Publisher: HarperCollins

Dead Man Switch by Tara Moss

Posted July 21, 2021 by Michael @ Knowledge Lost in Crime / 0 Comments

Dead Man Switch by Tara MossTitle: Dead Man Switch (Goodreads)
Author: Tara Moss
Series: Billie Walker Mystery #1
Published: HarperCollins, 2019
Pages: 368
Genres: Crime
My Copy: Library Book

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After 19 books, mainly from her Mak Vanderwall crime series and a YA paranormal series, Tara Moss is trying her hand at hard-boiled fiction. Dead Man Switch is the first book in the new Billie Walker series set in Sydney in the late 1940s. I knew I had to try this book out for two main reasons, one I love hard-boiled literature and was interested in checking out a novel set in Australia and secondly, I wanted to see how Moss would handle the female detective approach.

Without going into details about the plot, it’s a missing persons case that leads to Billie Walker uncovering a much bigger secret; I think reviewing this novel needs to focus away from the storyline. Moss really shines in the research and exploring the sexism Billie faces in her work. Dead Man Switch never refers to Billie Walker as a detective, it does make references to her as a private investigator and this stood out to me because Australian laws does not permit the use of the term detective outside the police department. Little facts like this really reminded me of the importance of research and they helped keep the novel hard-boiled without Americanising the plot.

Obviously, gender would play a big role in this book, and Tara Moss seemed to play with this in a fun way; Billie’s assistant Sam was happy to help a woman with any task necessary for the case but then others criticised her for taking a man’s job. Billie took over the business when her father had died, which is the reasoning behind her profession but now that the war was over, people thought she should leave this kind of work to men that needed work. This was a great way to explore the sexism and gender divide of the era and helped enhance Billie as a strong, take no nonsense character.

I had fun reading this book, and I am interested to see where Tara Moss takes the Billie Walker series. I am very particular in my crime novel picks and I wish this was a little darker and grittier, but I have to respect that Moss has plans for this character. There are not enough strong women detectives in crime novels, particularly in hard-boiled novels, so in a genre normally dominated by boring white men, this is a great change. I have no idea when book two will be released but I will be sure to read it. It is hard to review a crime novel, because the plot and characters play such a significant part of the reading experience, but I hope I have convinced someone to give Dead Man Switch a chance. For all the American readers of this review, this book is called The War Widow on your continent, which gives you a little insight on Billie Walker’s social situation.


Crash by J.G. Ballard

Posted August 9, 2017 by Michael @ Knowledge Lost in Classic / 0 Comments

Crash by J.G. BallardTitle: Crash (Goodreads)
Author: J.G. Ballard
Published: Harper Perennial, 1973
Pages: 185
Genres: Classic
My Copy: Paperback

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I have always enjoyed transgressive fiction, not because it is controversial and it breaks free from the expectations of society, but because of its satirical nature. When exploring the darker side of humanity, you are always going to get some attention and let’s face it, controversy sells. I am drawn to transgressive fiction because it defies conventional literature. Where else do you get to explore addiction and antisocial behaviours in a safe environment? It is a philosophy in its self, a way to strip away everything and look at the act itself. In the essay “Preface to Transgression”, Michel Foucault described it as a place where, “…God is absent, and where all of our actions are addressed to his absence in a profanation which at once identifies it, dissipates it, exhausts itself in it, and restores it to the empty purity of its transgression.” To me, it sums it up more intelligently than I could, it is a place where morality and laws are stripped away, allowing us to explore the nature of the transgressive in detail.

The nature of transgressive fiction did mean that these novels got a lot of attention and many were banned or the subject of obscenity trials. Yet some of the classics in this genre helped explore the ideas found in psychoanalysis (a psychological theory dedicated to treating mental disorders by investigating the interaction of the unconscious and conscious mind) and psychosexual development (psychoanalytical field dedicated to sexual behaviour, in particular the Freudian theory of the five stages of sexual development). Behind all the controversy, I think of the underlying themes to be found in transgressive fiction is one of self-discovery in an unaccepting world. The term ‘counterculture’ comes to mind when thinking about transgressive fiction, but even before that term was penned, we had D.H. Lawrence exploring a love affair between two different classes in Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Georges Bataille taking an unconventional look at his relationship with his father in Story of the Eye.

When thinking about J.G. Ballard’s 1973 novel Crash, I was having a difficult time working out how it fit into the genre. When thinking of it in relation to psychosexual development, Crash does explore symphorophilia (coined in 1984 to refer to a paraphilia in which sexual arousal involves staging and watching tragedies like car accidents), autassassinophilia (a paraphilia where an individual derives sexual arousal by the thought and/or risk of dying), and/or car crash fetishism. It is certainly controversial, one publisher famously said, “This author is beyond psychiatric help. Do Not Publish!” about Crash, but what did this novel have to say about society? Just to give you some background about this novel, it originally was a short story in the 1970 book The Atrocity Exhibition. Written shortly after his wife’s sudden death, the book is a series of interconnecting stories that explores the idea of how mass media inadvertently invades and splinters the mind of an individual. Suffering a mental breakdown, the protagonist (a doctor in a psychiatric hospital) surrenders to the world of psychosis.

Knowing this, I was beginning to understand what J.G. Ballard was trying to explore in Crash. If you look at cinema and the impact the Hays Code had on movies you might better understand the drastic change to films in the 1970s. In 1968, the code was officially replaced with the MPAA film rating system, which lead to an influx of controversial movies full of sex and violence. I think some of the darkest and grittiest movies come from this era. So does that mean Ballard is exploring mass media sensationalising sex and violence?

The automobile has become a huge part of our lives, we rely and depend on it to get us around but the amount of car accidents that lead to death is extremely high. According to the Association for Safe International Travel (ASIRT), nearly 1.3 million people die in road crashes each year, on average 3,287 deaths a day, while an additional 20-50 million people suffer injuries from car accidents. Globally, a car crash is the 9th leading cause of death, but in the 1970s this statistic would be much worse. This means, a car accident will be one of the most devastating experiences in some people’s lives. So what is Ballard trying to say when he explores this idea of sexual pleasure from a crash? That, I will leave to the reader.

Another thing that stood out to me in Crash was the narrator was named James Ballard. Naming the protagonist after himself means that the reader has to ask some very confronting questions, because we cannot rely on the author to give us the answers. I think it was a brilliant move by J.G. Ballard, automatically we might think that this is a fetish of the author but this allows him to explore the “empty purity of [this] transgression”. We are confronted we a completely different perspective and in the words of Ballard about this novel “[he] wanted to rub the human face in its own vomit. I wanted to force it to look in the mirror.”

In the end, like all good transgressive novels, Crash did leave me with plenty to think about. I had a lot of issues with this novel, I think the repetitive nature really hindered my enjoyment. I am not going to write off J.G. Ballard completely, but I am unsure which novel to try next; I was thinking High Rise. I love when a book leaves me thinking, and even writing this essay, I think I have gained a great appreciation of this controversial novel. Maybe I will return to it in the distant future and see what I think.

 


Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes

Posted July 5, 2016 by Michael @ Knowledge Lost in Classic / 8 Comments

Don Quixote by Miguel de CervantesTitle: Don Quixote (Goodreads)
Author: Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
Translator: Edith Grossman
Published: Harper Perennial, 1615
Pages: 940
Genres: Classic
My Copy: Paperback

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Don Quixote is a staple in western literature, it ushered in the golden age of Spanish literature and it is also is one of the earliest examples of the modern (canonical) novel. The novel tells the story of a Spanish nobleman (Hidalgo) obsessed with the chivalric romance literature of the middle ages, who sets out to try and revive chivalry. With his trusty squire Sancho Panza, he sets out on an adventure to undo all the wrongs and injustices he encounters in the world. Claiming to be a knight. he gives himself the name Don Quixote of La Mancha.

From the very start, we get a sense that maybe Don Quixote is crazy. In psychology the term Quixotism relates to “over-idealism” and is often used in reference to someone with a naïve romanticism towards utopianism. The term “tilting at windmills” refers to a scene near the beginning of the novel where Don Quixote races off to fight giants that were actually windmills. If you consider that Don Quixote went mad from all the books he was reading and set off to try and fix the world, then this could be used as a metaphor towards Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra own feeling toward the same books, but rather than fixing the world he wrote Don Quixote. This brings to mind the quote from Toni Morrison “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.”

Don Quixote, like many books of the time, was read to children; this is a novel I could never imagine being read to any child now. However one thing that makes this novel so great is that there are so many interpretations to be taken from the text. Harold Bloom (who wrote the introduction to my copy of the book) calls this a work of radical nihilism and anarchy, in the way it glorifies fantasy over reality. Calling him the Sorrowful Knight whose objective is that “He is at war with Freud’s reality principle, which accepts the necessity of dying.” The translator of the edition I read, Edith Grossman, has said, “When I first started reading the Quixote I thought it was the most tragic book in the world, and I would read it and weep”. However when she worked on the translation she remembered “sitting at my computer and laughing out loud.”

After the French Revolution a popular interpretation of the novel was that it was about ethics and righting the wrongs of society.  While later on it was a social commentary which always lead to the discussion of whose side Cervantes was on. You could even pull some religious or feminist themes out of this novel but for me, I read this as a Marxist text. The relationship between Don Quixote and Sancho Panza was a good representation of the class struggle. It is evident that Quixote needed Sancho Panza more than Panza needed him. Sancho Panza was there to rise the ranks of society while Don Quixote was be completely lost without his squire.

I cannot talk about Don Quixote without mentioning the way that Miguel de Cervantes played with intertextuality. This novel is split into two parts; the first part was originally published in 1605. In 1614 a second volume was released by an anonymous author. It is believed that Miguel de Cervantes started writing his second part after this and in 1615 it was released. While part one was a spoof of the literature that annoyed him, part two was more an attack on this unauthorised story of Don Quixote. It even made references to this scandal as Don Quixote explores the concept of someone writing about him.

This is the type of novel that deserves to be read again and again. Every reading will probably offer something different and this review is a reference point of what I got out of reading this book the first time around. If you get the chance, I recommend reading this with someone. I read this with Hilary from Yrrobotfriend and the discussions were the best part of this reading experience. While reading this novel I enjoyed part one the most but on reflection, I think part two offers more.


Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson

Posted March 30, 2015 by Michael @ Knowledge Lost in Book of the Month, Classic / 2 Comments

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. ThompsonTitle: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (Goodreads)
Author: Hunter S. Thompson
Artist: Ralph Steadman
Published: Harper Perennial, 1971
Pages: 230
Genres: Classic
My Copy: Paperback

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Journalist, Raoul Duke heads to Las Vegas with his attorney Dr Gonzo in order to cover the Mint 400 motorcycle race. After experimenting with some recreational drugs, LSD, ether, cocaine, cannabis and alcohol, their assignment was quickly abandoned. What follows is a series of hallucinogenic trips that end in disaster from trashed hotel rooms, car wrecks and much more. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream is a roman à clef, with autobiographical elements in which Hunter S. Thompson writes a retrospective of the 1960s countercultural movement.

Hunter S. Thompson was a journalist, but he was best known for his novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. While working in Journalism he coined the term Gonzo journalism which is a writing style he adopted for his first person narratives. The style is a combination of fact and fiction that allows Thompson a more personal approach to his articles. Combining elements of sarcasm, humour, exaggeration and profanity it allowed a first person look into social criticism. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was a result of Gonzo journalism and was originally published as a two part series in Rolling Stone magazine in 1971.

When thinking about the life of Hunter S. Thompson, I find it hard to imagine him as someone who  critiques the 1960s counterculture. I think of him saying things like “I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they’ve always worked for me.” Thompson has often stated that this novel was an exploration into the death of the American Dream but his views on counterculture are so fascinating. Drawing inspiration from his two favourite novels The Great Gatsby and On The Road, Thompson combines ideas of travelogue and the American Dream and goes on to show the reason why drug use was not the answer to social problems.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is a pretty confronting novel; the descriptions of drug-induced hazes and lurid hallucinogenic trips are very vivid and confronting. I am pretty sure I have read this book in the past but I had not marked it as read on Goodreads, LibraryThing or even the spreadsheet I keep. However going into the novel everything felt so familiar and I cannot tell if it was due to the movie adaptation or if I have actually read the book before.

The experience of reading Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is enhanced by the illustrations done by Ralph Steadman. My edition of the book stated in the introduction that Hunter S. Thompson requested the art to be done by Steadman because he believed this illustrator really understood the concept of Gonzo journalism. The novel is an interesting book and well worth exploring, and I was interested to see the satirical side and surprised at the way Thompson criticised his own lifestyle in this autobiographical novel.


In the First Circle by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Posted January 9, 2015 by Michael @ Knowledge Lost in Classic / 0 Comments

In the First Circle by Aleksandr SolzhenitsynTitle: In the First Circle (Goodreads)
Author: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Translator: Harry Willets
Published: Harper Perennial, 1968
Pages: 784
Genres: Classic
My Copy: Paperback

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Moscow, Christmas Eve 1949; a man makes a phone call to the American embassy to warn them about the Soviet Atom Bomb project. This call was caught on tape and quickly disconnected by The People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD). A brilliant mathematician named Gleb Nerzhin, was taken as a sharashka (known as zeks) prisoner and ordered to help track down the mystery caller. The zeks know that they have it better than a “regular” gulag prisoners but they are faced with the moral dilemma; to aid a political system they oppose or be transferred to the deadly labour camps.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is a Russian author as well as a historian; he was also a critic of Soviet totalitarianism which found himself in prison much like Gleb Nerzhin. He was accused of anti-revolutionary propaganda under Russian SFSR Penal Code (Article 58 paragraph 10) which is a ‘catch-all’ criminal offence that could be used against anyone that might threaten the government. During the period of Stalinism, the crime of “propaganda and agitation that called to overturn or undermining of the Soviet power” jumped from a six month prison sentence to seven years of imprisonment, with possible internal exile for two to five years. On 7 July 1945, Solzhenitsyn was sentenced to seven years in a labour camp for comments he made in private letters to a friend. After his sentence ended, Solzhenitsyn was then internally exiled for life at Kok-Terek, which is in the north-eastern region of Kazakhstan.

The First Circle was self-censored before Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn even attempted to get it published in 1968. Originally the book was 96 chapters long but the censorship turned the novel into 87 chapters. Some changes included the man telling another doctor to share some new medicine with the French instead of warning the Americans about the atom bomb. All mention of the Roman Catholics and religion was also removed. It wasn’t till 2009 a new English translation (not sure of the details on the Russian editions) saw the book restored and uncensored; now with the title In The First Circle.

The title alone is fascinating and it allows the reader to pick up on the whole metaphor before starting the novel. Looking at Dante’s Inferno, it is easy to find that the first circle of hell is limbo. In the epic poem Virgil introduces Dante to people like Socrates, Plato, Homer, Horace and Ovid. The time between Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection is often referred to as the Harrowing of Hell, in which he descended into limbo and brought salvation to the righteous. However in Dante’s Inferno this meant that Christ saved people like Noah, Moses, Abraham and King David, but a lot of the intellectuals where left. This is metaphor for the penal institutions, making reference to all the intellectuals and political thinkers arrested under Stalin’s Russia.

This novel made me feel a lot smarter than I actually am, there is a lot of information within In The First Circle however Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn presented them in accessible way. Going into the book I knew a little about Solzhenitsyn’s life and the metaphor in the title was explained in the Goodreads synopsis. So I was able to witness how everything came together without doing any research. The book sometimes goes into Russian history; I was fascinated with everything I learnt.

I have read so many books set in Cold War Russia but I don’t think there have been many actually written by a Russian. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has lead an interesting life and I am keen to read more of his novels before attempting The Gulag Archipelago, his three volume book on the history of a gulag labour camp. If you have paid attention to my best of 2014 list you would have noticed that In The First Circle did make the list. This was a wonderful book that was both thrilling and educational, I would recommend it to anyone interested in Russian history, especially the Cold War era.


Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon

Posted December 3, 2014 by Michael @ Knowledge Lost in Contemporary / 6 Comments

Wonder Boys by Michael ChabonTitle: Wonder Boys (Goodreads)
Author: Michael Chabon
Published: Harper Perennial, 1995
Pages: 384
Genres: Contemporary
My Copy: Library Book

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Grady Tripp is a writer of a few novels; following the success of his award winning novel The Land Downstairs he has set out to write his follow up. Seven years later his manuscript for Wonder Boys was over 2600 pages long and nowhere closer to being finished. In his personal life things were messed up, his wife has walked out on him, and his mistress Sara has revealed she was pregnant. Wonder Boys (1995) is Michael Chabon’s second novel following the success of his debut book The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (1988).

Michael Chabon spent five years writing a book called Fountain City following The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. Fountain City ballooned into a 1500 page novel about an architect building the perfect baseball stadium in Florida. Chabon stated that he “never felt like [he] was conceptually on steady ground.” Without telling his agent or publisher he abandoned the book and started Wonder Boys which steamed from the melodrama involved around Fountain City. The main character, Grady Tripp is apparently based on one of Chabon’s professors from University of Pittsburgh who had a 3000 pages manuscript which eventually was published in 2001.

This being my third novel by Michael Chabon, I was struck by how different this book was to the other two. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay and The Yiddish Policemen’s Union play with intertextuality and genre blending but Wonder Boys didn’t have this at all. Sure there were some similarities, the frequent use of metaphors and recurring themes (particularly with Jewish identity) were still present but it felt very different. Wonder Boys felt raw and emotional, and now understanding the fate of Fountain City I can see the birth of this book.

Chabon plays on the ideas of how we view the stereotypical struggling writer; a person surrounded in melodrama. Wonder Boys is set over the course of one weekend in which Grady’s third wife has left him and his mistress has told him he will be a father. To make things worse, his mistress is the chancellor of the university he works at and her husband in the head of the English department, which makes him his boss. The drama continues to unfold as his agent has arrived in town in the hopes to get a peek at his new novel, which is far from finished. However that is not the half of Grady’s problems and this novel is overly dramatic to give the reader a chance to re-examine the ideas they have of a struggling writer; not all of them are Grady Tripp or Hank Moody (Californication).

Michael Chabon wanted to play with the idea of drama as a reflection of the internal struggle that is experienced with a novel that just isn’t working. Everything is over the top, much like the 1600 page novel that needs to be trimmed down and turned into a more accessible novel. However everything that Grady tries to do to make his life a little less complicated just makes everything worse. This metaphor plays out throughout the entire novel and I had to wonder if it is better to abandon the novel and start again or continue trying to fix it (this plays out near the end of this book but I won’t give spoilers). The fact this book is full of anxiety and raw emotions only serves to enhance the experience and the metaphor.

Wonder Boys was also turned into a movie starring Michael Douglas, Tobey Maguire, Katie Holmes and Robert Downey, Jr. I haven’t seen the movie yet but I can see what it working on a very fundamental level but I am not sure how it would translate. The movie does seem to have a cult classic status so maybe it translated onto the screen perfectly.

Yet again I find myself being impressed with the works of Michael Chabon and a little sad that is takes me so long to read another novel of his. I have Telegraph Avenue on my TBR bookcase waiting for me but it is a bit of a tome. I have so many big books I would love to read but they still scare me, I really need to work on this problem. Wonder Boys is a wonderful and emotional journey and a great place to start if you have never read Michael Chabon before.