And the winner is…?
Sorry, but I think I said I would announce the first week of March.
Enjoy your weekend!
Let’s have a contest!
January 31, 2012 at 9:09 pm (Books, Personal, Writing)
Tags: contest, Kansas Two-Step
Well, I’ve got this blog and I’ve got a website and I’ve got some decent product in the form of two novels, a collection of novellas, and two collections of poetry. My first novel “Kansas Two-Step” has gotten a shot in the arm from a vlog on Keyhole Conversations. I figured I could generate even more buzz.
And who doesn’t love a contest?
This one is simple but fun. Go to my website, hbberlow.com, go to the Guestbook and send me a creative message telling me what your favorite dance is and why. That’s all.
The contest will run the entire month of February and the winner will be announced the first week of March. Don’t forget to include your e-mail address when you enter so I can contact you for mailing address info.
Put on your reading glasses and your dancing shoes.
“Time’s Arrow” — Martin Amis
August 9, 2011 at 7:17 pm (Books, Writing)
Tags: Martin Amis
Of late, I’ve been challenging myself as a reader.
“Naked Lunch” with its psychotropic excursions into the world of drug addiction. “Filth” written largely in Scot dialect with a visual apparition of a tapeworm infesting the main character’s body. And now Martin Amis’ novel which was short listed for the Booker Prize.
The main character, Tod T. Friendly, dies at the beginning of the novel and regresses throughout. The world is run backward. Patients, who are well, leave the doctor’s office sick. Conversation need to be read twice, in both directions. Tod goes to New York City, where his name changes, and then takes a ship to Europe, where his name changes again, and then becomes a Nazi doctor in a concentration camp.
Amis has an extreme fascination with words, structures of sentences, double meanings, and ambiguities. It is quite difficult to revert your way of thinking when you go into a novel such as this. However, as with my previous two examples, it was at an undetermined point in the reading when I understood the time sequences and the methodologies.
This is by no means “light reading” or something to be read for pure entertainment. After the previous two novels it will be quite important for me to read something light. Like a good piece of crime fiction.
“Chasing the Devil’s Tail” – David Fulmer
July 6, 2011 at 9:16 pm (Books, Writing)
Tags: Creole, crime fiction, New Orleans
This intriguing book is the first for the author. It is a murder mystery set in New Orleans in 1907 with a Creole detective investigating the brutal murders of several prostitutes in the Storyville section of the city. The novel integrates real life characters (musicians Buddy Bolden and Jelly Roll Morton, photographer E.J. Bellocq) with colorful denizens who could just as well have been real.
The novel is infused with language of the time and expressions that are unique to the period. I did not stop to look up any of the words or phrases that were not “modern” so as not to interrupt the flow of the narrative. The descriptions of New Orleans of the period give a sense of feeling, the sensory images conveying a mood and a feeling of the climate.
In contemporary crime fiction and television and movies, we have become used to scientific applications, forensic testing, and computer analysis. This is all absent from this novel due to the time period. That being the case, the investigatory thread of the narrative relies on perception, intuition, and intellectual analysis. Therefore there are some sections that drag and the evocative description can not completely make up for it.
That being said it is still a remarkably entertaining piece with all the required elements necessary to become a series (which it has). I was fascinated with the historical nature of it. {I also enjoyed “The Alienist” by Caleb Carr and “Nevermore” by William Hjortsberg.) At the end of the book, Fulmer dedicates barely a page to the research he had done on the piece. By contrast, I had written a blog entry on another and far more famous novelist who dazzles us with his research acumen over eight pages. {Apparently this more famous novelist must use Google alerts because he found the entry and responded with scathing criticism of my blog entry. After I responded with courtesy, he turned around and thanked ME for MY civility. It was a completely ironic turn of events.}
I have another book by Fulmer, Jass, also in his series. I will interested in seeing if the crime investigation portion goes deeper than this first offering.
“Low Life” – Ryan David Jahn
May 9, 2011 at 7:15 pm (Blogging, Books, Writing)
Tags: existential, Ryan David Jahn, thriller
I had never read an existential thriller until I finished the above mentioned book. Unlike standard thrillers where there is a relative amount of action and suspense, Jahn posits a scenario and then runs his main character through a set of daunting paces.
It does start rather slowly, detailing the boring life of a boring man. Simon Johnson lives in seeming decrepitude and has a life unworthy of a story. At same point, a man breaks into his run-down apartment and attempts to kill him. In defending himself, he kills the intruder and discovers a remarkable resemblance to the deceased. He sets about to discover who the man is and why he wanted to kill him.
There is a need to suspend disbelief initially. The character of Simon is blase at best and it is hard initially to accept that he would undertake this personal and psychological journey into a great unknown. But as the intensity builds and the answers do not seem readily apparent, we do desire to see Simon’s effort through to the end.
Jahn could have bailed out early on this premise and cut it short with a pat answer akin to the end of a CSI-type hour-long drama on television. Instead he digs and explores deeply. There are twists and turns and repositioning of the time continuum which becomes understood at the conclusion. The book is challenging in that it does not rely solely on the tools of a standard thriller but delves into what makes a person themselves or want to be someone else.
Jahn has a great blog, Guns and Verbs, which reveals some of his whimsical character as well as his considerations on the writing life. His debut novel, Acts of Violence has already been translated into several languages and he shows great promise for a long and successful career.
“Swann’s Last Song” – Charles Salzberg
May 1, 2011 at 9:45 pm (Books, Writing)
Tags: Charles Salzberg, crime fiction, hard-boiled, KWA
This novel was nominated for a 2009 Shamus Award by the Private Eye Writers of America and it is easy to see why. Salzberg takes the traditional private eye noirish novel and flips it around so that your expectations are skewed.
First, the main character, Henry Swann, is NOT a private eye but rather a muddled and troubled skip tracer living and working in a rundown section of New York City. Therefore it sidesteps all the usual clichés of the detective novel. Swann is certainly NOT Philip Marlowe or Sam Spade. Not even close. The novel makes what appears to be a traditional segue to California where the culture clash scenes are prevalent. However, Swann makes a trip to a hacienda in Mexico followed by a dangerous trek into the mountains. This appears to be more of something from “Romancing the Stone” or an Indiana Jones movie.
If this locale is not jarring enough, Swann then flies to Berlin where there is all the rainy and dark cloudiness of a Robert Ludlum spy thriller. And yet, throughout all these romps across the globe, it never falls back into a travelogue with droll descriptions of scenes and places. It is mood that Salzberg is creating.
The story is rather muddled but in that regard it is no different than the classic “The Big Sleep” (which Chandler readily admitted that he was uncertain as to who committed one particular killing.) Stories of this type are about character and mood and Salzberg creates a new and fresh version of the genre.
——–
I had the opportunity to meet Charles Salzberg at the KWA Scene Conference in Wichita in 2010. He was a speaker as well as a consultant who I had the opportunity to visit with on a ten-minute consult. We discussed (briefly) my transgressive work, “Weekend Getaways, or Adventures in Contract Killing” and I was encouraged by his comments and grateful for his feedback.
He is one the founders of the New York Writers Workshop (www.newyorkwritersworkshop.com) and heavily involved with Greenpoint Press (www.greenpointpress.org). He is gracious to a fault and a pleasant conversationalist (as I experienced at lunch).
I was absolutely delighted to have made his acquaintance and honored to have an inscribed copy of his novel.
“Trash” by Irvine Welsh
April 28, 2011 at 7:51 pm (Books, Writing)
Tags: Bret Easton Ellis, Irvine Welsh, transgressive fiction
I just finished reading this book by the same author of the more popular work “Trainspotting”. I chose this newer piece because I didn’t want to be influenced by having seen portions of the movie version of the earlier work.
I came across Irvine Welsh originally when I was finding writers of Transgressive fiction. This work certainly fits the bill. The blurb on the back says “…in an Irvine Welsh novel nothing is ever so bad that it can’t get a whole lot worse.” It is also a highly challenging piece for a number of reasons.
First, it is written in predominantly Scots dialect. I hadn’t read anything of that ilk since studying Robert Burns. It took a while to get used to the vernacular and the accompanying slang.
Second, like Brett Easton Ellis’ “American Psycho”, the main character does not have a lot of redeeming features. Bruce Robertson, a Scottish police Detective Sergeant is racist, misogynistic, a manipulator of his friends, a heavy drinker and cocaine user, and since he doesn’t do his own laundry, his stench emanates from the pages.
He is investigating the murder of a black man and he doesn’t really feel it is worth his time or effort to solve the case. The reasons are revealed later in the book.
And third, the book employs an intriguing typographical feature of showing a parasite (a tapeworm) living inside his body. It places itself directly over the text you are trying to read. Initially there are small fragments until much later in the book, the parasite becomes Robertson’s voice of conscience while, at the same time, hoping that Robertson (the Host) lives so that the creature will as well.
I was enthused that such a work was indeed published because my own Work In Progress (“Weekend Getaways, or Adventures in Contract Killing”) also is rather dark and employs elements of unusual typography for visual as well as emotional effect.
I enjoyed the work largely because Welsh keeps Robertson grounded in a real world of the working class and giving some indication that the character feels justified (which is the point behind Transgressive fiction.) I was up for the challenge of reading something that seemed more like a connection of anecdotes than a traditional Three Act formula. I was caught up in the descriptions of location despite the fact that I’d never been to Scotland. And finally, I could see behind all the darkness a sense of humanity, one that might have been different under other circumstances.
If Irvine Welsh can write these kinds of work, I am encouraged to know that my dark comic Transgressive work just might have a place as well.
