Somewhere, maybe even here, I read an essay about the
national differences in what passes for detective novels and
other people's reactions to something other than what they
expect: Where's the plot? Would the narrator shut up? and so
forth.
And then there's all the cultural and
historical material integral to a satisfying book. Most
readers didn't get an A in Latin American history, and I
would have been lost without mine in a Mexican detective
story I read in translation. There's a book set in Botswana
(_The Ladies' Detective Agency_ or the like) that's getting a
lot of buzz, all of which starts, "It's not exactly. . .
."
So, say I spent the next 10 years
learning French (given my year of it in high school, I'd need
20 years, but then I had a teacher who deemed it impossible
to speak), what if I found French hardboiled to lack credible
motivation? Anyway, that's my excuse for not making the
effort.
Joy, back to copyediting maybe her hundredth brief survey of
defense mechanisms
<
markhall@gol.com> wrote:
> you also have a risk factor---some of these authors,
while genre
> afficianados will love, won't easily be translatable
to a more general
> market, and might actually turn a lot of genre
afficiannados off. While
> not hard-boiled, Haruki Murakami comes to my
mind---a very distinctive
type
> of magical realism that often turns off magical
realist fans. And then
> there is my complaint about a lot of Japanese
fiction I read in
> translation---great mood and setting, but where the
hell is the plot???
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