An obliquely funny and playful detective story. Emmett Till seems to return from the dead to punish the offspring of those who lynched him. The book iAn obliquely funny and playful detective story. Emmett Till seems to return from the dead to punish the offspring of those who lynched him. The book is especially rich if you've read Philip Dray's superb By The Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America, but such background reading is by no means necessary. I suspect, however, that this book served as source material for author Everett. Elegantly plotted. Tonally, too, it's a marvel of consistency, especially Everett's mastery of a colorful southern vernacular. The overall mystery — a race war with supernatural implications — is tremendous fun. My favorite parts may be when the white "peckerwoods" are shown in the extremity of their racist ignorance. Author Everett makes fun of our whitest fears. Superb....more
Los Angeles, 1953. [Sound of harbor tug.] Marlowe meets a down and outer, has a hunch and befriends him, in a manner of speaking. The The Long Goodbye
Los Angeles, 1953. [Sound of harbor tug.] Marlowe meets a down and outer, has a hunch and befriends him, in a manner of speaking. The down and outer is the ex-husband of a debauched California heiress who turns up dead. Marlow drives fleeing husband to Tijuana etc. — just a glimpse of the opening.
It wasn’t made into a movie until 1973, with Elliot Gould, nevertheless I can hear Humphrey Bogart’s Marlowe voice from The Big Sleep as I read. Moreover I envision his various facial expressions and tics. Cinema of the mind.
Fun, dated, hokey, hard boiled language, but not too much of it. Extremely wry humor, very compact. It’s a nice break from the Pages from the Goncourt Journals.
Chandler shifts the moral high ground from one character to another and back again. This happens often with the police. So who is behind the eightball, who has the upper hand? Hardly a headline, I know.
It’s template genre stuff, don’t get me wrong. It’s formulaic, but it’s deftly done. Did you know that Toni Morrison was a great fan of detective stories? Read them by the score on her Kindle.
The discussion of jail In chapters 6 through 9 reminds me of Jean Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers — minus the homosex. Chandler’s one of the many writers who wouldn’t have existed if Ernest Hemingway had not a generation before shown them the way.
“A lovely dish and no mistake.” (p. 564) This is just one of those unfortunate dated metaphors for a beautiful woman. Is she meant to be consumed? Obliterated. And then what? So not all of the dated language is fun, some makes me cringe.
There’s too much dialogue. Dialogue is Chandler‘s Get Out of Jail Free card. As long as it’s cute he can say anything. Almost all the plot is spoken. All the narrator has to do is acerbicly dish out morsels of plot and he feels that’s enough. It isnt....more
How do the police operate in Japan? This police procedural from author Hideo Yokoyama reads much differently than one would written by, say, Richard PHow do the police operate in Japan? This police procedural from author Hideo Yokoyama reads much differently than one would written by, say, Richard Price or Elmore Leonard. The usual human failings are on full display—incompetence, careerism, ambition, revenge, etc—but they are played out in a setting alien to the Western reader. That's what made this novel so very interesting to me. For we do not know how the specific cultural idiosyncrasies of Japan will impinge upon the story's development.
Anyone who's suffered the petty humiliations of office politics will feel this book deep in their vitals. Now add to that loathsome banality the following enticements: (1) the setting in a Japanese prefectural police HQ where mistakes covered up 14 years ago in a famous kidnapping of a 7-year-old girl are only now coming to light; (2) an arrogant press corps who wants the head of the HQ's media director on a pike for abstruse reasons of journalistic disclosure; and (3) the media director himself, one Mikami, recently exiled from the investigative side—at heart he's really a detective—whose teenage daughter ran away three months ago leaving his wife distraught—and we have the novel's basic propulsive means.
Mikami has many questions and no one is providing answers so he must work inductively. Slowly, painstakingly, he pieces the scandal together. The plotting is exquisite. The reader moves through the logical progression of his thoughts, reservations, doubts and discoveries. For 566 pages his is the sole point of view. I admire how Mikami queries facial expressions and body language, someone's absence or abrupt appearance, an overheard word or phrase. Each clue is puzzled over it until he has a logical option or two or nine. Then he must run around eliminating false leads. All the while the writing is flat and unadorned. This isn't literary fiction. It's a conventional if captivating thriller depicting police culture in Japan and it's dysfunctional relationship with the press. Nothing gets in the way of the storytelling. In that sense, the tale has a certain purity. One is reminded of Georges Simenon and Leonardo Sciascia at their best.
In the end the book is about storytelling. It's about who controls the narrative, how it's presented to the public through the Fourth Estate, and who can or can't be trusted with the facts. The police tell a deliberately false narrative to protect themselves. Director Mikami is caught between their closed ranks and the overweening arrogance of the media. In Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep Philip Marlowe controls the narrative that will be presented to the newspapers. At several points it becomes necessary to determine precisely what the public narrative will be. Consulted by the police, Marlowe decides what details are to be included, which left out, which modified. Like Mikami he is a man with his own moral code and he works outside the system; true, technically Mikami's part of the HQ administrative team, but this allegiance has little meaning as he plays the lone wolf hunting down the truth. Moreover, Mikami does not have the good fortune of working in media-comatose 1930s San Francisco. This is modern Japan where the technical capacity for storytelling long ago outstripped available content. Thus the shrill, almost rabid manner of the journalists. The journalists here are pissed off, loudmouthed, insulting and self-righteousness in the extreme. That is the procedural level on which the book functions. There is not a lot of cloak and dagger, nor much cutting up of corpses, blood-spatter analysis, long stakeouts, prisoner confessions, deathbed clues or romance. It's mostly about office politics and the relationship between the press and the police surrounding the blown kidnapping case. Moreover, it has a wonderful final twist. Enough for now. Do read it....more
Leonardo Sciascia writes rereadable thrillers, loaded with action and existential angst. There is no one quite like him. In Equal Danger Detective RogLeonardo Sciascia writes rereadable thrillers, loaded with action and existential angst. There is no one quite like him. In Equal Danger Detective Rogas is put on a case meant to solve the serial killings of a number of judges and district attorneys. Rogas very methodically tracks down his man. It's a simple operation but with its own peculiar logic. He stakes out the man's house, but his plainclothesmen promptly "lose" the suspect. Rogas speculates that his man, Cres, simply walked away from the house without any knowledge of the stakeout. In other words, Rogas has been countermanded by higher ups who for political reasons wish to pin the crimes on others.
When a fifth man is killed, another DA, Rogas's boss takes him off of the case entirely and assigns him to the Political Section. It is after all 1971 in a state very much like Italy. This is a time of dime-a-dozen revolutionaries, the Red Brigades (Brigate Rosse) terrorist faction most famous for the assassination of former Christian Democrat Prime Minister Aldo Moro, etc.
Detective Rogas is told by his new boss in the Political Section to be somewhere for certain undeclared purposes. He realizes he's been double-crossed when he walks right into a cosy evening gathering of the same revolutionaries he has been told to investigate in the Political Section and their friends, various high-level government ministers. Thus we see the obstacles Rogas is facing. They are systemic. How can one arm of the government be investigating the very people who are friends and acquaintances of high-level ministers? Meanwhile Cres is at large and the murders go on. This is very Sciascia. To take one police problem and to study it until a far larger problem is exposed. The writing is hyper compressed and the story tics by in 119 pages.
There's an almost Nabokovian high style that Sciascia employs that I've never come across in his work before. (I don't think this is a peculiarity of the translation, it's too consistent to be so, though I yield to native Italian speakers on the matter.) Sciascia seems to me a writer of tremendous tonal range, and here he is applying these skills to what on the surface appears to be a rather formulaic detective yarn. It isn't, of course.
My favorite passage comes in the last third of the book. Detective Rogas decides to visit the head of the State Supreme Court, President Riches, whom he believes is or will soon be a target of Cres. Sitting before Riches he expounds upon his theory of Cres's revenge. Cres, Rogas believes, was the victim of judicial error. He was convicted and served five years for an attempted murder of his wife that was staged by her. President Riches will simply not hear it. What follows is his fascinating disquisition on the infallibility of the judiciary. Citing Voltaire's essay "Treatise on Tolerance: On the Occasion of the Death of Jean Calas," President Riches comes up with an argument that must be read (and reread) to be believed. His model is the Catholic Church's doctrine of papal infallibility!
An argument could be made that Javier Marias was a brilliant writer. One example, most authors can’t write about sex. Martin Amis has given this matteAn argument could be made that Javier Marias was a brilliant writer. One example, most authors can’t write about sex. Martin Amis has given this matter some thought. “Carnal bliss,” he says, “is more or less impossible to evoke. . . Erotic prose is either pallidly general or unviewably specialized.” *
Moreover, most fiction usually stops for sex and resumes afterward, interrupting the flow of the story. But Javier Marias can carry the narrative forward during sex — not that there’s much of it. But somehow he makes the intimacy integral to the tale, not extraneous, and not off-putting.
The recent death of the author at 70 has brought me back to this novel, which I previously called a “bloated whale.” I may have overdosed on his idiosyncratic style by the time I got to this last volume of his 1,200+ page post-Cold War spy trilogy.
It’s a spy novel, yes, but not in the Ian Fleming sense; Fleming wrote actioners. YFT Vol. 3, by contrast, is a highly readable intellectual thriller. It’s like Philip Roth‘s American Pastoral in a ruminative sense. It considers many matters and reconsiders them in light of new evidence or conclusions. It’s modernist. A major theme is how violence irredeemably changes us.
Jaime has left his estranged wife in Madrid, who has become involved with another man, to go to work for London’s spy services. He is an interpreter of people. He is paid well to read people, to give the agency a sense of their weaknesses. Jaime’s mentor in Oxford, Wheeler, explains the need for such specialists.
“According to Wheeler, there were very few people with our curse or gift, and we were getting fewer and fewer, and he had lived long enough to notice this unequivocally. 'There are hardly any such people left, Jacobo,’ he had told me. 'There were never many, very few in fact, which is why the group was always so small and so scattered. But nowadays there's a real dearth. The times have made people insipid, finicky, prudish. No one wants to see anything of what there is to see, they don't even dare to look, still less take the risk of making a wager; being forewarned, foreseeing, judging, or, heaven forbid, prejudging, that's a capital offence. No one dares any more to say or to acknowledge that they see what they see, what is quite simply there, perhaps unspoken or almost unsaid, but nevertheless there. No one wants to know; and the idea of knowing something beforehand, well, it simply fills people with horror, with a kind of biographical, moral horror.” (p. 439)
Naturally, Jamie’s job accords beautifully with what Marias does as a novelist.
Western twentieth century history, especially that of British spying — MI5, MI6, Cold War espionage, black propaganda, assets working abroad, the turncoats Philby, Maclean, etc. wartime high jinks, peacetime coercive ops, etc. — is used as background. Here’s an interesting quote that serves as a somewhat reductive description of the author’s narrative approach.
“I wasn't going to allow him to continue wandering and digressing, not on a night prolonged at his insistence; nor was I prepared to allow him to drift from an important matter to a secondary one and from there to a parenthesis, and from a parenthesis to some interpolated fact, and, as occasionally happened, never to return from his endless bifurcations, for when he started doing that, there almost always came a point when his detours ran out of road and there was only brush or sand or marsh ahead.” (p. 22)
Actually Marias never runs out of story; the book is remarkably sustained. Back in Madrid briefly Jamie’s friend, a matador — who provides him with a pistol to put a scare into his estranged wife’s new man — is coolness itself with the beautiful Old World manners which come across even in his translated speech.
“'The first thing to remember, Jacobo, is never put your finger on the trigger until you know you're going to shoot. Always keep it resting on the guard, OK? Even if the pistol isn't cocked. Even if it's not loaded.’
“He used what was to me an unfamiliar, seemingly old-fashioned word for 'guard,’ ‘guardamonte,' but then Miquelin was himself in the process of becoming old-fashioned too, a relic, like his generosity. I didn't need to ask any questions, though, because he showed me what to do and I could see where he placed his forefinger. Then he handed the pistol to me, so that I could do the same, or copy him. I had forgotten what a heavy thing a pistol is; in the movies, they hold them as if they were as light as daggers. It takes an effort to lift one, and still more of an effort to hold it steady enough to aim.
“And then the Maestro taught me how to use it.” (p. 344)
If I have a criticism it’s that Jaime’s interiority can irritate at times; he’s a deep thinker who never seems to pass up an equivocation. His second guessing at just the moment he kidnaps his wife’s boyfriend is one particularly annoying example.
Be advised, Marias is not light reading; this is not a book to take on a flight or to the beach. The sentences are long and often Proustian. I was far too tough on Vol. 2, which I discuss elsewhere. But If you want to know more about the trilogy’s plot, that’s the review to read.
I am beginning to see why Anita Brookner and so many others--the introduction here is by Larry McMurtry--love Georges Simenon so much. He is an exemplI am beginning to see why Anita Brookner and so many others--the introduction here is by Larry McMurtry--love Georges Simenon so much. He is an exemplar of the spare style. This comes across quite well in translation since much of what he writes about is concrete: acts and things, showing versus telling. Though Simenon does have his philosophical flights, they are usually brief. Sartre he isn't, thank goodness. The storyline is simple: a Parisian businessman, fed up with life, drops out of sight, vanishes. The adventure he then has marks him in a way not entirely expected. The following is a cliché said about certain writers but here it is also true. One feels that Simenon does not waste a single word. Everything works harmoniously. He upends expectations, surprises and excites. He entertains. Apparently, he would write about six or seven such books per year. In a bad year only two or three. ; )...more
Second reading. Frank Friedmaier is hell-bent on destruction. Son and chief procurer of the local brothelkeeper, his mother, Frank is nineteen years oSecond reading. Frank Friedmaier is hell-bent on destruction. Son and chief procurer of the local brothelkeeper, his mother, Frank is nineteen years old and a sociopath of the first order. This is collaborationist Vichy France. The men Frank admires the most are black marketeers, thieves, and murderers, men who brag about snuffing women during sex. Frank starts his descent by killing a fat policeman of the occupying army who shows his avid courtesies to the local whores. But murdering the Eunuch is just practice, a preliminary, and Frank’s way of arming himself with a fine automatic. Next he murders perhaps what we can call his true mother, his old wet nurse, who lives outside of town with her watchmaker brother. Frank’s gripe, though he could hardly say so, is his lack of a father. Frank wants to be a man. His crimes are failed attempts to initiate himself into manhood. Frank desperately needs guidance. That’s why he becomes obsessed with the closest person who might help him, his next door neighbor, Gerhard Holst. Frank is fascinated by Holst. When he finally condescends to approach Holst’s daughter, Sissy--Frank, sadly, is her first love--it is only to question her at length about her father. What did he do before the war? and so on. Later, when Sissy touches Frank’s heart, you know she is doomed. You wait anxiously for her despoliation which, when it comes, is horrendous, the act of a monster. This tale of brute thuggery and homocide in the wartime demimonde is a kind of a counter quest narrative. The anti-hero, Frank, must challenge himself to prove he is a man. What he does to everyone around him, but ultimately to himself, he thinks of as his initiation. His fatherlessness, his isolation among women, appalls him. The denouement, when the occupying authorities finally catch up with him, is surprising in its brevity and power. I found myself exclaiming aloud, something I never do. This is a wonderful novel. It's language is very flat, compressed, and sinuous. I’m glad I reread it. Second only to The Strangers in the House, it is my favorite Simenon. Effusively recommended. PS Kudos to NYRB Classics for winnowing this one from Simenon's huge corpus.
First reading This is wonderful. It's the first Simenon I ever read and I found it vivid, engaging and moving. Dirty Snow is my second favorite Simenon, outranked only by The Strangers In The House....more
"Open Doors" Leonardo Sciascia is considered--alongside Luigi Pirandello and Giovanni Verga--to be one of Sicily's great writers. Open Doors is rich, i"Open Doors" Leonardo Sciascia is considered--alongside Luigi Pirandello and Giovanni Verga--to be one of Sicily's great writers. Open Doors is rich, intellectually dense story, not an easy read but a rewarding and pleasurable one. The story is set in Palermo Italy during the fascist dictatorship of Benito Mussolini (in power 1922-1943) where it is the task of a judge of the criminal court to decide whether or not to support the death penalty in the case of a man who has murdered three people. There is no question about the man's guilt. The reader is taken through the thought process of the judge as he considers the matter. There is plenty of action, though it's mostly in the form of flashbacks relating to the case at trial. Only 72 pages long, I found the novelette immensely intriguing for two reasons.
First, the historical context. The year is 1936. Mussolini has been popular in Italy for ten years, but now his popularity is starting to wane. Public enthusiasm is fading. The Spanish Civil War has just started. In Russia, Stalin's appalling show trials are underway. And not even the most deluded can now doubt that the Nazi military machine is preparing for war. Add to that the fact that we're in the magical city of Palermo where it is gentle golden November. The three murder victims include a prominent fascist lawyer; for this reason the whole trial is gamed by the fascists to gain public sympathy. In the face of this the judge must decide what to do, knowing that a judgement of life in prison will end his career and perhaps his life. The second reason I liked the book was because it does what all good fiction must do: it takes the reader to another world, which, though perhaps understood historically, is completely unknown. In fact, the first ten or fifteen pages are rich with historic detail.
Unless you're Sicilian you're unlikely to know who Giacomo Matteotti was and what the series of events were that led to his assassination. So minimal Googling is necessary. But undertake this very light research and the book opens up wonderfully.
"Death and the Knight" I found the writing in the early going very dense. There are the deputy's reflections upon the expensive Dürer hanging on his office wall, "The Knight, Death, and the Devil." This is significant for the deputy is gravely ill and in great pain. It's the following exchange with his chief however that struck me as particularly opaque. They are discussing the murder of Sandoz, a lawyer, the previous evening. Sciascia wants this exchange to dazzle but it just comes across as cryptic. One wonders if it wasn't something he undertook to get the book started, something that might have been edited later had he possessed the time. Scasicia himself died the year after publication of the novella. But all this is impossible to know without the help of a biographer. Sciascia seems not without remorse for the way he has proceeded, if we can read anything into the deputy's thoughts late in the story: "He felt entangled in one of those detective stories where the author, without warning, applies and misapplies toward the reader a meretricious duplicity that never even manages to be clever." This is a perfect description of the opening exchange. But then the ship rights itself. Once Sciascia's tale is properly under weigh it becomes downright gripping. The first sign of this regained equilibrium is the dialogue between Senora De Matis and the deputy, which holds the reader, soothes his discontent at the rough preliminaries, and promises future rewards. The book is not a police procedural. It will not satisfy the reader who wishes to be immersed in forensic detail. In fact, the investigation serves merely as a loose framework from which the deputy's thoughts skew from lucidity to delirium and back again. The objective here is character, not plot.
"A Straightforward Tale" A retired German diplomat returns to Italy where he still keeps a house. When he finds something unexpected in his attic he immediately calls the police. When the Brigadier arrives at the house the next morning it seems long shut up. There is no answer at the door. All the windows are shuttered but one through which a man may be glimpsed slumped over a table. In Italy the police are independent of the carabiniere; it is the latter who now take an interest in the case. The mutual enmity between the two law-enforcement branches reaches an intensity that is almost comic. Joseph Farrell's Afterword says this about the story: "...If it does not have the multilayered richness of the other stories [in this collection] it is a masterly exercise in narrative. Indeed, it is as expertly plotted as any work of Sciascia's. On this occasion there is no temptation to go beyond the convential bounds of the novel into territory more usually assigned to the essay. The land is Sicily, the characters are Sicilian, and the villains are, although the word is never used, the modern mafia of drug dealers."
"1912 + 1" Here is another winner with perhaps a bit too much historical context early on for non-Italians. So just google the subjects "Gabrielle D'Annunzio" and the "Gentiloni Pact." After doing so it's smooth sailing all the way with Sciascia's text. There is a fine essay at the end of the book by Joseph Farrell who sums up 1912 + 1 as follows: "The work. . . is of the same type [as Sciascia's Moro Affair]. In it Sciascia recounts the known facts of a celebrated murder case in the decadent high society of pre-WW I Italy, when King Umberto was monarch of the nation and Gabriele D'Annunzio monarch of letters. D'Annunzio worshipped the Nietzschean superman, that ambiguous figure who, in his dealings with other men--or women--viewed himself as exempt from the laws of all conventional morality. . . . [D'Annunzio's novels] are impregnated with a Swinburnean sensuality, and Sciascia, in addition to exposing what to him seemed an evident injustice in the case in question, explored the links between the D'Annunzian culture of the time and the actual conduct of men and women. It was D'Annunzio, with his superstitious refusal to use the number 13 even in reference to the year, who provided Sciascia with a title. . . . The central theme--of justice frustrated--recurs in many of Sciascia's works."
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