Random Blither - McBain, Simenon,Walser, Esser and the horror of "Have Your Say"

So I gave up on Ed McBain. Partly it was the film star description thing. Partly I thought I'd be better off watching "The Wire". Partly it was an example of false economy - I bought an edition with three novels in which was then too big to fit in my pocket when I went out. As a result I switched to reading more Simenon last week - "The Blue Room," which while not as good as "Dirty Snow" was still pretty remarkable.

I've been wondering how to find out what to read next by him (I'm less interested in the Maigret side of things, though this could be because I was made to read a short story for EngLit "O" level many many years ago) and in the process stumbled across an essay about him by Paul Theroux, which has endeared the man to me even more. Anyway, I finished "The Blue room" and started on "Jakob Von Gunten" by Robert Walser, which a friend gave me 13 years ago but which I've never got round to reading (very poor...). It's commonly called "Institute Benjamenta" now, which confused me enough to ask someone to buy it for my birthday. Have only read Walser's short fiction in the past and not all that much of that. But it's great, even if, after Simenon et al, I'm reading it as a murder mystery without a murder. In between finishing "The Blue Room" on the train, I saw a band called Esser performing on a freezing cold bandstand on Sunday. I liked them enough to Google them, hence the video above. Last but not least, my worthy constituent Jimmy Cash sent me a link to spEak You’re bRanes, a website devoted to ripping the piss out of idiotic, xenophobic and dumb posts on the BBC's "Have Your Say" forums. Very funny.

James Ellroy - Drugs, Corruption, Death, Mutilation, Perversion & All That Jazz

So I take it all back about James Ellroy. Finished "White Jazz" last week and while it still remains true that all his books are basically identical, you can't deny the sheer, adrenal energy and excitement of them. I don't know where "White Jazz" rates in his canon and wonder whether the fact that it was published just after the LA Riots meant that commentators ascribed more significance than it was capable of supporting. But if you want to spend a few days locked into a world where every cop and crook is as fucked up, grasping, perverted and evil as the next, then you could do a lot worse. Not sure if the plot matters in Ellroy but the sudden addition of EYEBALL MAN, while definitely a rather clunky "rabbit-in-the-hat" moment, makes for a fittingly gruesome, funny ending...

Have started in on Ed McBain now, which is Wire-style good, although I'm not sure about his descriptions of people, particularly his way of comparing them (the women) to famous female movie stars. Although I guess it's the cops doing that, dunderhead...

Crime and Rehabunishment

An update on my crime-writing reading progress (if you catch my drift). Quickly read Daniel Woodrell's "Give Us A Kiss" between finishing Simenon and starting "White Jazz" (which turned up in the post the next day). It was lying around the house so I thought I'd give it a go, but couldn't for the life of me figure out what was supposed to be noir about this "country noir". I found it full of hokey hillbilly sentimentality and if he'd mentioned the red cowboy boots of the 19 year sexpot love interest again I would have wrapped the thing in a plaid shirt and burnt it. Anyway, I'm now well into "White Jazz". It's a long time since I read Ellroy and though I'm enjoying it, I've also remembered why I stopped.

Instinct: they're all THE SAME.

Luckily, the Gurniad is currently doing one of those "1000 Books You Must Read Before We Come Round And Beat You To Death With a Newspaper" supplements and Sunday was Crime, so that should furnish me with a few hundred more ideas...

And while we're on the subject of "Crime & Rehabunishment," my second novel "The Heritage" is due out in (cheap) trade paperback on February 5th. I can't really tell you much more, as no one at Faber has told me anything (images of baby chicks nudged from nests and left to starve, cheeping pitifully...). I will try to make more of a fuss about it between then and now, so if you haven't bought it, just get on and purchase now to shut me up. If I get to number 1 on the Amazon pre-order charts I promise to stop.

(THAT INSTINCT big: lies. Just lies.)

Oh, to make it up to you,another unsurprisingly excellent Bolaño story courtesy of the New Yorker...

Detect & Survive

I've declared 2009 the Year of the Detective. Or of the Murder-Mystery. Or the Police Procedural. Or something. It all goes back to my late night (and half cut) Bolaño revelation: if all novelists are like homicide detectives, then all novels are like murder-mysteries. Yeah, I know, it doesn't really make any sense, even on its own terms. But there seems to be something like a sliver of insight in there and it gives me a great excuse to buy a pile of new books. I'm currently nearing the end of "Dirty Snow" by Georges Simenon, which is a complete revelation. I'd always had Inspector Maigret down as a Hercule Poirot figure and, by extension, I'd assumed that Simenon was a cosy detective novelist. But "Dirty Snow" (not a Maigret book anyway) is something else - perfectly written, very dark and very bleak. It's a real find. Plus, the brief bio of Simenon reveals that he had a long term affair with Josephine Baker which he eventually ended because she was interfering with his productivity - he'd only written 12 novels that year. That, my friend, is style. Next on my list are "White Jazz" by James Ellroy (I've read other books by him, but someone once told me this was his "Ulysses," by which they may have meant it was incomprehensible) and Ed McBain (a compilation of three 97th Precinct novels). And last night I was recommended "The Black Dahlia" as the definitive Ellroy plus Derek Raymond's "I Was Dora Suarez" (and there's another writer I've been meaning to read for years). At some point I think I should throw in some Wilkie Collins, for history's sake, but am open to all additional suggestions...

Roberto Bolaño - "2666," "Part 5 - The Part About Archimboldi"

The last part of "2666" concerns the life story of the author who the critics were chasing in "Part 1". We follow Hans Reiter (who will later take the pen name Benno Von Archimboldi) from his birth on the North Prussian coast, through a childhood diving down to the seabed, his first job in the local aristocrats' semi-deserted home, his time in Berlin and then, for what feels like the bulk of the book, his conscription into the German army for the Second World War. Reiter fights on the Eastern front, pushing forward and then being forced into retreat, finally being interned by the Americans. Here, in perhaps the central action of this book (SPOILER ALERT!) he strangles a Nazi bureaucrat who confides that he has killed 500 Jews who were accidentally sent to the town he was running. Having left the camp, he begins writing, meets Ingeborg, his lover, who dies a little later and then lives in exile in the mediterranean whilst pumping out a succession of increasingly well-received books. Only during the final pages of the book do we find out that Klaus Haas - the German-American imprisoned in Santa Teresa as a serial killer - is his nephew. The book, the whole book, finishes with Archimboldi setting off for Mexico to try to help Haas.

My initial feeling is that this is the weakest section of "2666" (which, considering the general standard, is fairly mild criticism). In amongst the superb story telling (and once again, a succession of marvellous stories are folded into and pegged onto the basic narrative) there's something like wish fulfilment in the character of Archimboldi, the perfect outsider writer, who Bolaño presents as a kind of idiot savant, unaware or uninterested in the war he has been caught up in. He has to have Archimboldi kill the German bureaucrat almost to exculpate the character from his acquiescence up to this point. As for Archimboldi's publisher, Mr Bubis, he is so perfect, so supportive, so sure of his author's genius that for decades to come authors will be asking their agents to "find me a Bubis". I've already made the call.

But I can't help thinking that there must be more going on here than finishing with a panegyric to the writer as outsider and the publisher as loving parent. If the "Part About The Crimes" is the centre of the book - what the book is about - then is "The Part About Archimboldi" an epilogue of some sort? Because it seems a little strange to draw back from the brutality of the murders to this more bookish section, seeming, as it does, to undermine the feeling that when the critics come to Santa Teresa they've got it all wrong.

The connection can be drawn, I suppose, through a comparison Bolaño makes between Archimboldi and a detective: "he derived pleasure from writing, a pleasure similar to that of the detective on the heels of the killer" (p817). The detective appears to be a key idea in Bolaño's work, from the various poems in "The Romantic Dogs" named for or about them and, of course, "The Savage Detectives," his other 'big' novel. So writers are detectives and novels are murder-mysteries. This certainly holds true for "2666" and "The Savage Detectives," which are both murder-mysteries seen from another angle.

I can't really draw any conclusion, which seems partly the aim of a book which ends with an anecdote about a great German botanist who ends up being remembered only as the name of a particular type of ice cream. But I think a further clue as to how to look at "2666" is provided in an afterword from Ignacio Echeverría in which he offers Bolaño's explanation for the absence of Arturo Belano from the book: "The narrator of 2666 is Arturo Belano." Or to put it another way, "2666" is the great book that Belano has been writing during his own exile in Europe - an exile that, we have learnt in "The Savage Detectives," has been brought about by Belano's own involvement in a killing in Sonora. If we think of Belano as the hidden character in the book, then we have to reconsider how we've viewed everything in it. It's not Bolaño's background story which we should expect to illuminate "2666," but the subtly different one of Belano. It's not Bolaño's wish-fulfilment but Belano's.

"Behind every indisputable answer lies an even more complex question. Complexity, however, makes him laugh, and sometimes his mother hears him laugh in the attic, like the ten year old boy he once was." (p736)

New Year, New Thomas Pynchon

I'm so slow it's embarrassing, but there we are. The news you all already know is that there's a new Thomas Pynchon to look forward to in 2009. Called "Inherent Vice," apparently it's a detective novel set at the tail end of the sixties. Anyway, according to the Penguin catalogue (via The Ampersand"), the "cast of characters includes surfers, hustlers, dopers and rockers, a murderous loan shark, a tenor sax player working undercover, an ex-con with a swastika tattoo and a fondness for Ethel Merman, and a mysterious entity known as the Golden Fang, which may only be a tax dodge set up by some dentists." At this rate Mr Pynchon will start hammering out a book a year like Mr Roth. Just give him the Nobel now, for heaven's sake!

Roberto Bolaño - "2666," "Part 4 - The Part About The Crimes"

"The truth is, none of it made any sense" (p.595)

The fourth and longest part of "2666" details the deaths (or rather, the discovery of the corpses) of the 106 women murdered in Santa Teresa and the surrounding area in the five year period between January 1993 and December 1997. Some of the crimes appear to have been committed by a serial killer or serial killers, others by husbands, lovers, clients, narcos (drug traffickers), police etc etc. Every new discovery begins with a description of the body and how it is found. If the police manage to identify the victim we find out a little about the woman who has been killed. In a few cases they work out who has murdered her and, in little more than a handful, they manage to catch the perpetrator before he escapes across the border to the US or seemingly vanishes into thin air.

Interleaved between these grim, matter-of-fact vignettes are the stories of policemen Inspector Juan de Dios Martínez, Lalo Cura (who, if I've read it right, may be the son of Arturo Belano or Ulysses Lima from "Savage Detectives") and Epifanio Galindo (the book's three 'good cops'); arts journalist Sergio González; suspected serial killer Klaus Haas (the Lynchian giant who ends "The Part About Fate" and who I'm guessing will be related to Archimboldi from Part 1 in some way); US sheriff Harry Magaña; herbalist and 'seer' Florita Almada; ex-FBI expert on serial killers, Albert Kessler; and congresswoman Azucena Esquivel Plata. And in addition to these main stories are many others which are folded in, introduced as clues or as red herrings, or just as static.

The effect is slightly bewildering, presumably deliberately so. We're forced to follow the police - the way they become distracted over and over again from the main task at hand, are always being pulled away from the central core of what the whole book is about. At root, the cause of the murders seems to be the deep misogyny of society as a whole, the police joking about how many orifices semen has been found in, husbands killing their wives for no reason, a city working at a fever pitch of violence, the economy fuelled by illicit drugs money, occupying a strange interzone between two states.

But perhaps the most shocking thing about "Part 4" as a book is its refusal to draw conclusions. The only stories that end in this Part are the ones that end in death. This is not done in a standard "aestheticized" manner, where the tone of the prose is supposed to offer the 'closure' which the narrative appears to refuse. The stories simply stop as if only half way through. No conclusions are drawn. No poetic language is offered, the characters benefit from no new insight, however small. Any hint of an 'arc' to the story is denied. It's brutal and wholly effective - the temptation is to see the book as unfinished. But why not read it as a deliberate strategy? To offer any aesthetic sop would be to cheapen what's being described. "None of it made any sense."

"Every life, Epifanio said that night to Lalo Cura, no matter how happy it is, ends in pain and suffering. That depends, said Lalo Cura. Depends on what, champ? On lots of things, said Lalo Cura. Say you're shot in the back of the head, for example, and you don't hear the motherfucker come up behind you, then you're off to the next world, no pain, no suffering. Goddamn kid, said Epifanio. Have you ever been shot in the back of the head?" (p.511)

Books of the Year will be back tomorrow, with the choices of Richard Thomas, director of the Laugharne Weekend literary festival. Apologies for the interruption in service, but I promised the Bolaño updates first...