I know Bill Kerwin as many of you do, as one of the best Goodreads reviewers ever. When this book came out I bought it right away and it remained in aI know Bill Kerwin as many of you do, as one of the best Goodreads reviewers ever. When this book came out I bought it right away and it remained in a stack as many of my books always do. But I am in the middle of teaching The Big Sleep this fall (2024) as part of a detective fiction course, AND I am also teaching a ghosts class, and I finally saw that both of these topics seem to be pertinent in the reading of this book! And so as people used to say a decade ago: win win! ...more
“My New Yorks would turn the world over"--Georgia O'Keefe, about 1925
—Georgia O’Keeffe, about 1925I finally went just now 9/2/24 to the Chicago Art In“My New Yorks would turn the world over"--Georgia O'Keefe, about 1925
—Georgia O’Keeffe, about 1925I finally went just now 9/2/24 to the Chicago Art Institute exhibition Of Georgia O'Keefe: My New Yorks, and picked up the hard cover catalogue on my way out, featuring highlights and essays. Really interesting to see the relationship between her southwestern US work and her New York work, which I was (of course) less familiar with.
I'll write more as I read, but one thing I found both completely unsurprising and nevertheless maddening is how discouraged she initially was by husband Steiglitz (and some of the other art world boys) to even paint the buildings of Manhattan. Yet she persevered. . ..
Incase you might want to visit, here's a link to the Art Institute, with lots of examples of the remarkable work, but I think it will only be there until September 22:
Modiano's first three novels, published when he was 22, 23 and 25. Very different feel to this work than later, "more mature," work. This feels frenetModiano's first three novels, published when he was 22, 23 and 25. Very different feel to this work than later, "more mature," work. This feels frenetic in comparison, angry, a different style, infused with direct and indirect references to other authors. Later work is more minimal, for sure....more
10/2/24: Rereading for Fall 2024 Detective Fiction class. Why this one? A colleague who has taught lots of detective fiction said this was his favorit10/2/24: Rereading for Fall 2024 Detective Fiction class. Why this one? A colleague who has taught lots of detective fiction said this was his favorite, maybe his best. I've read all ten of them.
Original review, 1/9/24:
What’s it like in Harlem in the summer of 1960?
"Colored people were cooking in their overcrowded, overpriced tenements; cooking in the streets, in the after-hours joints, in the brothels; seasoned with vice, disease and crime. An effluvium of hot stinks arose from the frying pan and hung in the hot motionless air, no higher than the rooftops — the smell of sizzling barbecue, fried hair, exhaust fumes, rotting garbage, cheap perfumes, unwashed bodies, decayed buildings, dog-rat-and-cat offal, whiskey and vomit, and all the old dried-up odors of poverty."
This 1961 novel is the 6th in Chester Himes’s Harlem Cycle and it’s fast-paced, violent, and sometimes amusing. Dion Graham is the fine audio narrator. Coffin Ed and Gravedigger Jones take on heroin in Harlem, as in something like 3 million dollars of horse/smack in 1960 dollars. Early on we meet an albino giant, Pinky and his dwarf buddy. As I wrote in my review of the last one in the series, everyone in these books seem to be depicted as either physically or morally a freak or monster, and usually the one equates to the other. Pinky and his buddy are “freaks,” as is their pursuer detective Coffin Ed, damaged by having acid thrown in his face and multiple skin grafts. And he’s in a stage of rage against the world, often taking it out on the world.
When they seem to have caught the perpetrators, they find a man swallowing bags of heroin and they punch the guy hard in the stomach, making him regurgitate the bags. . . but he also dies. So this would today likely lead to a second degree murder charge, but it only leads to our violent duo getting suspended. Then Gravedigger gets shot and Ed, enraged as usual, is on the case following a prostitute named Heavenly, who has her own container for heroin, a dog. Later on, eels are also storage containers for smack.
So, yeah, this is violent, the body count is high, monstrously so, but this romp may still be one of the best plotted, with some crazy detours to land in Africa and oh yeah, the use of Nitroglycerine to blow a safe. . . but you gotta know how much nitro to use or you might. . . Watch out! (house go boom!)....more
Tender little buddy read with my friend George, for reasons I can't quite recall at the moment, but maybe something to do with the times we are livingTender little buddy read with my friend George, for reasons I can't quite recall at the moment, but maybe something to do with the times we are living in?...more
10/10/23: Reread for my ghosts/liminal spaces fall 23 class; ghosts, you ask? Well, that's a question, isn't it? The incident late in the story at the10/10/23: Reread for my ghosts/liminal spaces fall 23 class; ghosts, you ask? Well, that's a question, isn't it? The incident late in the story at the well? The foster family's recently deceased son is a kind of ever-present "ghost" in this story, or ghost, depending on your point-of-view. I LOVE this book, and showed excerpts from the beautiful and moving 2023 Academy-Award-nominated film based on the story, The Quiet Girl (available now on Hulu), as well.
One of the things I am paying attention to in this second read is the mention of "secrets," which I had not paid much attention to in my first reading, but other reviews I read later speculate on what is going on with that. In short, I think there are secrets throughout this story, though some are worth speculating about.
Foster (2010, but republished in 2022, as a wider group of people across the planet, including me, were introduced to her work through the Man Booker Shortlisted Small Things Like These [2021]) is a book about an economically disadvantaged girl from a growing Irish family who is fostered for a summer by a middle-class couple--her mother is a cousin to the host woman--we come to learn later in the story had recently lost their son, to drowning.
A personal reflection: When I was 9 and my sister N was 7 my father drove us to the farm of his childhood friend an hour or so from our house. At the time no one knew when or even if we were going back home. We knew very little about it, but we knew our mother was very sick; I think my parents thought she would die. We were in the same sense as this quiet girl being “fostered” on a farm. A trip to a research hospital was lucky, the cause of my mother's pain was identified and corrected and in the early fall we returned home.
So this is a weird way to talk about this book, maybe, but I’ll admit I was influenced in the reading of this book by my son’s photography project (I know!) about Liminal Spaces, and we have been taking lots of photographs together, talking about what is in the lines between light and darkness, as in noir art--possibility, sure, but also fear of the unknown, mystery, magic. So since I was in that mindset I thought the whole book was about liminal spaces, in various ways, for this girl who is, after all, growing up, in the liminal space between childhood and adolescence, comparing the state of her family to a family less precarious than her own.
Here’s some examples of what I mean:
“It is a hot day, bright, with patches of shade and greenish, sudden light on the road.” “In places there is bare, blue sky. In places the blue is chalked over with clouds. . .” “I picture myself lying in a dark bedroom with other girls, saying things we won’t repeat when the morning comes.” (whispering in the shadows) “It’s something I am used to, this way men have of not talking. . .” “There’s a moment when neither one of us knows what to say. . .” “There’s a moment of dark, in the hallway; when I hesitate, she hesitates with me.” “I am in a spot where I can neither be what I always am nor turn into what I could be.” “The presence of a black and white cat. . .” “. . . the woman’s shadow stretches, almost reaching my chair.” “. . . everything changes into something else, turns into some version of what it was before.” “He looks happy but some part of me feels sorry for him.” “. . . we can see everything and yet we can’t see.” “. . . the wind blows hard and soft and hard again. . “ “. . . things I don’t fully understand. . .”
In-between-ness!
There’s ominous signs of things to come, fear, worries. There are times in which the story is eerie. We learn over time that the foster parents lost their child to an accidental drowning, so the spectre of this tragic event hovers over the girl's time at the farm, climaxing at one key turning point in the story that calls forth Irish myth, in some ways. There’s a black dog, the black sea. . . she's early on wearing the boy’s clothes. . . is something beckoning in the well where the boy had drowned?
“I keep waiting for something to happen.”
This is a marvelous short book y’all should read right now!
“My heart does not so much feel that it is in my chest as in my hands, and that I am carrying it along swiftly, as though I have become the messenger for what is going on inside of me.”...more
“And always the dirty snow, the heaps of snow that look rotten, with black patches and embedded garbage . . . unable to cover the filth.”
Not one of Ge“And always the dirty snow, the heaps of snow that look rotten, with black patches and embedded garbage . . . unable to cover the filth.”
Not one of Georges Simenon's Detective Maigret novels, that are generally pretty charming (Maigret) but also bleak in their investigations of the slime underneath the calm domestic surface, but one of his roman durs (or hard novels), considerably darker, and so good, a portrait of a killer that reminds me of Paul Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice and The Killer in Me by Jim Thompson, the darkest gutter criminal noir. The bleak noir tale of a 19-year-old amoral pimp, Frank, in a European city under Nazi occupation, in an apartment where his mother runs a brothel.
Many people have said this is his best novel (of more than 200!! 400? 500?) but beware, it looks bleak even in the first ten pages.
“The greatest of all, the most genuine novelist we have had in literature.” —André Gide...more
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