I had gone through all the Nero Wolfe books about 25 years
ago and have been wanting for a long time to read How Like A
God. I finally got my hands on a copy. It is simply one of
the more brilliantly written and bleak noir books I've
encountered. The only thing in common this has with Stout's
Nero Wolfe series is that it is masterfully written. The book
was published in 1929, and only in a few places feels at all
dated. The book follows thirty soome odd years of the
protagonist, Will Sidney, jumping back and forth between
different events in his life. This character is for the most
part disconnected from his life, the course his life takes
seems to be at the whim of those around him, and as things
progress he goes far off course from any sense of normalcy.
There's a desperation in his search for a connection to
something, anything. Written in the second person, and, along
with the way the time sequence shifts around, it leaves you
feeling almost as disconnected as Sidney. Here's an excerpt
from it:
You spluttered, raving, your face almost touching hers, and
all at once you saw two glistening drops of yor saliva appear
on her cheek, beside her mouth, but she did not lift her hand
to remove them; they remained there, shining like silver
bubbles. For an instant you gazed at them, fascinated; then,
dropping yor handkerchief into her lap and saying,
"Wipe off your face," you stepped back and stood there
looking at her.
"You don't need to spit on me," she said. As though suddenly
hypnotized into an immobility to match your own, you stood
and watched the accurate and inevitable movements of her hand
as she picked up the handkerchief, damp with your
perspiration, and rubbed it back and forth across her cheek;
always the same, the same as when she is eating the candy you
bring her or unbuttoning your clothes ...
Oh yeah, this was Stout's first book. And a hell of a first
book!
-Dave
-- # Plain ASCII text only, please. Anything else won't show up. # To unsubscribe from the regular list, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to # majordomo@icomm.ca. This will not work for the digest version. # The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 15 Mar 2004 EST