Philip Marlowe – Raymond Chandler

I’ve already mentioned how I started reading Chandler and Hammett because of Pulp Fiction’s poster.

Yes, Philip Marlowe is the epitome of cool: hard when he needs to, suave in the few cases when he should be so, gifted with women, tough with thugs, and – ultimately – always right, even when he’s wrong. But in Chandler’s books the narrator is (often, if not always – I don’t know as I haven’t read all his books) Marlowe himself. And to me that makes him sound, well, like he’s trying a bit too hard. I mean, if you’re trying to show how great you are, you surely don’t need to tell your reader how wonderfully witty your deadpan one-liners actually are, do you? Shouldn’t your actions do the talking for you, instead of your unreliably biased pen?

This is just a thought: Chandler’s books are wonderfully entertaining (although maybe not great literature), but a third person narrator would actually add swag (if it was ever needed) to his detective...

The Impressionist – Hari Kunzru

Another 30p surplus copy that my wife bought at the Barbican library, and a novel that I later took on a research trip to Rome, where I would hit the archives in the early morning, hit the city in the late afternoon, and hit the bed of a centrally located convent (yes, I wasn’t swimming in money as a Ph.D. student!) with a book or a movie in the (very) early evening.

I’m not quite sure if I was upset with myself for not liking a book by Kunzru, or kind of upset with him for writing a book that I couldn’t like. I had very high expectations from the book right after reading of Pran’s conception (in its biological rather than literary meaning) and getting ideas about the kinds of reactions that his complexion could cause.

But, sadly, the novel was a bit vacuous (like Pran himself) and never really won me over with its description of idealized and glorified places (which, to me, remain very much idealized and glorified even when they are deprecated in the novel). I just felt like Woody Allen’s Zelig was a much more interesting (and likeable) chameleonic character...

An Awfully Big Adventure – Beryl Bainbridge

I’ve never bought a book on a whim, without having ever heard of its title and without knowing anything about it except that it has a cool cover page. Luckily my mom has (although not often) and this is the fruit of a trip to a dingy remainder bookshop and the smirking face of Hugh Grant on a front cover.

Being about theatre, the book has a clear British air about it – magnified by the fact that everything is set in the years immediately following the Second World War and the (rightfully) glorified victory in the Battle of Britain.

An Awfully Big Adventure is an awfully heavy book masked (at least in its Italian edition) as a light-hearted journey of self-discovery. It took me quite a few pages before I started to understand the depth of the novel I was reading, but when I started to realize what I was dealing with I was completely wrong-footed.

I still can’t listen to a speaking clock without thinking about this book. And, for much that I don’t like Chinatown-like twists (something I already mentioned) this one totally shocked me.

Manhattan Transfer – John Dos Passos

I read this book – my first one by Dos Passos – right before my last trip to the USA. In all honesty, I can’t really say that I’ve loved it (however, I did try, really quite hard).

Manhattan Transfer oozes love for New York City, but that’s not always sufficient to make a great work, even for someone as fond of the place as I am (just ask Woody Allen – his adoration for NYC is as apparent in Hannah and Her Sisters just like it is in Anything Else, yet the two movies aren’t quite of the same calibre...).

Individually taken, the stories of all the characters in Manhattan Transfer are intriguing and typically New Yorkesque. Yet, to me, the book – with its constant changes of perspective and its stream of consciousness – was just too hard to follow, and what I was left with was a series of interesting anecdotes and a plot I really didn’t understand. I’m sure I was the problem here, which is just a big shame...