Ellroy

Jag läser Blood's a Rover, James Ellroy. Enligt författaren, "the greatest novel since the Holy Bible". Det är sant såklart. Ingen skriver som Ellroy. Läs NYROB om Ellroy "Fever Dreams of Your FBI".

The stories are told in a uniform, crazed, modern American vernacular, and with such breakneck speed, hairpin plot turns, compression, and telescoping of events that the reader needs to stop and rest from time to time. The standard noir subject matter of killings, beatings, and acts of revenge is all here, but the incidents are so closely packed and described with such loving attention to the injuries suffered that it’s hard not to feel that some limit of what the reader can bear is being toyed with.

In order to speed the flow of the prose, Ellroy tries almost everything. He’ll save two words by saying that a building is “lake-close” rather than that it stood “close to the lake.” One-sentence paragraphs take over. So do sentence fragments and sentences whose elements are broken up by slash marks. Dashes proliferate. The past perfect tense seems to evaporate and is replaced by the simple past tense to a degree that makes it difficult to figure out when exactly something is happening.