So it's nice to return from the beach (Outer Banks, NC) to
find Effinger
mentioned by someone (three of them, no less!) who is not me.
;-j Maybe a
few folks will go to a used bookstore to hunt down his
_When_Gravity_Fails_ .
. . as it is out of print. Effinger is one of those
well-praised authors who
unjustly suffers from a lack of an audience. News for fans:
he has finished
the fourth of the Marid Audran novels--but his publisher
refused to publish
it, saying it was too dark (sound familiar?). I have heard
that ms. exist,
but have not had the pleasure of seeing it or even speaking
with anyone who
has. Any further info would be much appreciated.
Kevin Smith asks:
<<<It's summertime, and the living is cheesy...What
are you reading this
summer?>>>
Heading off to the beach, I stopped at a bookstore to grab
BOH, but it was not
available so I picked up _Miami_Blues_ as my first Willeford
instead. Wow. I
will read every book this man has written. Willeford is so
casual in his
movements that I forgot that there had to be a violent
reckoning between Hoke
and Junior. Indeed, Willeford is so casual that the violence
actually hurts
coming off the page. I didn't put it down. Which means that I
had to move
quickly onto the other book I brought...
_The_Count_of_Monte_Cristo_ was a great beach book at over
1000 pages. I'd
even put in a nomination for it for proto-HB (written in
1844-5). Dumas
claims to have gotten the idea (wrongful incarceration,
escape, revenge) and
some details from the Paris police archives. Most modern
works would be hard-
pressed to equal the work's cynicism about human nature and,
especially,
justice. I recommend the opportunistic prosecutor Villefort
as a shining
exemplar of all we've grown to love (to hate) in the lawmen
of classic HB.
About ordering foreign books: there's a bookstore in
Cambridge, MA called
Schoenhof's (schoenhofs.com) that has a huge stock of other
language texts.
That won't help you get books from England, but from France
they're the best.
They also have english dictionaries of all flavors (slang,
american-brit,
american-aussie, etc.).
And finally, apropos of the abilities of the modern
undergraduate, my partner-
in-crime is a graduate student at a well regarded southern
university.
Recently she taught a class consisting of some classics of
"high modernism"
including Kafka's _The_Trial_ (and showing "The Cabinet of
Dr. Caligari",
Duane; they didn't like it, but they dug "Battleship
Potemkin"). You'd think
most undergraduates had the experience of getting a driver's
liscence, but
these students persisted in wondering what sort of terrible
society Kafka
lived in that he should write such depressing and obviously
useless books.
They loved Proust. Go figure.
-------------------------------
A short synopsis of _When_Gravity_Fails_:
In the twenty-third century, Marid Audran is a loner making
his living doing
odd-jobs in the criminal quarter of an unnamed Arab city.
He's a drunk and a
junkie and his acquaintances are strippers, whores and thugs.
When a few
murders happen a little too close to Audran he starts to take
a self-
preservative interest, but he doesn't really start to get
involved until the
local crime boss makes Audran his "instrument of
vengence."
Of particular note is the important bit of technology that
gets hung onto the
story so you know you're in the future: people can plug
personality modules
("moddies") directly into their brain and so experience the
world as though
they are that person. Historical and fictional personages are
available. Our
hero, Audran, is, of course, too independent to have his
brain wired...
The story, and its continuation in the two sequels
(_A_Fire_in_the_Sun_,
_The_Exile_Kiss_), is less about what happens in the world
than what happens
to Audran as a man who defines himself as a loner when he is
stripped of his
independence. Those who care about the "crime" will be
disappointed at how
neatly that part of the book is wrapped up. WGF's major
weakness, imo. Also,
like all good HB, the city is integral. The criminal quarter,
The Budayeen,
is a great example of a finely drawn locale.
The epigraph of the book is from Chandler's "Simple Art of
Murder":
"He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man
for any world...He
is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a
proud man or be
very sorry you ever saw him. He talks as the man of his age
talks--that is,
with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for
sham, and a
contempt for pettiness."
Which about sums up what it is to be a HB protagonist,
doesn't it?
Cheers,
myshmysh
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