The translator Laura Dail must know her verb conjugations well. That’s extra important in a book written with a Spanish ojalá premise: if only detective Hector Shayne Belascoaran hadn’t died in the previous book. And you may believe the story that’s about to unfold, even to the climax when mariachi bands are employed as frontline troops.

Taibo brings Hector back to Mexico City for one more show, teasing with us about his right to create character immortality. We readers move up another notch in the suspension of disbelief scale, and we do so gladly because we are aficionados.

In many parts of the book the story is related in a variant of subjunctive mode with what if’s, and it would be nice that’s, and it could have happened like this’s. Owing to a good translation job and the brilliance of Taibo as a writer, the narrative is well-presented with a mix of voices from the humorous author and beleaguered heroic Hector. We buy in and feel assured of entertainment with plenty of human truths added.

During the series we sense that Paco and his character are one and the same soul.

This is likely it for one-eyed Hector and his pony-tail girlfriend. That’s okay, we can go back and re-read and enjoy the five other ones (plus there’s the untranslated “Días de Combate” to delve into).

By way of contrast Hotchner’s 1970s biography “Papa” is a great read, as close a look as we can get to Hemingway the man. It’s a good book for two reasons: one, Hotchner is a terrific writer, concise and communicative without being fancy; and two, he and Papa were truly good friends. The candor and respect shown between author and subject creates an eager reader interest and provides veracity to the accounts. Unlike other bio’s I’ve read, I never felt I was getting any bogus or skewed information in “Papa.”

This new one (dated October 20, 2015) was also produced by Hotchner, who’s now in his 90s.  Most all of the Paris players and the last wife are gone. Hotch admits in his intro that he waited in order to not step on any toes, or risk hurting Mary Hemingway’s feelings.  We see Hemingway as a changed person, closer to mortality after his two near-death Africa airplane crashes. Often he is drinking wine in a series of hotel room meetings with his pal Hotch. These were occasions when Papa was either in ostensibly high spirits or he was blue, expressing regret and spilling over with irony and self-effacement.

As good as Hotchner’s writing remains – and despite an unflagging interest and admiration of Hemingway and his circle – I don’t have the same sense of complete trust with this little book. It’s not a matter of doubt about the authenticity of the information, most of which is already known, or the personal portrayals of Hemingway.

Instead it’s a matter of how Hemingway’s dialog is captured in the text. There’s a license to fudge in a memoir, but long sections of Papa’s conversations sound too pat, too prosaic and laden with facts. The author has Papa describe events or people he knew and books they wrote with Wikipedian detail. Not so sure I buy the Midgetape recordings claim.

Enter knowing the entire universe is about Lotto and Mathilde.

The novel is an overwrought love story presented to us in a most literate and poetic way. It rolls out [twice] the truths and deceptions of a complex relationship between two exceptionally strong personalities. The his and her views are revealed under the watchful microscopic eye of the knowing author, the voyeuristic reader, and some snoopy secondary characters as well (e.g. Antoinette, Chollie, Rachel, and old ESP Bette).

Among the appositional statements the author throws into the mix, one of the most interesting appears when Shakespeare’s Volumnia is used as a point of comparison. Volumnia is the bad-ass mother figure in Coriolanus, who controls her son and rants obsessively, guarding him like a lover (her likeness is Antoinette). Coriolanus is maybe the most down and dirty play the Bard ever produced.

I think it’s safe to say Groff’s novel has more than its share of down and dirty: including cruel mothers, pandering perverts, drunk abusers, sleaze bags, con artists, dangerous neurotics, and lots of porn. Plus deceit, extortion, suicide, self-sterilization, betrayal, and vengeance.

Groff writes in language that is powerful and orchestrated with her content. Her imagery is raw and fresh, often hypnotic. Too often the aesthetic is dumbed down with a sudden sex act. The carnal imagery can go too far (or linger in a frat room somewhere) with lingo like, “and he shucked her right there.” When that happens, the narrative trance is interrupted.

Groff can do the atmospheric magic. She offers a fine portayal of caring artists and creativity in the colony-retreat section. The trap is set. Against idyllic venues on the beach and in the countryside or in the Big City and even Paris, she sets down a chilling collection of conniving, cold-hearted types fucking and vomiting and bickering their way through the pedestrian world. The characters wheel about. Back and forth we go: gifts and denials, triumphs and disappointments, comedy and tragedy.

Smelling the worst is the aroma of extortion.

In the long run, beauty and light edges out sordid darkness. The ending is sad and not as tidy as it could be. It meanders too much in time. It tries to offer redemption that seems too late. The dog named God is lost and then found. Conclusions are delivered before we can arrive at them.

As Orwell reminds us, a literary novel brings with it a wave of anarchy, and Groff is not afraid to shake things up, reach for the moon and take chances.

The title itself is the spoiler alert. Our hero is in deep trouble with the brutal paramilitary gang, the Halcones in Mexico City.

Taibo uses a tidy 12-chapter mystery format in this one. Other than a single chapter dedicated to the backstories of each of Hector’s office mates (for entertainment purposes, we suppose, not storyline), hardly a single word is wasted. Mexico City is laid out before us in gritty detail. It’s shown as a city beyond order and hope, held together by the remaining good-natured fabric of most of its natives. It’s a land of sugary soda pops, dangerous streets, venal policemen, gangsters, whores, and sometimes humorous and endearing characters, like the office crew and Hector’s elusive love interest, the girl with the pony tail.

Since authors can do such things, Taibo brings his hero back by popular demand in a subsequent novel “Return to the Same City,” subject of a future book report.

It’s the first chronologically in the English-translated series of Hector Belascoaran Shayne detective novels. The Mexican detective is introduced and developed.

The other – the real first book, is “Días de Combate” which Taibo published for Spanish-speaking readers only. I bought a copy and will give it my best shot translating/reading and reporting on it this winter.

As any review out there will tell you about “Easy Thing” (there is no article una in the Spanish title), the book’s made up of three cases that Hector has taken on at once. As he madly juggles the various events, we learn the most about him in the interim scenes when he’s with family, lovers, or his eclectic office mates (a sewer engineer, an upholsterer and a plumber). As in many American hardboiled crime stories, we are more entertained by the hero himself and his interplay and commentary on the world around him than by the actual plotlines.

Similar to his later novel “Frontera Dreams” (review), Taibo gives us realistic observations about the condition of Mexico, its inherent corruption, and the people’s low-key angst. “An Easy Thing” is longer than most Taibo novels and doesn’t exhibit the same kind of streamlined potency that “Frontera Dreams” has. But the gems within the story are well worth slogging through the most tedious of the three cases, the one about factory union murders. The other two cases, one about a porn star and her daughter involved in extortion, and the other a search to see if Mexican hero Emiliano Zapata is still alive, are less political and more entertaining.

*an earlier post described the recent movie adaptation

Like any great novel, On the Road has classic sections that read fresh and even more powerful when seen again years later. The most re-readable section of On the Road includes Parts 4 and 5, essentially the novel’s last hundred pages. This is by and large the Mexico trip, which can stand alone on its own raw energy.

Here you find Kerouac on a high wire writing super prose, tightly packaged in a limited timeframe. The episode exceeds phantasmagoria and becomes mythic. Characters loom larger than life within the land of ancient Toltecs. Dean Moriarty on the mountain takes on godlike characteristics. The Mexico account delivers the conclusive impressions of all the gang’s journeys. Their experiences have now peaked and they have pushed the envelope as far as they can. They then test their mortality and move close to the edge, near implosion, blindly expecting things to be resolved on their own accord. And, followed by some angels, they are. Mexico City, which they see as a sort of a Bohemian nirvana, quietly becomes the last stop. It’s the last Sal and Dean journey.

The romantic innocence that marked their earlier trips has gone, and they are in dire straits. They part ways, each suffering their own variety of illness (Dean’s is delusional, Sal’s is mortal). Restless Dean leaves, and Sal feels abandoned. Even back in NYC their bond never mends.

Within this last section, Kerouac artfully makes the symphonic tie-in’s with vital themes and major percussions heard throughout the preceding pages of his story. There is a completeness achieved, beginning with the moment the travelers become one with the Mexico earth and its dirt and insects. Then again when Sal hallucinates the end-game’s apocalyptic white horse. Dean the omni-visionary and perpetrator of convenient truths says he saw it too. Kerouac makes us see it as well.

There’s hard realism in these pages about the social devastation caused by hurricane Katrina. Maybe it’s as frank and true and graphic as you’ll find anywhere. You’ll read much about the disaster early in the book. Street-level. Then as pages go by, the more particular story tends to float and slog along with the murky waters of the flood. There is only so much one can say about hell and its parallels on earth before melodrama takes hold. Around the chaos of Katrina’s aftermath, Burke weaves a bad-guys-are-really,really-bad adventure. The pair of good guys Dave Robicheaux and his pal Clete Purcell strive to make things right. The storyline has its share of sudden shocks, twists and pitfalls, but I was wishing for the less-gloomy violence and pathos found in his other novels.

The narrative voice jumps from first person Dave to omniscient and back. It’s something crime writers often do, and they usually pull it off (to some extent) without any of their readers noticing. In this case, it may be overdone. I was prone to lose the narrative connection, that familiarity I had on page one when Dave talked about his time in Vietnam and its horrors. Burke’s POV “author” is conveniently all over the place. When we return to our man Dave, all the god-like narration in-between seems odd.

The New Orleans storm account (like the event and the nation’s reactions) is heavily laden with underlying questions of racism. Burke’s writing rides the razor’s edge between sympathy (for the flood victims) and loathing (for those who capitalized on the scene via criminal acts). There are some interesting factoids (and euphemistic epithets) thrown forth. For example: in the moments of urban rioting, there are two businesses that are always spared and not burned or looted (by the “Snoop Dog fans”)- funeral homes and the offices of bail bondsmen. Burke does not intellectualize nor direct this into a statement novel. There is a hint, but no mention of the “disaster capitalism” that Naomi Klein suggested as an intentioned by-product of Katrina. One thing for sure… lots of guns are everywhere, and that seems okay with everyone. In that sense I found the story angle a bit Republican in flavor, and it made me want to put the book down or at best hurry through to the end.

The Robicheaux books are written to be simple and very personal (with the hero’s touching family scenes, etc.). The texts have a salty Gulf Coast flavor, not unlike David Lindsey’s Houston detective books. Difference is, the hero of Lindsey’s series, detective Stuart Haydon, drives a Jaguar and has refined West University sensibilities. Dave R is simple and down-home. Whether in New Orleans or New Iberia, he’s an enlightened blue-collar Cajun type. The story is what it is – a fiction writer’s vision. But the account — the factual witnessing of the atrocious and tragic events during and after Katrina, that’s really what sells the book.

I give Burke a lot of credit for telling us about it without being unfair or sensationally biased (as most of the reporting networks were). Whatever made-up story Burke put around it was to me immaterial. Far as I’m concerned, Dave Eggers successfully cornered that aspect of things in his Katrina novel, “Zeitoun.”

Rumor columns say the Salinger estate will release additional works, some of which supposedly pick up characters of yore and take them forward in time. True? Who knows for sure other than a few lawyers?

Meanwhile, I’ve stashed the old and supposedly rare 1969 moldy, pot-smoked, yellow-page boxed set and am replacing it with clean copies. It was time.

If there are new JDS releases. I’ll be ready.  This summer, I’m revisiting the Glass family and Holden and DeDaumier-Smith and Teddy and all the others.   (to be continued)

((())) seymour bouquet of parentheses

It’s bad practice to post a brief book report after reading a few reviews on Amazon, at least in my own writer guidelines. But this time, I did just that. The uneasy sense of confusion I had while reading this Salter book was too much. I rapidly went in search of confirmation. I found that others had similar reactions. One reviewer said it best, that Slater gives us an engaging intelligent narrator in a lovely setting in France and then tosses a monkey wrench into the telling.

In a klunky way, Salter puts his narrator in the role of describing some other guy’s romance.  We sense an odd attraction between the two men. Why, we aren’t sure. This is far from Nick and Gatsby, or that type of clearly executed observer voice. This is an odd hybrid of first POV and third POV. Much of it is unknowable by the first person voice, yet documented in vivid scenes. Since he’s not present, it is impossible for him to document the episodic sex scenes between his friend Dean and this Ann chick. So the narrator says, well, I’m sort of imagining it.  Huh?

There’s plenty of flesh. The book was written in the Sixties (1967) when womens’ rights awareness wasn’t yet raised to the height of the 70s. Still, there is a lot of room for feminist complaint about the objectification of a woman, i.e., Ann being a mindless sperm receptacle, etc. Fact is, Dean is pretty shallow too. Maybe in that sense he is a harbinger of men characters in future women’s novels. The ones in which women’s characters are duly given full development but at the cost (intentional or not) of shallow portrayal of the male characters. In a sort of role reversal the male characters end up as sex objects themselves, like mindless and faceless hard-ons.

This book has been touted as a “writers’ kind of writing” novel, a sort of paragon of styles and language. The writing itself is very good.  Slater has a refined style and immense talent with words. Stretches of it were so well written I went into a reader’s trance. But overall I didn’t like the story and characters and found the novel difficult to digest.