Another couple of extraordinary Caldwell stories are
'Savannah River Payday' and 'Saturday Afternoon'.
'The Bastard', a novella from 1929, is about an amoral loner
and is as noir as anything by Appel or Goodis.
'Poor Fool', 1930, is a tale of a gullible down-and-out boxer
who ends up in a house of horrors from which he is unable to
leave. The character motivations are poor enough to make the
book pretty weak when looked at with a critical eye, but the
story is surreal and engaging enough and I suspect that the
poor character motivations were deliberate, so I closed my
critical eye and read on with the other one and found the
whole thing grotesque and fascinating.
'Tobacco Road', 1932, is a stunner. It's the story of the
Lester family, Georgian sharecroppers who live in grinding
poverty. It's brutal, depraved, absurd, hilarious and
heart-breaking. It's one of those books that make you want to
read everything else the author's ever written. Did for me,
anyway. Unfortunately, I haven't found another (yet) that
lives up to TR. Although I've found something exceptional in
each of them. For instance, three scenes from 'Journeyman'
have stayed with me -- one might even be my favourite in all
of fiction -- even though much of the book can be dismissed
as lascivious nonsense.
Al
----- Original Message ----- From: "Mark R. Harris" <
brokerharris@gmail.com> To: <
rara-avis-l@yahoogroups.com> Sent: Monday, February
04, 2008 10:21 PM Subject: Re: RARA-AVIS: Re: Erskine
Caldwell...
> "Kneel to the Rising Sun" is a classic Caldwell
story.
>
> On 2/4/08, jacquesdebierue <
jacquesdebierue@yahoo.com> wrote:
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 04 Feb 2008 EST