Reading is somehow like traveling and getting to know voices who may well become friends. My picks this time are from the US contemporary and less contemporary literature, and these are my new “friends.”
You can find these reading suggestions in a Newsletter available at Streetlib.com
I’ve just closed the last page of one of the most beautiful and touching readings I’ve ever had in years – The Largesse of the Sea Maiden by Denis Johnson. This is a collection of Johnson’s latest stories about existence, humanity, friendship and love, an unforgettable experience into truly authentic writing which may be seen as some sort of nourishment against the sense of loss and pain that all too often affects our life. Elegant and delicate is also Percival Everett’s So Much Blue, with its reflections into the adult life of an artist and family man. The straight story of the protagonist into a dramatic episode of his youth imbues of existential meaning his artistic strive to find a sense behind the surface of life and art, giving the title a double meaning which is both melancholy and evocative. For crime-story lovers who are always looking for a talented writer and great dialogues, gripping plots and complex characters, I’d like to suggest reading Margaret Millar’s A Stranger in My Grave. Millar worked as a screenwriter for Warner Brothers – her dialogues, situations, and plots delve into California’s provinces with their dark and mysterious settings and offer the reader another great experience into noir and family drama.
If you’re keen on crime and noir, with weird atmospheres and dark characters, few writers reach the peak of sarcasm, violence, and craziness as in Jim Thompson’s After Dark, My Sweet, one of his various novels which later became a film. Gripping dialogues, twisted characters, moral tensions, and some dramatic violence make the story an iconic model for any noir to come, which might be even darker than usual. Not as famous as his masterworks but as much as elegant, witty and disenchanted is Raymond Chandler’s Playback with our beloved private eye Philip Marlowe embedded into a supposedly simple plot set against a decadent Californian scenario. With its elusive women, retired chaps in vintage resorts and junkies laughing at his wisecracks this story is a pure vintage jewel where noir makes room for comedy.
Last but not least, I recommend Despair by Vladimir Nabokov – a great literary noir written firstly in Russian and then translated by the author into English in 1937. If you’re feeling more like reading a complex noir which transcends the crime novel and reaches the peaks of great literature, then go for this. If you’re obsessed by doppelgangers, getaways and heinous acts, this will be definitively your cup of (black) tea.
To wipe away the idea we have in mind when we think about the USA and their stereotypes, one should turn to different literary experiments and go off the beaten tracks of mainstream literature, whatever it means. Some writers in US contemporary literature are challenging the boundaries of what is considered “beauty” or “uplifting” fashionable writing, and are delving into some strange territories where the characters appear all the more realistic and somehow touching, notwithstanding their weirdness and stupidity and fragility and horrible existence. A writer of this type is Ottessa Moshfegh whose collection of stories, Homesick for Another World, starts someway where Joyce Carol Oates had left her borderline and problematic characters in such stories as Man Crazy or Haunted with their gothic allure. Moshfegh’s stories are not properly gothic, it’s the world that is a dark, weird place inhabited by incomprehensible, grotesque people, although humane, fragile and strangely beautiful. To cheer you up after that, your return to mainstream literature will not be the same as before, and you’ll need a “transition stage” – go for The Secret History of Twin Peaks by Mark Frost and don’t feel guilty if you fall for ghosts, aliens, Fbi’s superagents and military secrets. All the plot is a continuation to the original TV series and a network of possible explanations to the weirdness and inexplicability of what happened and maybe continues happening in a parallel world of imaginative power. Even though Laura Miller criticised Frost’s five hundred pages as a “threadbare of fetishes of the 20th century of conspiracy theory”, a reader who’s suffering from the withdrawal symptoms of Twin Peaks, needs to have something to soothe with, after all.
La lettrice immaginaria 