This book rends the heart. It will have you exclaiming aloud. Its immediacy, its relevance to how we live today, in short, its astonishing salience, kThis book rends the heart. It will have you exclaiming aloud. Its immediacy, its relevance to how we live today, in short, its astonishing salience, knocks the so-called knowledgeable reader on his or her ass.
Those who read this book should discard all pretense that they are unbiased. My brothers and sisters, it is not something we can choose not to be. It is implicit, engendered in us by our culture. Evidence discussed here even suggests that it doesn’t matter if you’re black or white, we’re all subject to the same biases.
In that sense the book is invasive; it tends to show you your faults, personally. It’s utterly gripping. Written with economy and clarity. If only everyone, every American, would read this book. Then perhaps we could begin to address our problems.
The book’s thrust is how the war on drugs, promoted by the Raygun administration, “cloaked in race-neutral language, offered whites opposed to racial reform a unique opportunity to express their hostility toward blacks and black progress, without being exposed to the charge of racism.” (p. 69)
The section about the degradation of one’s Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure will set your hair on fire. All such searches must be consensual. You have the right to say no. But almost no one does thanks to the Supreme Court’s odious machinations. There’s a wonderful coda, too, that briefly looks at the errors Civil Rights lawyers have made over the years.
That I should be reading this during the fourth week of the Derek Chauvin trial, the day after Daunte Wright, an unarmed black man, was shot and killed in a most despicable manner in a neighborhood of Minneapolis. I throw my hands up in despair. (Now Adam Toledo too, 13 years old. Who’s next?)...more
Forget that this novel happens to be written in the Cold War spy genre. That’s incidental. It is in every sense literary fiction and as such contains Forget that this novel happens to be written in the Cold War spy genre. That’s incidental. It is in every sense literary fiction and as such contains some truly astounding pages. One caveat: the male-female relationships seem oversexed in a way that was the convention in the 1980s. The criminal father aspect reminds somewhat of Geoffrey Wolff’s fine memoir, The Duke of Deception. The author’s very good at creating hateable males. He does it by making them misogynists....more
If you’ve got a bit of Jane Goodall in you (as I do), try this off-beat thriller. The humor is subtle and the style beautifully stripped down. The wriIf you’ve got a bit of Jane Goodall in you (as I do), try this off-beat thriller. The humor is subtle and the style beautifully stripped down. The writing exhibits a mastery of tone and narrative pacing that induced wonder and admiration in this reader.
Our storyteller is an elderly woman who, living alone in a rural area of Poland between Wrocław and the Czech border, is awakened in the dead of night by her neighbor, Oddball, to be told that another neighbor, Big Foot, is dead. The woman is eccentric, but intelligent and compassionate. She has long despised Big Foot for his arrogant behavior, and reckless despoliation of The Plateau, the isolated area in which they live, and brutal treatment of his dog. She has reported him to the police, who are a laughable bit of dysfunction unto themselves. Now he is dead. After the discovery Mrs. Duszejko goes about her business. She housesits for those who use their houses only as summer retreats, whereas she is on The Plateau year round, roughing the bitter winters alone when it can reach -20 F. Though her vocabulary is laudably rich, and her understanding of the natural sciences keen, she has an incongruous fondness for astrology, of which she says, “Nothing is capable of eluding this order.” (p. 56)
She believes that her Little Ladies, that is the local deer, for she is a stalwart lover of Animal life, have conspired with other local wildlife to murder a second person; she bases this speculation on the hundreds of deer prints left in the snow near the murder scene, which she happens upon. Between these two deaths—Big Foot’s has been ruled an accidental choking; he was eating poached deer at the time—Mrs. Duszejko, a retired teacher of English, teams up with a former student, Dizzy, to consult with him as he methodically translates the collected works of William Blake into Polish. She wishes she knew Animal script so she could warn the innocent creatures away from the hunters. Then again she wishes she could be aloof to the crimes committed around her, like those a short drive away in Auschwitz who hardly know what happened there during the war. She is alas not made of such incurious stuff. She sees suffering and despairs.
Soon when visiting the police commissioner she’s raving like a PETA member: ‘“You’ll say it’s just one Boar,” I continued, “But what about the deluge of butchered meat that falls on our cities day by day like never-ending, apocalyptic rain? This rain heralds slaughter, disease, collective madness, the obfuscation and contamination of the Mind. For no human heart is capable of bearing such pain. The whole, complex human psyche has evolved to prevent Man from understanding what he is really seeing. To stop the truth from reaching him by wrapping it in illusion, in idle chatter. The world is a prison of suffering, so constructed that in order to survive one must inflict pain on others....”’ (p. 106)
The killings go on. All the victims are hunters, middle aged men. Mrs. Duszejko continues to write letters to the police in which she interprets the horoscopes of the dead, citing relevant planetary conjunctions and the like. She gets no reply. There are many twists in Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead that this summary doesn’t touch on—and let’s not forget about the final kicker! This is the work of an extraordinarily talented writer, relatively new to English speakers, whom I look forward to reading more of. Hypnotic stuff....more
Second reading. Frank Friedmaier is hell-bent on destruction. Son and chief procurer of the local brothelkeeper, his mother, Frank is nineteen years oSecond reading. Frank Friedmaier is hell-bent on destruction. Son and chief procurer of the local brothelkeeper, his mother, Frank is nineteen years old and a sociopath of the first order. This is collaborationist Vichy France. The men Frank admires the most are black marketeers, thieves, and murderers, men who brag about snuffing women during sex. Frank starts his descent by killing a fat policeman of the occupying army who shows his avid courtesies to the local whores. But murdering the Eunuch is just practice, a preliminary, and Frank’s way of arming himself with a fine automatic. Next he murders perhaps what we can call his true mother, his old wet nurse, who lives outside of town with her watchmaker brother. Frank’s gripe, though he could hardly say so, is his lack of a father. Frank wants to be a man. His crimes are failed attempts to initiate himself into manhood. Frank desperately needs guidance. That’s why he becomes obsessed with the closest person who might help him, his next door neighbor, Gerhard Holst. Frank is fascinated by Holst. When he finally condescends to approach Holst’s daughter, Sissy--Frank, sadly, is her first love--it is only to question her at length about her father. What did he do before the war? and so on. Later, when Sissy touches Frank’s heart, you know she is doomed. You wait anxiously for her despoliation which, when it comes, is horrendous, the act of a monster. This tale of brute thuggery and homocide in the wartime demimonde is a kind of a counter quest narrative. The anti-hero, Frank, must challenge himself to prove he is a man. What he does to everyone around him, but ultimately to himself, he thinks of as his initiation. His fatherlessness, his isolation among women, appalls him. The denouement, when the occupying authorities finally catch up with him, is surprising in its brevity and power. I found myself exclaiming aloud, something I never do. This is a wonderful novel. It's language is very flat, compressed, and sinuous. I’m glad I reread it. Second only to The Strangers in the House, it is my favorite Simenon. Effusively recommended. PS Kudos to NYRB Classics for winnowing this one from Simenon's huge corpus.
First reading This is wonderful. It's the first Simenon I ever read and I found it vivid, engaging and moving. Dirty Snow is my second favorite Simenon, outranked only by The Strangers In The House....more
Loading...
