Here’s my review of Walter Mosley’s The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey:
This review originally appeared in the November 2010 issue of Los Angeles magazine.
The new novel from L.A. native Walter Mosley takes place in South-Central, where a confused and neglected nonagenarian named Ptolemy Grey sleeps under a table in his junk-filled apartment. After a miracle drug restores his mind (but hastens his death), Grey spends his final days meting out revenge for bygone injustices. The bluesy prose is what we’ve come to expect from the author of the 11-book Easy Rawlins series. That Mosley sets this powerful tale about historical forgetfulness in L.A. makes perfect sense.//W.W.
Photo by David Burnett
And here’s a “Spot On” interview I did with the PEN American Lifetime Achievement Award winner:
This “Spot On” item originally appeared in the November 2010 issue of Los Angeles magazine.
Spot On
Walter Mosley: The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey is informed by the L.A.-born writer’s experience of caring for his mother, who suffered from dementia before her death in 2009. “It’s not a particular thing she said or did. It’s more the frustration,” says Mosley. “Trying to explain to somebody what’s going on, or you’re pushing the tele-phone but you want to change the tele-vision. She understood that she didn’t understand. It was very complex. Hopefully I got that complexity into the novel.”
Download a pdf of this review & “Spot On”: Review.2010.11.PtolemyGrey
