RARA-AVIS: Didier Daeninckx

judith feaster (jfeaster@email.gc.cuny.edu)
Mon, 17 Nov 1997 16:11:06 I noticed Daeninckx's name pop up recently in your discussion and am hoping
some of you have read his novels. His work is particularly interesting to
me because it so successfully exploits the access popular genre affords in
the name of explicit political agendas. I am a graduate student in
Comparative Literature at CUNY Grad Center in New York and I am soon to
begin a dissertation on literary genre and national-cultural referentiality
focusing mainly on the genesis of the American hardboiled genre(guess what?
I am a 27 year-old woman, too!). I am interested in that period because of
the great challenge that was presented by the two world wars towards
marshalling national-cultural identity as aesthetic tokens. So your
exchanges of the last few days have been especially fun to read - all that
theorization about what exactly the European interest in "Americanness" via
popular genres like hardboiled detective literature and westerns might
reveal.

I've been too shy to write until now since I am just beginning my research
but I do share your love for the hardboiled genre. My favorite writer is
Raymond Chandler but I am just now in the middle of THE ASPHALT JUNGLE and
I just cannot get over the sweetness of its writing, all that intense,
particularized description and the ever-changing characters as humble,
insecure criminals. I guess it's kind of funny and sentimental, which some
people really hate. I also like the regular joe character in hardboiled
novels and your discussion makes me wonder to what extent serialization
contributed to the location of the hard-boiled genre. I mean that even if a
book was not serialized, it may have been influenced by the tone of those
that were. I am even thinking back to Poe and his recurring Dupin character
who sets the tone for the narrative.

I think you should check out Daeninckx's novels; they are contemporary but
some are periodized and his detectives have a wistful self-consciousness
reminiscent of Chandler's Marlowe. Also, the city (usually Paris) in his
books becomes characterized like Chandler's Los Angeles and Paretsky's
Chicago. In my favorite, LE DER DES DERS, his PI Rene Griffon drives a
Packard and is friends with an expatriate American named Bob who sells army
surplus blue jeans on the black market. "Bob" with a French accent. Others
I have read are:
Meurtres pour memoire
Le bourreau et son double
Lumiere noire

I know the first is available in translation as MURDER IN MEMORIAM. By the
way, I have never understood exactly what "le der des ders" refers to. Do
any of you French speakers know?

Thanks, JUDY

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