A man wakes to find himself transformed. He looks around, seeking his bearings as he tries to come to terms with what has happened to him overnight, perhaps after uneasy dreams. He looks at his hand, which he knows like. well, like the back of his hand. It is .... unfamiliar, the hand of another. He seeks out his reflection. The man who looks back at him is a stranger.
These are the opening beats of Mohsin Hamid's latest novel, The Last White Man: "One morning Anders, a white man, woke up to find he had turned a deep and undeniable brown." These are also the opening beats-albeit about a black man who wakes up white-of A. Igoni Barrett's Blackass (2015), the epigraph of which cites Kafka's "The Metamorphosis" to make the debt explicit. It's also the premise of a chapter of Matt Ruff's Lovecraft Country (2016) about a black woman who wakes up white, which, per its title, "Jekyll in Hyde Park," alludes to Robert Louis Stevenson's scene from 1886: "The hand of Henry Jekyll ... large, firm, white, and comely" appears the yellow light of a mid-London morning, lying half shut on the bed-clothes ... lean, corded, knuckly, of a dusky pallor and thickly shaded with a swart growth of hair." Perhaps Hamid is hoping to make good on a saying from his first novel, Moth Smoke (2000): "Tales with unoriginal beginnings are those most likely later to surprise." "in Like the hero of Herman Raucher's novelization of Watermelon Man (1970), Anders's first impulse is to mistake himself for a dark-skinned home intruder.
Denne historien er fra September 2022-utgaven av The Atlantic.
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Denne historien er fra September 2022-utgaven av The Atlantic.
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The Dark Origins of Impressionism
How the violence and deprivation of war inspired light-filled masterpieces
The Magic Mountain Saved My Life
When I was young and adrift, Thomas Manns novel gave me a sense of purpose. Today, its vision is startlingly relevant.
The Weirdest Hit in History
How Handel's Messiah became Western music's first classic
Culture Critics
Nick Cave Wants to Be Good \"I was just a nasty little guy.\"
ONE FOR THE ROAD
What I ate growing up with the Grateful Dead
Teaching Lucy
She was a superstar of American education. Then she was blamed for the country's literacy crisis. Can Lucy Calkins reclaim her good name?
A BOXER ON DEATH ROW
Iwao Hakamada spent an unprecedented five decades awaiting execution. Each day he woke up unsure whether it would be his last.
HOW THE IVY LEAGUE BROKE AMERICA
THE MERITOCRACY ISN'T WORKING. WE NEED SOMETHING NEW.
Against Type
How Jimmy O Yang became a main character
DISPATCHES
HOW TO BUILD A PALESTINIAN STATE There's still a way.