Kevin:
<<Judging from the racks, Ellroy, Mosley, Pelecanos,
Jerome Charwyn and Block are very, very popular. So surely
someone out there besides Americans "gets" it. Unless
thousands and thousands of people worldwide are in the habit
of regularly buying books they don't
understand.>>
I hear that Constantine and Gores also have a big following
outside the US. In fact, I was surprised by a recent
conversation I had with a French colleague who is not even a
hardcore crime fiction fan. He has read Constantine and a lot
of the contemporary writers discussed here.
I think a perspective that ignores literature from countries
other than the US is myopic (to say the least). For example,
I recently discovered Bino Realuyo, a sensational writer (and
poet) from the Philippines. While no other country has had a
Chandler or a Hammett or a James Crumley, the US has never
had a Naipaul or a Narajan, or a Carpentier, or a Mahfouz, or
a Calvino, and so on. There is a danger in treating
hardboiled literature as an isolated genre; it's part of the
much larger field of realistic literature, and overlaps and
breeds with all sorts of other genres. Which is why the view
from each country is necessarily different. If one day there
is *one* worldwide perspective, culture will be dead.
Everything will be a simulacrum. This is specifically in
response to Paul's accusation of limpdickness (of British
writers). They live and work in a different culture, and
their language reflects this, but they can be as hardboiled
as anyone.
This reminds me strongly of a polemic some time ago, where
one side argued that only US musicians can play jazz
idiomatically. I was on the other side.
Regards,
MrT
__________________________________________________ Do You
Yahoo!? Send instant messages & get email alerts with
Yahoo! Messenger. http://im.yahoo.com/
-- # To unsubscribe, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to majordomo@icomm.ca. # The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 06 Jul 2000 EDT