Re: RARA-AVIS: Re: Name Your Poison

From: DJ-Anonyme@webtv.net
Date: 31 Aug 2006


David wrote:

"i haven't read Bruen, but this sounds kind of like what i was getting at when i said that certain authors sometimes make good sense of nonsense. i am thinking of books like A Wild Sheep's Chase by Murakami, for one, or anything by Steve Erickson for another, though these books aren't strictly noir."

Bruen isn't really comparable to these two. There is no sense of the supernatural, as with Murakami, or the surreal, as with Erickson (well, maybe a touch of the surreal, I could certainly see one of these books featuring Breton's gun being shot into a crowd). There are no sci-fi elements at all. The Brant novels are definitely set in this world. It's just that the characters are sometimes larger than life and the situations are sometimes on the absurd side, but the absurdity of real life -- there is little of the imposed structure that Kevin recently described fiction as having. Yes, the reader is told the solution of whatever the given crime is in a partcular book (even if the cops might not solve it, a killer being randomly killed before being caught, or moving away, etc), but the crime is not the real appeal, but the characters and the instituion in which they work. The crime is just an excuse to set these characters into action.

Like Chris, I'm usually with Kevin in wanting structured fiction, that randomness is usually just a excuse for sloppiness, but Bruen is one of the few that can make it work. His Brant series is pretty near unique.

Mark

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