Bioy Casares and Borges on Eça de Queirós

In a nod to Tom (né Amateur Reader) and his current Portuguese Literature Challenge being held over at Wuthering Expectations and the fact that I'll soon finally be reading Eça de Queirós' The Crime of Father Amaro as a result of said challenge's call to reading arms, here's a snippet of Adolfo Bioy Casares and Jorge Luis Borges on the high-strung Eça de Queirós lifted from Bioy Casares' smashing Borges diary pictured above:

Martes, 14 de junio [1955]

Hablamos de Eça de Queiroz; decimos que desearíamos que hubiera más libros de Eça; que todo lo que escribía era agradable; que era muy superior a sus maestros, a Anatole France y aun a Flaubert.  Borges tiene un instante de duda, cuando menciono a Flaubert; luego dice que Madame Bovary es un libro mucho más pobre que El primo Basilio.  Hablamos de Proust...

[We talked about Eça de Queirós; we said that we wished there were more of Eça's books; that everything he wrote was enjoyable; that he was far superior to his "masters," superior to Anatole France and superior even to Flaubert.  Borges has a moment of doubt when I mention Flaubert; then he says that Madame Bovary is a much lesser work than Cousin Basilio.  We talked about Proust...]

(Adolfo Bioy Casares, Borges, Barcelona: Ediciones Destino, 2006, 133) 

*****

Proust not being Portuguese, the follow-up anecdote in the sequence had to be pruned from this post.  Tsk, tsk.  However, even with something like 1,500 pages still to go, I can still assure you that Bioy Casares' diary is filled with juicy literary goodness of this nature as well as the delicious personal dirt that I was hoping to find--as in the story about the crazy ex-flame of Borges' who used to boast of being a big Don Quixote fan but would then qualify it with comments like "pero el verdadero, no el que todos leen" ["but the real one--not the one that everybody reads"] (55)!

Tiempo de silencio

Tiempo de silencio (Crítica, 2000)
por Luis Martín-Santos
España, 1962

A pesar de su fama como uno de los mejores libros españoles del siglo XX, hay que reconocer que el asunto argumental de Tiempo de silencio es poco prometedor como una diversión: un médico, falsamente acusado de ser culpable de la muerte de una joven durante un aborto ilegal, sufre las consecuencias éticas y legales como resultado de su supuesta complicidad.  Sin obstante, vaya sorpresa descubrir que la novela, como si escrita con la ayuda de tinta corrosiva y ojos de rayos x, sea tan deslumbrante como un retrato de Madrid a finales de los años cuarenta.  Me gustó enormemente.  Aunque todo el mundo habla de la influencia joyceana y/o piobarojiana en la obra de Martín-Santos, por mi parte veo rastros de Francisco de Quevedo en su fervor lingüístico y su debilidad por el tono delincuentemente elevado.  En la página 40, por ejemplo, se nota que la llegada del médico Pedro y su ayudante Amador a las chabolas en las afueras de Madrid, adónde se han ido en busca de algunos ratones de laboratorio que se han robado desde su centro de investigación dedicado al estudio del cáncer hereditario, se describe con una pura mirada burlona quevediana: "¡Allí estaban las chabolas!  Sobre un pequeño montículo en que concluía la carretera derruida, Amador se había alzado --como muchos siglos antes Moisés sobre un monte más alto-- y señalaba con ademán solemne y con el estallido de la sonrisa de sus belfos gloriosos el vallizuelo escondido entre dos montañas altivas, una de escombrera y cascote, de ya vieja y expoliada basura ciudadana la otra (de la que la busca de los indígenas colindantes había extraído toda sustancia aprovechable valiosa o nutritiva) en el que florecían, pegados los unos a los otros, los soberbios alcázares de la miseria".  Dada que esta descripción de las chabolas implícitamente critica a la España  franquista, véamos otro ejemplo ácido desde la misma secuencia altisonante (41): "¡De qué maravilloso modo allí quedaba patente la capacidad para la improvisación y la original fuerza constructiva del hombre ibero!  ¡Cómo los valores espirituales que otros pueblos nos envidian eran palpablemente demostrados en la manera como de la nada y del detritus toda una armoniosa ciudad había surgido a impulsos de su soplo vivificador!  ¡Qué conmovedor espectáculo, fuente de noble orgullo para sus compatriotas, componía el vallizuelo totalmente cubierto de una proliferante materia gárrula de vida, destellante de colores que no sólo nada tenía que envidiar, sino que incluso superaba las perfectas creaciones  --en el fondo monótonas y carentes de gracia-- de las especies más inteligentes: las hormigas, las laboriosas abejas, el castor norteamericano!"  A veces mencionado como un representante de la llamada novela social española, para mí Tiempo de silencio es un libro tan estilísticamente delirante y sui generis que no puede ser clasificado como una obra representativa.  Por ejemplo, no hay capítulos dentro de la obra.  Varios personajes "narran" en sus propios monólogos interiores, y otras escenas se narran en la tercera persona omnisciente.  El lenguaje emplea la jerga médica y el habla de los pobres y los ricos madrileños además de neologismos cultos y palabras alegremente latinizadas.  Es una novela novedosa y, al fin y al cabo, divertida pero también llena del sentimiento trágico de la vida según las palabras de otro escritor vasco famoso.  Pedro, caminando en las calles de Madrid, explica todo en este pensamiento suyo que se encuentra en la página 58 del librazo calidoscópico-y-escrito-con-cariño de Martín-Santos: "Cervantes.  Cervantes.  ¿Puede realmente haber existido en semejante pueblo, en tal ciudad como ésta, en tales calles insignificantes y vulgares un hombre que tuviera esa visión de lo humano, esa creencia en la libertad, esa melancolía desengañada tan lejana de todo heroísmo como de toda exageración, de todo fanatismo como de toda certeza?  ¿Puede haber respirado este aire tan excesivamente limpio y haber sido conciente como su obra indica de la naturaleza de la sociedad en la que se veía obligado a cobrar impuestos, matar turcos, perder manos, solicitar favores, poblar cárceles y escribir un libro que únicamente había de hacer reír?  ¿Por qué hubo de hacer reír el hombre que más melancólicamente haya llevado una cabeza serena sobre unos hombros vencidos?"  (http://www.planetadelibros.com/editorial-editorial-critica-1.html)

Luis Martín-Santos (1924-1964)

Luis Martín-Santos' 1962 novel Tiempo de silencio, a staple on 20th century Spanish graduate reading lists and apparently not without reason, can be found in English translation as Time of Silence as published by Columbia University Press as recently as 1989 (translator: George Leeson).  Highly, highly recommended for anyone interested in seeing what great stuff was going on in peninsular Spanish literature during the Boom decade made famous by Latin American authors.

Marcel Schwob's "Bloody Blanche" & "Los señores Burke y Hare: Asesinos" (Peril of the Short Story for R.I.P. VI)

"Bloody Blanche" ["Blanche la sanglante"] & "Los señores Burke y Hare: Asesinos" ["MM. Burke et Hare, assassins"]

by Marcel Schwob [translated from the French by Chris Baldick and Marcos Mayer]
France, 1892 & 1896

With people like our good friend Jill so easily grossed out by the playful medieval love poetry of Juan Ruiz, I'm not sure what she or anybody else would have to say about French decadent/Ubu Roi dedicatee Marcel Schwob's truly revolting "Bloody Blanche."  A reimagining of the fairy tale as an Oldboy-style revenge fantasy, this gruesome four-page short story's only real purpose seems to be to put its 10-year old title character--both the object and the agent of almost all of the story's violence--in situations where rivers of blood soil her tender young flesh and clothing.  Creepy (and not really good creepy if you ask me!) but maybe something to get excited about for fans of the "genre: murder" narrative tradition as one website I came across this weekend laconically put it.  After "Bloody Blanche"'s perverse red-on-white excesses, "Los señores Burke y Hare: Asesinos" ["Burke and Hare, Assassins"], a fictionalized biography of the real-life serial killers who terrorized Scotland in the 1820s, almost qualifies as wholesome family entertainment in comparison.  In any event, I really enjoyed Schwob's arch, surprisingly humorous approach to the material here. For example, after comparing William Burke to a character in The Thousand and One Nights on account of the two men's shared propensity for enjoying storytelling and killing others as the only outlets for their "sensuality," Schowb then devilishly lavishes praise on Burke for his "originalidad anglosajona" ["Anglo-Saxon originality"] in coming up with the more beneficial endgame for his "errabunda imaginación de celta" ["roving Celtic imagination"]: while the fictional slave merely carved up his victims after his crimes, Burke, a much more forward-thinking man, sold his victims' bodies to science for use on the dissection table (277-278).  Elsewhere, in what will have to serve as the final words on this piece, Schwob teasingly turns his sights on the art of biography-writing itself when he explains why he'd rather leave Burke and Hare "en medio de su nimbo de gloria" ["in the middle of their halo of glory"] than spell out how the criminals met their end:  "¿Por qué destruir un efecto artístico tan hermoso llevándolos lánguidamente hasta el final de su carrera y revelando sus debilidades y sus decepciones?  Solo hay que verlos allí, con su máscara en la mano, vagando en las noches de niebla"] ["Why destroy such a beautiful artistic effect leading them listlessly along down to the end of their career and disclosing their weaknesses and disappointments?  Far better to picture them still out there, masks in hand, wandering around in the fog-shrouded nights"] (285).

Sources

"Bloody Blanche" appears in Chris Baldick, ed.  The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales.  Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, 245-248.  "Los señores Burke y Hare: Asesinos" is the last of 22 bios to appear in the Spanish version of Schwob's Vies imaginaires as translated by Marcos Mayer under the title Vidas imaginarias.  Buenos Aires: Longseller, 2005, 275-285.  By the way, here's a link that I just found to the original "MM. Burke et Hare, assassins" in French.  Enjoy!

Libro de buen amor 1606-1617: De las propiedades que las dueñas chicas an

De las propiedades que las dueñas chicas an

Quiérovos abreviar la mi predicaçión,     [1606]

que sienpre me pagué de pequeño sermón

e de dueña pequeña e de breve razón,

ca lo poco e bien dicho finca en el coraçón.

Del que mucho fabla ríen, quien mucho ríe es loco;     [1607]

es en la dueña pequeña amor grande e non de poco;

dueñas di grandes por chicas, por grandes chicas non troco,

mas las chicas e las grandes e las grandes non se repienden del troco.

De las chicas que bien diga el Amor me fizo ruego,     [1608]

que diga de sus noblezas; yo quiérolas dezir luego,

dirévos de dueñas chicas que lo avredes por juego:

son frías como la nieve e arden como el fuego.

Son frías de fuera, en el amor ardientes:     [1609]

en cama solaz, trebejo, plazenteras, rïentes,

en casa cuerdas, donosas, sosegadas, bienfazientes;

mucho ál ý fallaredes, ado bien paráredes mientes.

En pequeña girconça yaze grand resplandor;     [1610]

en açúcar muy poco yaze mucho dulçor;

en la dueña pequeña yaze muy grand amor;

pocas palabras cunplen al buen entendedor.

Es pequeño el grano de la buena pimienta,     [1611]

pero, más que la nuez conorta e calienta:

así dueña pequeña, si todo amor consienta,

non ha plazer del mundo que en ella non sienta.

Como en chica rosa está mucha color     [1612]

e en oro muy poco grand preçio e grand valor,

como en poco blasmo ya e grand buen olor,

ansí en dueña chica yaze muy grand sabor.

Como robí pequeño tiene mucha bondat,     [1613]

color, virtud e preçio e noble claridad,

ansí dueña pequeña tiene mucha beldat,

fermosura, donaire, amor e lealtad.

Chica es la calandria e chico el ruiseñor,     [1614]

pero, más dulçe cantan que otro ave mayor;

la muger que es chica por eso es mejor:

en doñeo es más dulçe que açúcar nin flor.

Son aves pequeñuelas papagayo e orior,     [1615]

pero, qual[es]quier d'ellas es dulçe gritador,

adonada, fermosa, preçiada cantador:

bien atal es la dueña pequeña con amor.

De la muger pequeña non ay conparaçión:     [1616]

terrenal paraíso es e consolaçión,

solaz e alegría, plazer e bendiçión:

mejor es en la prueva que en la salutaçión.

Sienpre quis muger chica más que grande nin [mayor]:     [1617]

non es desaguisado del grand mal ser foidor,

del mal tomar lo menos, dizelo el sabidor,

por ende de las mugeres la mejor es la menor.*
*

Is medieval Spanish poetry the book blogosphere's equivalent of box office poison?  Although I have the feeling that I'm about to find out, let's get to it anyway, shall we?  The Libro de buen amor or Book of Good Love is a poem of over 1700 strophes written circa 1343 by a Spanish poet known variously as Juan Ruiz or the Arcipreste de Hita or both.  One of the canonical works of medieval Spanish literature (pun intended: one of the built-in literary and historical ironies of the LBA is that Juan Ruiz might in fact have been a disgraced real-life "archpriest" or cleric himself), the poem is an often ribald affair chronicling the poet's ambiguous efforts to differentiate "good love" (the love of God) from "crazy love" (the love of the ladies) for his readers' benefit.  In any event, the twelve stanzas above, from a passage titled "De las propiedades que las dueñas chicas an" ["On the Attributes of Little Women"], constitute one of my favorite sections in the poem for their mix of post-Ovidian amatory humor and mock scholasticism.

While I'm not going to provide a full translation of the verses in question, it'd be wrong of me not to share how "De las propiedades que las dueñas chicas an" begins in Saralyn R. Daly's rendering of lines 1606 a-d.  To wit:

My lords, I want to make my preaching to you very brief,

For in short sermons I have always found delight and art,

Also in a little lady and in reasoning that is short.

For what is little and well said stays fixed within the heart.**

What follows, as you might be able to imagine from this opening, is a brief "sermon" on the greatness of little women delivered as a parody of the scholastic rhetorical device in which two opposite sides of a question are compared to one another: here, the topoi of the más and the menos (more and less) according to Alberto Blecua's helpful footnote on page 415 of my Spanish edition of the text.  Commenting on this beginning, Jeremy N.H. Lawrance wryly notes, "Perhaps only a medieval poet, writing in the scholastic tradition of artificial conceptual correspondences, could introduce the far-fetched comparison between a short sermon and a small woman, even as a joke, with so little ado."*** So what makes little women so great?  According to the poet, it has to do with things like the fact that there is great love to be found inside the little woman out of all proportion to her size (1607b's "es en la pequeña dueña amor grande e non de poco").  He supports his argument by claiming that while they may appear to be cold on the outside, in love they are "ardientes" (ardent, passionate) and a great joy in bed (1609a-b).  He extends the less is more comparison by referring to the abundant sweetness to be found in a tiny lump of sugar (1610b), the heat to be found in a grain of black pepper (1611a-b), the great amount of color evident in a tiny rose (1612a), and--moving on to the animal kingdom--the parallel to be found in the example of the skylark and the nightingale, which despite being diminutive creatures, sing more sweetly than any other birds of a greater size (1614a-b).

Even though English readers may not be able to appreciate how delirious and giddily propulsive this playful rhetoric comes across in Spanish meter, there's probably little extra translation help needed to understand the dirty wordplay behind Juan Ruiz's skirt chasing persona and predicaçión.  The everyday word caliente, for example, used to convey the heat of the grain of pepper in 1611a-b, can also double for the heat of sexual arousal if you're able to read between the arcipreste's carnal lines.  With this in mind, it should come as no surprise that verses 1611c-d offer up a similar potential double entendre in praise of one of little women's special attributes: using Saralyn R. Daly's translation once again, "Just so, with a little woman, if she grants you all her love,/There's no delight on earth which isn't found in her encased."  Near the end of "De las propriedades que las dueñas chicas an," the poet uses some innuendo-laden language of the sermon to preach that little women are without peer as an "earthly paradise" and sexual "consolation" to man (1616b), a "pleasure" and a "blessing" (1616c), and "better in the proof than in the salutation" (1616c).  Then, while appearing to poke fun at the tradition that portrays women as the agents of sexual sin and evil, the arcipreste offers this advice to his listeners in the concluding strophe of his homage to the little ones he loves so dearly (translation by Daly once last time):

I've always loved a little one more than the big or tall!

It never has been wrong to flee great evil, I suggest,

"But of all evil, choose the least," so says the ancient Sage.

Therefore, of all the women, littlest women are the best!**

**

Notes & mini-bibliography

*This part of the poem was transcribed from my battered paperback copy of Juan Ruiz's Libro de buen amor in the wonderful edition put out by Alberto Blecua for Cátedra's Letras Hispánicas series.  See pages 415-419 for the verses presented here and information including notes on the text and textual variants.

**I haven't seen many English translations that do the Libro de buen amor justice.  However, Saralyn R. Daly's translation of "About the Qualities Which Little Women Have" that I made use of here is a very nice exception in that regard, wisely offering the facing text in "Old Spanish" edited by Anthony N. Zahareas.  See The Book of True Love, pages 396-398, for the bilingual verses in question.

***Jeremy N.H. Lawrance, "The Audience of the Libro de buen amor," 226.

The Poem

Ruiz, Juan (Arcipreste de Hita).  Libro de buen amor. Madrid: Cátedra, 2001.

Ruiz, Juan (The Archpriest of Hita).  The Book of True Love [translated by Saralyn R. Daly).  University Park: The Pennsylvania Stae University Press, 1978.

A Study

Lawrance, Jeremy N.H.  "The Audience of the Libro de buen amor."  Comparative Literature, 36/3 (1984), 220-237.

Daphne Du Maurier's "Monte Verità" & "Don't Look Now" (Peril of the Short Story for R.I.P. VI)

"Monte Verità" & "Don't Look Now"

by Daphne du Maurier

England, 1952 and 1971

I love that Daphne du Maurier photo up above.  Despite the weird Project Runway fashion statement that she's making with her ensemble, there's something about her expression that makes me feel that I could bond with her--or, more realistically, that makes me feel that I'd at least want to bond with her--should our two worlds ever meet.  Unfortunately, my first two reading dates with Daphne didn't go as swimmingly as I would have hoped.  For starters, experiencing "Don't Look Now," the 1971 short story of hers which I read first, was a little like watching a cool, edgy Hitchcock thriller for about an hour and a half and then finding out that M. Night Shyamalan had been brought in for the last 15 minutes to deliver one of those lame-o, implausible endings that he's famous for.  What the hell, girl and/or "M"?  You had me with the creepy old clairvoyant sisters and the sudden reappearance of the beloved but unfortunately long deceased young daughter.  You lost me with that ending--particularly the goofball last line which reads like a parody.  The 1952 "Monte Verità," at 79 pages maybe more a novella than a short story, was a disappointment for other reasons.  A genre splice pairing a mountain climbing adventure and a supernatural mystery focused on a mystical cult of true believers hidden away from the modern world, it all just got a little too H. Rider Haggard She outlandish for me although people more inclined to Brit adventure/supernatural mystery pastiches may naturally have a higher tolerance for this sort of thing.  Oddly enough given all this kvetching, though, I'm not at all opposed to seeking out a little more Daphne du Maurier action in the future.  If reading her at long last was kind of like being set up on a blind date with a hipster chick and then finding out that the hipster chick in question was not only inexplicably all bent out of shape about R.E.M. breaking up but also wrongly excited about Sting's Back to Bass solo tour, I still think she's a fine stylist in terms of her storytelling mechanics, in drawing attention to the emotional nuances of (and between) her characters, and--despite apparent disagreements with her judgement from time to time--also fairly good company in terms of how many of the supernatural aspects of these two stories are grounded in character reactions that feel realistic for the most part.  But R.E.M.?  Sting?  "Hipster"?  WTF?

Source

"Don't Look Now" and "Monte Verità" are the first and last stories featured in Daphne du Maurier's nine-tale Don't Look Now collection, read here as part of the "Peril of the Short Story" festivities for R.I.P. VI.  New York: NYRB Classics, 2008, 3-58 & 267-346.

Llorenç Riber

Llorenç Riber
por J.R. Wilcock [traducido del italiano por Joaquín Jordá]
Italia, 1972

Una de las biografías inventadas más absurdas de La sinagoga de los iconoclastas, de Wilcock (un libro que fue uno de los cianotipos posmodernos de La literatura nazi en América, de Bolaño), Llorenç Riber es una obra re divertida que trata de un director catalán, obsesionado con los conejos, cuyas producciones raras incluyen una versión musical de las Investigaciones filosóficas, de Wittgenstein.  Como corresponde a un relato de esta índole, el compilador de este homenaje documenta la vida del artista con carácter juguetón por medio de cuatro reseñas críticas de sus obras escritas por otros y el fragmento de un guión inédito de una obra teatral de Riber que se llama Tristán e Isoldo (una puesta al día gay del clásico medieval).  Aunque no tengo la menor idea de cómo ustedes reaccionarían al sentido de humor que se encuentra acá, no podía dejar de reírme a carcajadas con los pormenores biográficos falsos (dicho haber sido devorado por un león en una página, Riber es después llamado "el director prematuramente devorado" en la próxima página [242]) o las varias reseñas simuladas (Tête de Chien tiene tanto éxito en Lausanne que Riber "fue llamado a saludar hasta ocho veces"; sin obstante, el crítico entonces añade que "para un director, triunfar en Suiza es como recibir una cesta de huevos de regalo" [246]).  Al hablar de esto, una de las reseñas fingidas--la reseña escribida por un tal Matteo Campanari para Il Mondo en Roma--es particularmente interesante para razones imprevisibles.  Veamos si yo pueda hacer justicia a esta anecdóta literaria poco conocida.  Resulta que Wilcock, después de trasladarse a Italia de su Argentina natal, se convertió en un crítico de teatro suplente en algún momento.  Tan aburrido por la tarea de ir al teatro, el excéntrico Wilcock comenzó a escribir reseñas sobre espectáculos inventados por un semanario romano bajo un seudónimo. En este momento, ¡no es de sorprender que la revista fuera llamada Il Mondo, que el crítico estrafalario se llamara Matteo Campanari, y que una de las producciones falsificadas fue presentado por un director que esté mejor conocido como Llorenç Riber!

*

One of the wackier fake biographies from J.R. Wilcock's La sinagoga de los iconoclastas (available in English as The Temple of Iconoclasts and a work that's one of the indisputable postmodern blueprints for Roberto Bolaño's Nazi Literature in the Americas), "Llorenç Riber" is a super funny piece of writing that celebrates a rabbit-obsessed Catalan theater director whose bizarre list of credits includes a musical version of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations among several other way off-Broadway oddities.  As befits a narrative of this nature, the compiler of this would-be homage playfully documents the artist's life with a selection of four critical pieces on his work composed by others and an extract from Riber's own unpublished play Tristán e Isoldo [Tristan and Isoldo], a sort of gay update of the medieval romance.  While I have no idea how many of you would embrace the absurdity of all this as much as I did, I couldn't stop laughing at either the faux biographical tidbits (said to have been killed by a lion on one page, Riber is then referred to as "el director prematuramente devorado" ["the prematurely devoured director"] on the very next one [242]) or the various mock reviews (Riber's Tête de Chien is so warmly received in Lausanne that the director's asked to come out for eight curtain calls; however, the reviewer then cynically notes that "para un director, triunfar en Suiza es como recibir una cesta de huevos de regalo" ["for a director, being lauded in Switzerland is like receiving a basket of eggs as a gift"] (246).  Curiously enough, one of the mock reviews that's most interesting--the one penned by one Matteo Campanari for Il Mondo in Rome--isn't particularly interesting for any of the reasons you might expect from the above.  Let's see if I can do this obscure literary anecdote justice.  As the story goes, Wilcock at one point in time became a substitute theater critic in Rome after moving to Italy from his native Argentina.  However, the eccentric writer was so bored by the chore of theater-going that he started inventing reviews of fabricated plays with made-up facts and casts and submitting the pieces to an Italian weekly under a pseudonym.  At this point, it should come as no surprise that the weekly was called Il Mondo, that Wilcock's pseudonym was Matteo Campanari, and that one of the fake directors Campanari-Wilcock wrote about was none other than our good friend Llorenç Riber!

Fuente/source

Héctor Libertella, ed.  11 relatos argentinos del siglo XX (Una antología alternativa) [11 20th Century Argentine Narratives: An Alternative Anthology]. Buenos Aires: Editorial Perfil, 1997, 241-266.

Más

El país de Juan Rodolfo Wilcock (La Nación)

Juan Rodolfo Wilcock: Rey iconoclasta (Milenio Online)

Farewell, My Lovely

Farewell, My Lovely (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, 1992)
by Raymond Chandler
USA, 1940

For anybody keeping score at home, I'm in the early stages of an ever so leisurely reread of all of Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe novels--looking for reading kicks, sure, but also looking to see how well these books hold up against my memories of them from days gone by.  So far Chandler and Marlowe are a solid two for two.  It's a measure of Farewell, My Lovely's success as an entertainment vehicle, though, that a far-fetched storytelling moment or two, an all too neat resolution of a love triangle and a murder, and some Hardy Boys-style credibility gaps didn't dim my enthusiasm for the novel as a whole.  It's a flawed but engaging work.  Although brash private detective Marlowe's first-person narration is as snappy as always ("Even on Central Avenue, not the quietest dressed street in the world, he looked about as conspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food," he memorably describes one goon [4]), one of the things that I'd forgotten about in this novel is that he engages in an unexpected running gag involving some none too subtle Hemingway-bashing: "Who is this Hemingway person at all?" asks the dirty cop who's just had the Hemingway nickname bestowed on him by Marlowe and is quickly getting fed up with the mysterious insult.  "A guy that keeps saying the same thing over and over until you begin to believe it must be good," Marlowe retorts (164).  Elsewhere, Marlowe's reaction when presented with a photograph of a missing person is typical of the high testosterone yucks to be found throughout the narrative: "It was a blonde.  A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window" [93]).  What makes this second Marlowe novel so fascinating from a thematic rather than a mere writing standpoint, though, is that Chandler took a genre tale of multiple murders in L.A. and boldly turned it into a kind of oblique commentary on the problems of race in big city America.  What was Chandler's message?  Thankfully, it's not so simple that I could tell you for sure.  However, in a novel where casual racism from white cops, criminals, and even Marlowe himself is often directed at "nigger[s]" (87), "Jap gardeners" (121), "a smelly Indian" (142) and the like, it's both uncomfortable and somehow bracing to see Marlowe's sarcastic indictment of the kind of justice available to blacks vs. whites: "Well, all he did was kill a Negro.  I guess that's only a misdemeanor" (118).  (www.weeklylizard.com)

Raymond Chandler

Farewell, My Lovely was my third novel or novella read for R.I.P. VI.

The next title will likely be either James M. Cain's 1934 The Postman Always Rings Twice (also an old fave of mine back in my high school and/or college days) or a short story by Daphne du Maurier (since I appear to be the only guy on the planet who's never read anything by her).