Perdita Durango es una mala mujer. Muy mala!

PERDITA DURANGO
Barry Gifford
Grove Press, 1996
reviewed by Anthony Vacca
5 out of 5 stars

Brief, brutal, and bizarre, Perdita Durango is my kind of pulp noir, and my kind of woman. A self-proclaimed Tex-Mex (Half American, Half Mexican) Perdita is also a thief, a whore, a killer, and an all-around sociopath. Skinny, lithe, and dangerous, this novel follows Perdita's misadventures after shacking up with Romeo Dolorosa, a Mexican drug dealer who fronts his border distribution racket with a church where he serves as voodoo high priest, sacrificing goats and chickens and sometimes even people.

In a lot of ways, this novel, also anthologized in the collection Sailor's Holiday under the title 59° and Raining, is the anti-Wild at Heart in that the previous novel was about a couple that represented the idea of love being something stronger than the chaos at the heart of the Americas, but here we have Perdita and Romeo as celebrants of death, two evil souls who see killing and fucking as essentially two sides of the same coin, the only real way to prove that you're alive.

Even the roadtrip trajectory of this novel mirrors the one Sailor and Lula took in Wild at Heart but instead of goinng to California to make a chance at a life together, our two Latin-flavored killers are transporting a truck-load of human organs that are to be used in a mafia-run illegal skincare scheme. Without giving away the particular sordid and disgusting contents of their cargo, know that it certainly only adds to the over-all theme of the complete disregard of life that we children of God are more than capable of perpetrating upon one another.

Gifford is in rare form here, carrying the free-wheeling, digressive narrative along quickly enough with cigarette-smoking-cool existential back-and-forths between its characters; these are the kind of deviants and delinquents who love to tell each other stories for the pure bliss of hearing the sounds of their own voices. The action is jarring and sparesly rendered in a way that reads almost like beat poetry that doesn't suck.

This novel (or novella, if we want to split hairs) can be read in a single sitting, as the chapters are short and charged with enough sex and violence to leave a throat dry and in serious need of a refreshing cervaza. It's a hell of a story, and like its eponymous femme fatale, it's bad. Very bad.

Drinking & Detecting

George Pelecanos created the character of Nick Stefanos at the beginning of a writing career that includes multiple crime novels as well as work on TV’s The Wire and Treme. In a A Firing Offense, Nick’s Trip and Down By The River Where the Dead Men Go we learned that  Nick was born in Greece but shipped to the US as a baby and raised by his grandfather in Washington DC.  He spent his teens and twenties working for a retail electronics store and eventually became their advertising director but a busted marriage and job dissatisfaction led to him quitting to become a private investigator with a knack for finding himself in violent situations.  However, Nick ends up spending most of his time working at a dive bar which enables his increasing alcoholism.

Shelf Inflicted staffers Anthony, Kemper and Dan recently read the trilogy and cracked open a bottle of Old Grand-Dad as they discussed Nick Stefanos.  General spoiler about Nick's adventures in drinking and detecting follow:

Up Jumped the Devil

The Death of Bunny Munro
Nick Cave
Faber and Faber, 2009
Anthony Vacca's rating: 4 out of 5 stars

I am conflicted. On one hand, Nick Cave is one of my top ten favorite musicians. For over thirty years he has consistently made some of the best emotionally and physically visceral music ever to come tearing, and sometimes aching, its way of the electric shiver of a set of speakers. The man can sing about capital letter Love in a way that will turn any person equipped with something resembling a heart into a believer; but he can also thrash and foam like a maniac about the erotic bliss of banal and lowercased murder. Age has not tempered the man. He can do the arena rock (There She Goes My Beautiful World), and then turn around and throw a dirty old man punk rock boogie your way (No Pussy Blues), and then stick his tongue firmly in cheek and strut his way through a playful poke and prod at a bible story favorite (Dig Lazarus, Dig). What I am saying here is that the man is versatile, confident, and staggeringly literate in his ability to craft a hell of a song. The same is true in every way about Nick Cave’s approach to writing a novel.

And here comes the conflict: as much as I love Nick Cave’s music, having finished reading this, his second novel (twenty years later after And the Ass Saw the Angel I am left wondering how many wonderful novels we could have had from the man if his calling had been that of a novelist first instead of a musician. Because, yeah, The Death of Bunny Munro is a wonderful book. It’s disturbing, tender, articulate, funny, monstrous, profane, humane, and everything else I could ever ask for from a single book.

Bunny Munro (could this be a respectful nod to the then recently departed John Updike and his own great creation of Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom?) is damned. We know this from the first sentence on. And we also know, even if Bunny’s own self-awareness fails him on about all fronts imaginable, that there is no one to blame for Bunny’s fate except himself. His problem is not that he is married to a long-suffering, and emotionally-disturbed wife or that he has a precocious and loyal little son charmingly named Bunny Jr.; Bunny’s problem is that he can’t stop trying to fuck anything with a vagina even if it is at the expense of everything he should hold dear.

I saw the film Shame last year, which was a powerful rumination on sexual addiction and what exactly it means to be a human being that interacts and forms relationships with others, and let me tell you this: I like sex as much as the next sane, non-repressed person, but living a life resembling anything like the shit that Michael Fassbender’s character from the aforementioned flick or that Bunny Munro goes through…well, there’s a reason why I just used the word shit.

Bunny will gladly tell you that his favorite thing in the whole wide world is a woman’s vagina: any and all vaginas. He wants to be inside them all. This is why in the first chapter of the book we find Bunny sitting in a sleazy motel room with a black hooker while he tries to talk his wife down out of a panic attack on the phone. She wants her husband to come home, but Bunny tells her he can’t because he is still out on the road selling his company’s beauty products from door to door. This is what we call a lie, because Bunny is only a few miles away from his home where his wife gets calls about Bunny’s dying father and there’s the sound of a thousand birds fleeing a burning peer right outside her window that’s driving her insane. Bunny promises his wife he will be home early in the morning, but it is late in the afternoon by the time he finally does; after he fucks a random waitress, of course.

This is the kind of man Bunny Munro is.

After a series of misfortunate events, the novel really gets rollicking when we find Bunny back on the road once more, selling his cosmetic wares all over Brighton (that’s in England) with little Bunny Jr. in tow. If I had to describe the plot of this novel then I would have to say here that it is a road-trip novel about fathers and sons. But that makes it sound so pedestrian and there is nothing ever somewhat resembling that word when it comes to something Nick Cave has created.

For one, Nick Cave weaves an encroaching apocalyptic funk throughout the novel by constantly reminding Bunny and the reader of a maniac who is terrorizing public spaces, his body painted red and horns jutting out of his skull. This is far from being just a prank because the bodies of women are starting to turn up, their bodies ripped to pieces by a pitchfork. No matter where Bunny goes he can’t escape seeing news coverage of the madman on TVs and in newspapers. He does his best to ignore the news story and the sense of dread it is welling up inside him, but he can’t help but notice that the killings are getting closer and closer to Brighton. And Bunny knows that the killings are coming home to him.

Also, Bunny is fairly certain that a ghost is haunting his every movement.

But it is hard to feel too sorry for Bunny, because he is constantly at his worst behavior. As he and Bunny Jr. drive around all day, spending nights at cheap motels and having every meal in fast food joints just as ubiquitous, we see just exactly how shitty a dad the man is. He leaves his kid in the car for hours while he goes to visit the homes of women whose names are on his list of interested customers, and when he is not trying to hawk his ridiculous sounding creams and ointments, he is seeing if maybe he can talk whatever women is in front of him into a quick screw. Because this is how Bunny sees women (and I do mean any and all women): they are vaginas with some immediate potential to be entered. It does not matter how old or unattractive a woman is, when Bunny sees them he is immediately thinking of them in terms of fucking. This does make for a lot linguistic feats on the part of the author, as he thinks up another colorful expression or play on words to talk about Bunny and his nearly constant erection.

In fact, it is the humor that saves this book from being utterly harrowing (and it is plenty enough harrowing, still). Cave does a similar trick like Martin Amis, in that, he is constantly placing Bunny in absurd and humiliating situations that the character completely deserves. One of the funniest running gags in this book (and one which Cave apologizes for in the afterward of the novel) is Bunny’s obsession with the singer Avril Lavigne. Cave sums it up nicely in this sentence right here: "Bunny is almost positive that Avril Lavigne possesses the fucking Valhalla of all vaginas." So if you can’t find humor in a dirty, middle-aged man beating off to this ridiculous notion of Avril Lavigne as the end-all be all sex object, then this book might not be for you.

Don’t think this book is all grotesquery and gallows humor, because Cave is also melancholy and generous in his portrayal of Bunny Jr. When Cave writes about how Bunny Jr. loves his father for no reason greater than the fact that Bunny <i>is</i> his father, the prose makes you ache. If anything, Bunny Jr. is the collateral damage throughout this whole story. We watch as he tries to understand exactly who this man is that is supposed to be his father. The boy is smart—he spends his time cooped in the car reading through an encyclopedia—but is too young to realize that he is or find comfort in the fact. What Bunny Jr. wants is for his father to love him back and be proud of having him as his son. Unfortunately for Bunny Jr., his father is a cad.

A quick post script: For the five-star experience, get a copy of this book on audiobook. Nick Cave reads the novel himself, and there is nothing like hearing Cave’s exact and lyrical way of speaking, as he keeps the story moving at a rapt pace. Plus, the audiobook features an original score of music composed by Nick and Warren Ellis of the Bad Seeds (Nick Cave’s backing band). The score divides each chapter as well popping up every now and then at moments in the text where the music adds a surreal urgency to the events at hand. There’s also neat sound effects placed throughout the reading, so that when Bunny walks into a room with a flickering light there is also that all too distinct sound for us to hear right along with him. It all adds up to make a unique and unforgettable experience.

Also posted on GoodReads

Subversive Literature in Nazi-Occupied America

The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick
Anthony Vacca's rating: 3 out of 5 stars
Vintage (repint)

I don’t know why this is, but for some reason at the library where I work as a sexy librarian (catwoman glasses and tight turtleneck sweaters are standard issue) it has been decided by my co-workers that I am the go to guy when it comes to all matters concerning science fiction and fantasy novels. I find this odd considering I haven’t read a fantasy novel in about eight years and I can count the number of sci-fi novels I have read in my life on one metaphorical hand and still have one or two metaphorical fingers to spare. I have no idea what to recommend these patrons beside some of the obvious sci-fi classics I know about either because of movie adaptations or because I don’t live under a rock.

I am not prejudiced against sci-fi novels (actually, yeah, I probably kind of am: but not in theory at least). One of the aspects I think the genre has that makes it so worth-while is that it is a great vehicle for allegorical speculations about culture and the role of technology within. This is why films like, Blade Runner, The Running Man, Total Recall, Robocop, Alphaville, Brazil (to name a few) are all excellent (in their own, particular ways) pieces of cinema history. I think one of my problems (misinformed preconceptions?) about science fiction, is that the writing takes a backseat for all that speculation. Maybe I can blame all those hours of creative writing workshops and my young love for minimalism (you wouldn’t know that from the way I go on in these reviews), but I am still pretty critical on the whole "telling when you should be showing" aspect of fiction. What does this have to do with sci-fi novels? Well, I am talking about info-dumps here. Unless you are Neal Stephenson or David Foster Wallace, the info dump can be one of the most terrible atrocities known to fiction. They can turn any sense of a natural flow in prose into some kind of mutant creature that flops around on the ground waiting for a mercy blast from a flame-thrower.

Fortunately, we are spared from that in The Man in the High Castle; in fact, it feels like Dick was making a conscious effort to make the world within his sci-fi novel familiar enough so that we wouldn’t have trouble imagining it. One of the main techniques he uses to achieve this is by setting his novel in the present day (at least it was when it was published in 1962) United States. The only difference between our world and the world of Dick’s novel is that, the Allied Forces kind of lost WWII.

Oh, and the Nazis rule the world.

Sure, Japan is still around, and they were given a portion of the U.S.’s west coast for their part in helping out the Third Reich; but now they’re more than a little regretting ever getting in bed with the devil. There is not a lot they can do as the Nazis turn the rest of the U.S. into a violent and crumbling police-state, or as they build gigantic rocket ships towards space (why settle for Earth when you can have the entire galaxy for an empire?)…and we are not going to even talk about the hellhole of a science experiment they turned the entire continent of Africa into. The world is not a better place and, like any good Nazi, they don’t give a fuck.

But these are all the broad strokes of the world Dick is painting; this novel’s focus is not about epic battles of resistance or about the horrors of a dystopian society ran by Adolf and his thugs; instead, this book is essentially an ensemble piece that follows over the course of a few weeks the lives of several different people in Japan-occupied San Francisco. Not all these people know each other or even meet each other over the course of the novel’s narrative, but their lives reflect one another in that Dick uses his cast to work at his central questions of his novel: what does it mean to have an identity in relation to one’s country?

History, obviously, is one way Dick goes about tinkering with his question.

And so we follow around Dick’s assortment of science fiction grotesques: there’s Nobusuke Tagomi, a Japanese businessman who is beginning to have a crisis of conscious about his role as a successful colonist profiting off of the atrocities committed by the Axis powers; and there is Rudolf Wegener, a mysterious Eastern-European diplomat who shows up at Tagomi’s offices with certain information that may change German and Japanese relations substantially. There is also Frank Frink, a Jewish man who has survived the pogroms by keeping his racial identity secret, and who is now working on a scheme to make fake American antiques to sell for exuberant prices to young, chic Japanese colonists. Unfortunately for American antique dealer Robert Childan, he is the poor schmuck who has no idea he is selling fake Civil War pistols. And we can’t forget Juliana Frink, Frank’s ex-wife, who is living an aimless and restless life as a martial arts instructor, but then a mysterious stranger enters into her life…

Like I said, some plot elements tie these characters together, but there is really only two connecting factors that matter. One is the I Ching, which I know very little (and also care very little) about; but apparently it is kind of a big deal for new age and drug-addled Philip Dick, so of course then it is a big deal for all his characters. It’s apparently quite common for both Japanese colonists as well as Americans to consult this work for help in navigating their lives. The passages where characters consult their I Ching decks or whatever are opaque and I guess jam-packed with fortune cookie meaning.

(Rumor has it Dick wrote this novel while consulting his own I Ching deck. Good for you Dick!)

The other thing that ties these characters together is a book called The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, which is a scandalous best-seller in Dick’s version of America. The book is essentially an alternate history novel in which the author describes a history in which the Nazis lost World War II. It’s the kind of book everyone is reading (even when they are not supposed to): Jews, Americans, Japanese, and even Nazis. What is kind of ingenious is that this book does not tell of an America or history as we the readers know it, but instead it is a speculation of what could have happened. Some of the imagined historical events offered in this book within a book have a pretty good logic and rationale behind them. It works well enough for the characters in this book at least, because no one can predict history or the future exactly…well, unless you have the I Ching…

The Grasshopper Lies Heavy is what helps to elevate this book from being a pretty good pulpy sci-fi yarn, and into a fairly intriguing metaphysical novel. Some of his characters who read this book dismiss it as just sensationalist, and even immoral, trash. Others, like the oppressed Americans (go figure) view this book as something more.

For them it is not just fiction. Not just escapism. Not just another disposable piece of junk "genre" writing.

No, for these deserving readers The Grasshopper Lies Heavy is a means for them to reevaluate their own world, their own ideas of self. The book allows them a way to subvert the hegemony of the forces that control the world around them, and allows each reader, even if it is in their own mind, a way to escape to a place that none of the monsters crawling around this world of ours can touch.

And, in Dick’s estimation at least, this is the underappreciated and underutilized power of good old-fashioned fiction, no matter what the genre you classify it away as. Can’t say I argue with the man one bit.

Also Posted on GoodReads

The Information Comes at Night

The Information by Martin Amis
Anthony Vacca's rating: 5 out of 5 stars
Price: 15.99
Publisher: Vintage (reprint)
Available: Now

Failed novelist Richard Tull is fairly certain that the cosmos are at odds with him; and while Martin Amis assures us--as in, Martin Amis takes the time to address us directly himself--that Richard's place in regards to the universal order of things is tantamount to jack-shit, he doesn't bother to mention this simple fact to his protagonist; but I guess Amiss knows that telling Richard Tull any of this wouldn't make much of a difference. You see, Richard Tull is kind of going insane.

And because no one likes to blame their own damn self for any of their problems, Richard Tull is dead-certain that the one person who deserves to suffer for all of his woes is none other than his best friend Gwyn Barry. Richard was the one who showed promise years ago with publishing of his first novel, a challenging yet cult-literary success (this due largely in part to the fact that none of the reviewers understood or even finished the book); and it was Gwyn who was supposed to be the talentless chump who spent his career doing nothing more prestigious than student study guides for famous works of literature. Richard was the one who married the pretty Gina as his own exceptional trophy wife, while Gwyn was stuck with plain and dumpy Gilda. Richard was supposed to be the one in this friendship who is kind and generous to his obviously inferior friend.

But then no one bought, let alone read, Richard's second novel (which has the fantastic title Dreams Don't Mean Anything) and after that no publishing house was sure-as-hell going to waste their time (or, more importantly, their money) publishing a third or fourth or even fifth novel from such an unmarketable author. Pretty soon Richard ends up with nothing more prestigious in his life than a career as an editor for a very small vanity press and as a reviewer for an equally small joke-of-a literary journal. And even here, the kind of books he reviews are almost all-primarily doorstop-sized biographies on various obscure hack-writers and hack-poets from the 17th and 18th centuries (and I can see how this would certainly contribute to a destabilization in mental health). And while his wife is still undeniably pretty-and admirably faithful and supportive of her husband through all his failures (as a writer and especially as a husband)-Richard now has the additional bummer of two twin boys to cramp his style, and one of them is starting to show signs of being a "special needs" child.

And maybe this would all be a tolerable lot in life for Richard if it wasn't for the fact the Gwyn Barry is now an international mega-star of a novelist with the publication of only his second novel. But what's worse than the fact that Richard thinks Gwyn's book is awful and boringly simple is that Gwyn didn't marry Gilda-no, he ended marrying the extremely beautiful and extremely wealthy Lady Demeter de Rougemount. When Richard learns about this last blow, right on the heels of watching Gwyn's book rise on the sale charts, he literally breaks down into tears and laments, "How could you do this, Gwyn? I thought we were in this together." And he hasn't stopped lamenting or crying since.

Actually, I take that back. Richard has stopped lamenting-now, he just straight-up hates his best friend Gwyn Barry. And you know what, Richard (in his own words here) is going to do whatever it takes to "fuck Gwyn Barry's world up."

And that, my friends, is what we can call the "basic plot" of Martin Amis's triumphant snarl of a novel, The Information. And it's a hell of a storyline, at that; but it is also only one of the many treasures within this novel.

For one, there is the absolute grace Amis gives to all his characters and their dialogue, even with a protagonist as petty and lousy as Richard Tull.

The novel kicks off with the back-to-back birthdays of Richard and Gwyn (how can the cosmos not be at work here?), and during one particularly dull birthday luncheon for Gwyn, attended by numerous respected journalists, writers and other various kinds-of socialites, an argument breaks out between the guests about what exactly is the difference between the nature of female writing and male writing. Gwyn listens idly by until his opinion on the matter is asked for directly; and his response is (after first pausing for a moment of reflection and after taking the time to steeple both his hands before his mouth in a thoughtful manner): "'I never think in terms of male writers or in terms of female writers. I find I always think in terms of people.'"

And, of course, everyone at the table's response to this gag-inducing and super-precious answer is to sigh admiringly and nod approvingly, like the sycophantic and callow schmucks they all arewell, all except for Richard, that is. Richard, understandably disgusted, rebuts:

"'It must make you feel nice and young to say that being a man means nothing and being a woman means nothing and what matters is being a...person. How about being a spider, Gwyn. Let's imagine you're a spider. You're a spider, and you've just had your first serious date. You're limping away from that now, and you're looking over your shoulder, and there's your girlfriend, eating one of your legs like a chicken drumstick. What would you say? I know. You'd say: I find I never think in terms of male spiders or in terms of female spiders. I find I always think in terms of...spiders'"

And in this moment, Richard Tull had me completely on his side. No matter how disgustingly, pathetically or despicably Richard may behave throughout the rest of the book (and he certainly does all three in spades) he at least isn't the same kind-of self-absorbed ass that Gwyn is. If you don't believe me about Gwyn, then try this factoid on for size: ever since Gwyn has become famous, he has started in with this habit of staring at everything with a wide-eyed, child-like wonder, as if he has never seen the item before. So during an interview the flow of questions are in danger of being interrupted while Gwyn takes a moment to ogle at a fork, or a slice of grapefruit. Gwyn also likes to compare his writing to carpentry in interviews. Of course, the interviewer inevitably responds with, "do you do any carpentry yourself?' And Gwyn's answer is to shrug, and say, "I dabble." Richard knows this is complete bullshit and calls his friend out on it. Gwyn then shows Richard his carpentry table in the basement of his mansion (another sore-spot for Richard), and also the chair he bought from a store and has sawed away at a little here and there, just so in case an interviewer would like to see his carpentry, Gwyn will have a workshop and some work to display.

Yeah, I know, what an ass, right? (It's funny, because Martin Amis says nearly the exact same thing later on in the book about Richard Tull's character; and, well, Richard is also kind of an ass, too)

So now that you have caught glimpses of why Richard wants to "fuck Gwyn Barry up", I should probably tell you a little bit about just exactly how Richard plans on doing that. Well, the thing of if it is, Richard kind of makes some of the most seemingly pathetic and inane attempts imaginable. Luckily for Richard there's Steve "Scozzy" Cousins: a small-time thug who "fuck's people up for a living", and who also just happens to be Richard's biggest (and only) fan. Pretty soon Scozzy is in Richard's employ, and this criminal and his minions begin pursuing avenues for the best possible ways to destroy Gwyn Barry.

To say too much more about this novel (Um, is that supposed to be a joke, Anthony? You are aware of, like, how long you've been going on for now, right) would give away all the wild thrills packed within its tightly structured pages; but let me take a moment to speak about the writing itself.

Oh, man, the fucking writing in this thing!

Here are a couple of passages that are straight zaps to the neural receptors:

"Some junk novels were all about airports. Some junk novels were even called things like Airport. Why, then you might ask, was there no airport called Junk Novel? Junk novels have been around for at least as long as non-junk novels, and airports havent been around for very long at all. But they both really took off at the same time. Readers of junk novels and people in airports wanted the same thing: escape, and quick transfer from one junk novel to another junk novel and from one airport to another airport."

"These days he smoked and drank largely to solace himself for what drinking and smoking had done to him--but smoking and drinking had done a lot to him, so he drank and smoked a lot."

"...she didn't know Proust. But she knew tears. Gina had tears cold."

"Poets got women. They didn't get anything else, and women sensed this; so they got women."

There are so many others I could have had a status update twice a page just to share them all on this site. But I have to let you, my readers, have some of the fun of finding these yourself, right? (i.e. READ THIS BOOK!) But what makes the writing in this book such a marvel isn't merely a matter of the diction and cadence and rhythm of it all (which in of itself is impressive enough), but because of the very stylistically informal way Martin Amis narrates this novel. Because it is Martin Amis, at least that is who the narrator claims to be) who is telling us this whole sordid tale. And Martin Amis is wise to keep us somewhat removed from the action so that we can keep everything in perspective. He manages this by interjecting the story throughout with little tidbits about astronomy and other celestial physics so that we the readers can realize just how little (or much) significance all of this feuding between Richard and Gwyn matters.

...but then again, maybe Martin Amis is wrong about all of this. Physics and astronomy, and even math for that matter, are all essentially guesswork. These are all just theories and speculations, albeit good enough ones for us to transport human beings in metal cans from the moon and back, but still their very nature is uncertain. Because the thing of it is, scientists, like authors, are just trying to take in as much information as they can and weave it into something that makes sense, something we can all agree upon-a linear narrative with a beginning and an end that will comfort and reassure us all. The only problem is that, most of the time, "there is the Information, which is nothing, and comes at night."

Also posted on GoodReads