Yesterday I was looking for you by John Edgar Wideman

I was looking for you yesterday
by John Edgar Wideman

Yesterday I Was Looking for You is a saga in which characters appear and disappear, traversing the skin and blood of a black community between the years of the Depression and the return from Vietnam. A community abandoned to its music, to the music that John Edgar Wideman reproduces with a blues rhythm in his prose. Yesterday I Was Looking for You was awarded the PEN/Faulkner Prize for fiction in 1983.

After seven years away for having committed a murder, Albert Wilkes returns to Homewood, a ghetto inhabited almost exclusively by blacks, whose personality, with the passage of time, is fading away. From this decadence – which consists above all in a progressive dissolution of the traits and identity of the neighborhood – Wilkes and his friend John French escape, albeit briefly; one an exceptional pianist and the other, quite a character. Over time, Carl, French’s son, together with his friend Tate – an albino black man who borders on the supernatural – and their girlfriend, Lucy, will be the ones who will try to reestablish the traditions of Homewood and recover the diffuse heritage of the previous generation.

«In this hypnotic and deeply lyrical novel, Mr. Wideman returns once again to the ghetto where he grew up and transforms it into a magical place filled with poetry and pathos.» Alan Cheuse, New York Times

Edgar Wideman Born in 1941 in Washington, D.C., he is a novelist and essayist who has also written short stories and memoirs. Professor Emeritus at Brown University, he is one of three novelists who have twice received the PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction. His extensive work includes the short story collection Damballah and the novel Hiding Place, both with the same characters that populate Yesterday I Was Looking For You, and which together with the latter constitute the so-called Homewood Trilogy. Other notable titles are the novels Philadelphia Fire (1990), Two Cities (1998) and Fanon (2008).