Death Comes for the Archbishop

Death Comes for the Archbishop (Vintage Classics, 1990)
by Willa Cather
USA, 1927

I haven't had to say this for a while, but I didn't actually care for this book all that much. While far from the worst thing I've read all year, Cather's overrated "classic" about the colonization of New Mexico after its annexation to the United States in 1848 never really clicked with me in any major way. Although I wound up being at least somewhat moved by the portrayal of the lasting friendship between the two French clerics at the heart of the novel, I wouldn't recommend Death Comes for the Archbishop on its storytelling merits alone (Kit Carson, Fray Junípero Serra, and Pope Gregory XVI cameos be damned). The plot is passable but told in a pedestrian manner, the characterization is fairly weak throughout (even the Archbishop himself, famously modeled on Santa Fe's real-life Archbishop Lamy, is more type than character up until the final chapter), and that whole panorama-of-an-era-in-upheaval thing isn't all that convincing compared to a real classic of historical fiction like Di Lampedusa's The Leopard. That being said, this still might be an OK read for anybody curious about the difficulties of missionary work in the 19th-century West, for people interested in learning about the conflicted perceptions of white settlers toward the Mexicans and Native Americans of the region when New Mexico began to be "civilized," and--last but not least--for critics with low standards. Pretty cover, though. (http://www.randomhouse.com/)

Willa Cather

For another blogger's take on this novel, please check out Emily's review from Evening All Afternoon.

Booked to Die: A Mystery Introducing Cliff Janeway

Booked to Die: A Mystery Introducing Cliff Janeway (Charles Scribner's Sons hardcover, 1992)
by John Dunning
USA, 1992

For all this book's rather serious shortcomings (faux tough guy patter that almost always rings false, an uninteresting protagonist, side stories involving a thug and a love interest that lack all credibility whatsoever), I'm kind of embarrassed to admit that I actually enjoyed much of this thriller's plot. While some of that likely only had to do with the particular subculture explored in the novel, the world of book dealers and book scouts in Denver's used/rare book trade, I feel I must grudgingly give Mr. Dunning some pre-Da Vinci Code-style credit for pumping out a mystery that was almost as entertaining as it was preposterous! Rating: Eat a big bag of these and then tell me how you feel! (http://www.simonandschuster.net/)

John Dunning and his poseur hat

The Land of Little Rain

The Land of Little Rain (The Modern Library Classics paperback, 2003)
by Mary Austin
USA, 1903

"For all the toll the desert takes of a man it gives compensations, deep breaths, deep sleep, and the communion of the stars. It comes upon one with new force in the pauses of the night that the Chaldeans were a desert-bred people. It is hard to escape the sense of mastery as the stars move in the wide clear heavens to risings and settings unobscured. They look large and near and palpitant; as if they moved on some stately service not needful to declare. Wheeling to their stations in the sky, they make the poor world-fret of no account. Of no account you who lie out there watching, nor the lean coyote that stands off in the scrub from you and howls and howls." --The Land of Little Rain, p. 10

Although The Land of Little Rain is very slow moving in parts, I liked this slender 109-page nature-writing classic quite a bit more than I would've expected from just a quick glance at that horrid New Age cover on my library copy above. Austin's prose is suitably spare and unadorned throughout this series of 14 non-fiction vignettes on life in the harsh southern California desert, but she has a great eye for detail and an unconventional point of view that provide for constant surprises when leafing through her work (to provide just one example, Austin is as likely to decry an act of violence with an unexpectedly secular aside--"Since it appears that we make our own heaven here, no doubt we shall have a hand in the heaven of hereafter" [40]--as she is to attribute John Muir's profound love of the natural world to his status as "a devout man" in another passage [95]). Geographically focused on the areas near the Mojave Desert and the Owens Valley in California where the author lived at the dawn of the 20th century, the Land of Little Rain's thematic concerns embrace the flora and fauna of the region, the itinerant gold prospectors still looking for their lucky strike, and--perhaps most interesting of all over a century later--Austin's interactions with the Paiute and Shoshone Indians and the Mexican settlers of her adopted home. Discovering that the midwest transplant and single mom Austin was so appreciative of these different cultures in an age notorious for intolerance of all kinds makes me want to learn more about this gifted writer sooner rather than later. Rating: 4 out of 5 stars. (http://www.modernlibrary.com/)

Mary Austin

The Modern Library edition of The Land of Little Rain includes a fine biographical sketch by Robert Hass, but other versions of the text are available online for free due to its status as a public domain work. For a good recent blog entry about Austin and her life, check out Prof. Peter Richardson's self-titled blog on Californian culture here.

The Big Sleep

The Big Sleep (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard paperback, 1992)

by Raymond Chandler

USA, 1939

"It was about eleven o'clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn't care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.

The main hallway of the Sternwood place was two stories high. Over the entrance doors, which would have let in a troop of Indian elephants, there was a broad stained-glass panel showing a knight in dark armor rescuing a lady who was tied to a tree and didn't have any clothes on but some very long and convenient hair. The knight had pushed the vizor of his helmet back to be sociable, and he was fiddling with the knots on the ropes that tied the lady to the tree and not getting anywhere. I stood there and thought that if I lived in the house, I would sooner or later have to climb up there and help him. He didn't seem to be really trying." --The Big Sleep, pp. 3-4

Chandler's 1939 debut novel, like Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon before it, is one of those old favorites that has seemingly only gotten better with age. While its tale of high society blackmail having to do with a smut bookstore, crooked cops, illegal gambling, and multiple murders must have been even more thematically jolting back in the day, the way it's told still feels remarkably contemporary today. Part of that has to do with the novel's plot-driven engine, which motors along with all the speed and efficiency of a short story on wheels, but part of it has to with Chandler's bracing way with words. The book is full of smart, funny writing--like the description of a 20-year old party girl's "sharp, predatory teeth" (5) or the putdown of Marcel Proust as "a connoisseur in degenerates" (56)--passed off with the same sort of casual, conversational insouciance evident in narrator Phillip Marlowe's description of his arrival at the Sternwood mansion above. Yet despite the laughs, there's a cynicism or a world-weariness here that becomes more pronounced as the novel progresses--which is understandable given the notion that 1930s L.A. couldn't have been any kind of a decent place at all for either a stained-glass knight or his detective fiction counterpart. Inspired. (http://www.vintagebooks.com/)

Chandler (above) continues to receive an interesting mix of praise and dismissal from those evaluating his work from the perspective of "serious" fiction. For a reading that tries to argue both sides of the argument at once, check out "The Case for Raymond Chandler" by clicking on the link.

In the Time of the Butterflies

In the Time of the Butterflies (Plume paperback, 1995)
by Julia Alvarez
USA, 1994

Have you ever seen a really bad movie about a totally interesting subject? If so, you'll probably be able to relate to my frustrations while reading this mid-'90s historical fiction bestseller. To be fair, there were certain things I liked about the book. The U.S.-born/República Dominicana-raised Alvarez is a decent enough storyteller, and the subject matter--the lives of the four Mirabal sisters who became resistance leaders in the time of Dominican Republic dictator Rafael Trujillo's oppressive regime--is certainly deserving of a wider audience. Structurally, I admired the author's ambition in letting each sister tell her own story via diary entries, flashbacks, etc. I also enjoyed the vaivén between the past and the present during the 60-year sweep of the narrative. On the down side, I never really connected with the idea that there were four distinct narrators here. Alvarez' intricate attempt at a chorus approach notwithstanding, I found In the Time of the Butterflies rather clumsy in this regard--presenting types rather than differentiated characters and artificial rather than convincing dialogue. Although less problematic, I was also taken aback by Alvarez' apparent fixation with almost all of her protagonists' menstrual cycles. I imagine her aim was to present the sisters as "real women" in addition to heroines, but the amount of space dedicated to the topic was disconcerting: one minute I'd be reading a so-so novel about a brutal dictator, and the next I'd be reading Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret! Not really the way I wanted to end this review nor the way I wanted to start the Latin American Reading Challenge. Rating: 2.5/5 stars. (http://www.penguin.com/)

Julia Alvarez

All Shot Up

All Shot Up (Pegasus Books paperback, 2007)
by Chester Himes
France, 1960

I'm not sure that "mother-raper" or the adjectival "mother-raping" are any less offensive than the similar expletives in use today, but those are just two of the colorful linguistic oddities to be found in this gritty police procedural novel set in late 1950s Harlem. #4 in a series featuring tough-talking/acting black police detectives Coffin Ed Johnson and Gravedigger Jones, All Shot Up lives up to its title with virtually non-stop action and what feels like an insider's take on crime, political corruption, and racism in the big city. While this 160-page thrill ride may be a little too high testosterone for the Jane Austen crowd, Himes does a great job at keeping the narrative roller coaster twisting and turning. In addition, he has a flair for description that's simultaneously funny and arresting: "It was ten minutes by foot, if you were on your way to church," he writes of one destination, "about two and a half minutes if your old lady was chasing you with a razor" (p. 21). This sort of mordant, streetwise sense of humor permeates the novel, a fine thing since the almost surrealistically violent caper at its heart is studded with lots of sordid characters who don't really represent Harlem's more churchgoing sides of the population. All in all, a very enjoyable read--but somebody else will have to fill me in on how closely Himes' imagined Harlem, so vividly portrayed by a U.S. expat then living in France, matched the real deal city at the time. (Pegasus Books/45 Wall Street, Suite 1021/New York, NY 10005)

Himes and cat

For a nice little bio piece/book review having to do with Chester Himes, check out Courttia Newland's 2000 "From a life of crime to watching the detectives" here.

The Cask of Amontillado

"The Cask of Amontillado"
by Edgar Allan Poe
USA, 1846

How it starts: "The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could; but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge."
How it ends: "In pace requiescat!"

Apuleius' digressionary effusiveness notwithstanding, there's something to be said in favor of that other type of writer who can get his message across with as little wasted space as possible. Poe's seven-page "The Cask of Amontillado," for example, has always struck me as one of the most economical short stories ever, but I'd forgotten just how much of a pleasure it was to read until I picked it up again recently. The outwardly affable but inwardly calculating narrator, the Buñuelesque humor about the difference between a trowel-wielding mason and the brotherhood of freemasons, and the exquisitely controlled balance between madness and menace all add up to a perfect tapas dish for those who'd agree that revenge is a dish best served cold. Rating: 5/5 stars. Source: The Portable Edgar Allan Poe (ed. J. Gerald Kinney). New York: Penguin, 2006, 208-214.

Are you a Poe fan? Tell me about it.

Want to see what the Los Angeles Times had to say about Peter Ackroyd's new Poe biography a few days ago? Read about it.

The Maltese Falcon

The Maltese Falcon (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, 1992)

by Dashiell Hammett

USA, 1930

ISBN 978-0-679-72264-9

Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon was one of my all-time favorite books back when I was a young and impressionable 20-something, but I decided to read the crime fiction masterpiece again recently to see how it'd hold up under the weight of all that time gone by. Suffice it to say that it remains a tremendously entertaining read, its well-known plot and colorful cast of characters only improving with age. While a little dated in ways both expected (some of the attitudes expressed toward women and gays) and not (the scene where Sam Spade and Detective Polhaus eat pickled pigs' feet in a German restaurant), Hammett's spare, economical prose and stripped-down storytelling are as winning a combination as ever. In addition to the classic dialogue (Wilmer: "Keep on riding me and you're going to be picking iron out of your navel"; Spade, chuckling: "The cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter" [p. 120]) and rogues' gallery of unforgettable criminals, one of the things I loved most about rereading this was rediscovering Hammett's narrative sleight of hand. In a passage I'd long forgotten about, for example, Spade tells client/future love interest/iconic femme fatale Brigid O'Shaughnessy a story about an old case of his involving a guy named Flitcraft, a real estate salesman who had abandoned a seemingly happy life as a family man to assume a new identity elsewhere. While the anecdote at first appears to be little more than an unimportant digression, Flitcraft's reasons for trying to escape his life of ease underscore both the randomness of the way things happen in life and the futility of people attempting to become anything other than who they really are--a rather pessimistic point of view that's easy to be forgotten amid all the juicy details of the great tale of greed that follows. That Spade hardly spends as much time talking about the Flitcraft case as I do here makes it even more perfect as an example of Hammett's subtlety in fleshing out flawed characters who aren't just types.

Since the film version of The Maltese Falcon is one of the few adaptations I can think of that lives up to the original novel, it's at least even money that another viewing of that will take place here soon as well. In the meantime, I give this latest encounter with Hammett a New Year's Eve rating of 5 out of 5 stars. Cheers!

(http://www.vintagebooks.com/)

Dashiell Hammett (1894-1961)

Gringa Latina

Gringa Latina (Kodansha Globe, 1996)
by Gabriella De Ferrari
USA, 1995
ISBN 1-56836-145-9

"Gringa Latina is a celebration of my growing up as a gringa in a land of Latinos and becoming a Latina in a land of gringos. I was a gringa in Peru, because my parents had come from a distant land to make their life there; I have been called a Latina in Saint Louis, Boston, Los Angeles, and New York, the places where I have made my life as an adult. Yet I am not one or the other but both. Like mirrors, they are the reflection of each other, their images continually resonating throughout my life. These reflections, with their peaceful islands and their turbulent waters, form the chapters of this book." --Gabriela De Ferrari, p. 1.

While Gabriella De Ferrari's Gringa Latina is a lovely little memoir that you could probably polish off in a few hours of serious reading, I spaced out my time with it so that I could savor it over the course of the three days we here in the metro Boston area spent snowed in last weekend. A celebration of the author's childhood in Tacna in southern Peru, where she was born to Italian emigrant parents who had become Peruvians not by birth but by choice, the book offers up a precious glimpse at a kind of paradise lost written from the vantage point of an adult whose own wanderlust had led her to residence--and eventual citizenship--in the United States after college. Although De Ferrari's "otherness" in Peru seems to have had as much to do with class differences as matters of culture or ethnicity (her family was very well off in relation to most of their counterparts, and her parents' annual Italian Day celebration on June 2 seems to have been a hit with everybody lucky enough to score an invitation to it), her story should resonate with anyone who's ever had a bicultural upbringing or an expat experience of their own. This book is out of print but well worth tracking down for its series of family vignettes that read like touching little prose haiku. Brava!

The Burnt Orange Heresy

The Burnt Orange Heresy (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, 1990)
by Charles Willeford
USA, 1971
ISBN 0-679-73252-7

I used to be a big fan of the Vintage Crime/Black Lizard imprint, and just thinking about names like Chandler, Hammett, James M. Cain, and Jim Thompson can still put a tough guy's grin on my book guy's face. Willeford, who was new to me but is a known quantity in pulp fiction circles, doesn't seem up to that pantheon level here, but his Burnt Orange Heresy isn't a bad read either. Narrated by smug Palm Beach art critic James Figueras in the autobiography of a sicko style popularized by Jim Thompson, the novel starts out as a sleek heist piece grounded in the world of contemporary art before turning into the confession of something much more sinister. Along the way, Figueras takes various often-bitchy potshots at both the South Florida merchants who peddle art and the international artists and critics who shape public perception of it (in one of my favorite moments, a character who's supposed to be a legendarily-reclusive French avant-garde painter in hiding in Florida caps off a discussion of Marcel Duchamp by offering a choice of TV dinners--turkey, Salisbury steak, or enchilada, tamale, and Spanish rice--to his uninvited guests). I didn't really buy the logic behind the big criminal finale, but if you're looking for a 144-page crime novel with attitude and the occasional laugh, you could do a whole lot worse.

Charles Willeford (1919-1988)

(NB: This version of The Burnt Orange Heresy is OOP. Others are available in an assortment of garish colors. For more on Willeford, check out Marshall Jon Fisher's short piece on "The Unlikely Father of Miami Crime Fiction" here.)

The New York Trilogy, I: City of Glass

The New York Trilogy: City of Glass (2006 paperback)
by Paul Auster
USA, 1985
ISBN 0-14-303983-0

• "What interested him about the stories he wrote was not their relation to the world but their relation to other stories." (City of Glass, p. 7.)

I read this novella as my New York state selection for the Book around the States Challenge, but I'm not totally satisfied with the choice. Sort of a metaphysical detective story, City of Glass is at its best playing with genre and authorial identity. The plot, offering a few novel twists on the narrative front, is promising. An author named Quinn, a writer of detective fiction hiding behind the Poe-like pseudonym of William Wilson, becomes involved in a mystery of his own when he receives a late night telephone call from a stranger who mistakes him for a detective named Paul Auster. Deciding to impersonate this fellow named Auster (himself also later revealed to be an author within the claustrophobic recesses of the work in question), Quinn takes the case on and descends down deep into the abysses of an NYC labyrinth of alienation and anomie as he trails his suspect across the uncaring Manhattan streets. Allusions to Borges, Don Quixote, and other metafiction exemplars help enrich the writer/reader relationship here, but the deconstruction/reconstruction of Quinn's identity crisis that takes place in the latter half of the story is just not all that exciting compared to the Cervantes-inspired paradigms that came before it. Imaginative but a bit of a letdown. (http://www.penguinclassics.com/)