meticulous care of his blind brother, tons of newsprint, uniforms and military belongings, four or five television, a Ford "T" inside at one of the dining rooms, seven pianos, boxes, with and without objects, books, cockroaches, mice and rats, and cats to balance the mansion and its micro - ecosystem. Homer is the chronicler of both their lives.
The despair over the death of their parents (Spanish Flu), the brother who has been enlisted in the First World War, and is gassed with mustard vapors. Without any news about him , Homer and blind, makes this kick that obscure object of survival called resilience. Even when the news was received by the inhabitants of the mansion Collyer, which were Homer and the servants, who are like family, mentioned that Langley was lost in combat. That thee hope or intuition is very strong and plays the role of promoter of the denial, and that he. Because, Homer cannot accept his brother dead. Indeed, a few months Langley is back to home with a chronic cough and an anarchist ideology well planted.
The lives of two brothers, becomes a framework for observation, the history of the United States, in the first half of the twentieth century. It highlights the deep affection they both profess. By Homer, a filial respect that it is still critical, but with total confidence, towards that figure, not only is the older brother but also his guide existential.
Homer is writing the story of his brother, but in his mind he is also talking about himself a biography to a single person, his muse Jacqueline, of which only remembers the voice with Francophile accent, and the special time in his life, in which he was saved from being run over across from his house by crossing to "Central Park". Even though over the years, he doubts that she may exist, and the likelihood of a trap in his memory it is not ruled out. It is this kind of reflection on what may be the real reality, or the distortion that makes our brain of that the novel may well be inscribed on the newly developed genre of neuro novels.
Langley is who lead whatever action is needed, he is the one who read every day, all editions of newspapers published in New York. The love of both brothers is sublime between them, and also they are very interested in women although severe limitations may happen. So they were very active from the cabaret girls and nightclubs, women that help at home, hippies and some platonic loves, like the unforgettable from Homer to Elizabeth, a student of piano, which serves as guide in unsound cinemas in where Homer plays the piano. Is this the muse, who whispers into the ears and heart will inform him what kind of scenes and musical plays were possible to interpret. And finally, with Jacqueline, the Frenchwoman who heads the senile infatuation.
The brothers live on the Day of Victory of World War II, the expressions of opposition against Vietnam War and subsequent wars. In his contact with the guys from the decade of the sixties and seventies, there is an immediate acceptance and integration, given its marginality whiles his subversive anti-establishment status. The brothers come to realize from its labyrinth of paper and paperboard, of meanness, of his fellows from the neighborhood that is becoming Harlem.
This novel has a well-armed prose, poetic phrases laden with nostalgia, but without fuss or cry, rather with the acceptance of time. Doctorow's novel was inspired by two real people of the same name, but whose biographies are different in the time that they lived, and in the severe degree of isolation of the original two brothers. In the case of real Collyer, they were not very sociable. The other, the neighbors of the two royal brothers were the torturers, the morbid, those who wanted to take the property, even children who trained breaking the windows of the house in summer, until the fines and penalties for law enforcement authorities , firefighters, the mayor of the city.
The brothers were increasingly locking in confined spaces, with runners whose walls were magazines, newspapers, books and boxes without utility, which underpin the maze that finally caught them. The fear of humanity, which they live, filled them full of shock, so that gradually they were propping her confinement, and they never were able to see the outside live again.
On the Collyer brothers, Homer and Langley, it has been speculated and written in abundance. Franz Lidz, in his book about them and also on its four uncle "Ghostly Men: The Strange but True Story of the Collyer brothers, New York's Greatest Hoarders" begins with an overwhelming. All the arts is the same -- an attempt to fill an empty space "Which is a beautiful and euphemistic representation of something that is much more complex.
If one were to describe briefly the behavior of these people we could say, "Meet strange things, which others call trash, but for them that are symptoms and symbolism indicates that summarizes aspects from the utility to mysterious connections with the homesickness. These are simple beings collector's motley things with personal symbolism, some of which even can be called art.
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Homer & Langley: A Novel
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Reviews with images
Descent or Flowering?
Those of us who trained at Bellevue Hospital were filled with Bellevue lore, and the gynecologist who canoed to work in the East River and fathered the loony Collyer brothers was certainly part of it. Doctorow chooses Homer, blind like Homer of Chios of the Iliad, for his first person narrator, which lends authenticity to his telling of an essentially true story. The trans-generational time frame, ticking off historical events as the brothers experience them close at hand, naturally brings Forrest Gump to mind. But really, not much happens in this book, and by half-way through when Homer informs us that Langley has decided that a batch of gluey oatmeal will be their breakfast each day I had to wonder why I was reading it. The plot does pick up after that revelation, but Doctorow has only borrowed this plot in order to make more human and psychological hay. Nothing in this story implies that either Homer or Langley is mentally ill or even outstandingly different. Doctorow's Langley is certainly not the OCD poster boy that pop psychiatry has made him. What Doctorow makes him is a brother. Whether this story is a descent or a flowering of the Collyer line is a choice this author leaves to the reader throughout and right up to its penultimate ending. I've left other Doctorow novels half-read, but I enjoyed this short one immensely.
Top reviews from other countries
Imager
I would say it's one of Doctorow's best books. The descent of the two brothers unfolds ...
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 6, 2016
B. Preuschoff
Auf leisen Füßen zum mehrfachen Nachdenken...
Reviewed in Germany on November 21, 2012