The Stranger

It's hard to imagine it was made into a film. But it was Orson Welles, and it was 1946 right after the first English translation, in the middle of the red scare so maybe, at the height of our collective paranoia it may have been possible. It was published first in 1942 in French of course. In 1954 he even recorded an audio book himself. It was his true first novel, his prior work all being non-fiction. There are three primary English translations.

Stuart Gilbert (1946): Formal and stiff.
Matthew Ward (1989): More even handed and modern, my preference.
Joseph Laredo (1983): Similar to Ward but not as immediate.

"And I, too, felt ready to start life all over again. It was as if that great rush of anger had washed me clean, emptied me of hope, and, gazing up at the dark sky spangled with its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe. To feel it so like myself, indeed so brotherly, made me realize that I’d been happy, and that I was happy still. For all to be accomplished, for me to feel less lonely ,all that remained was to hope that on the day of my execution there should be a huge crowd of spectators and that they should greet me with howls of execration." -Camus

The Strange Woman

Ben Ames Williams, author of short stories and novels, was born in Macon, Mississippi in 1889. Strangely his best work was set in Bangor Maine. Much of the book feels dated, but when he delves into a sefarers gothic his provse comes alive in a dark 'Billy Budd' kind of way. He repeatedly descibes a hydrophobia that I don't think has ever been matched.

1.

"He imagined the canoe overturning, felt the strangling water flood his laboring lungs, saw his body sinking with last spasmodic reflex jerkings of arms and legs to rest at last on the dark, slimed bottom of the lake till great sluggish fish with toothless mouths came to pluck at the soft, decaying flesh."

2.

"...and he imagined the canoe broken against these ledges and saw his own helpless body caught by the current and whirled downstream, to smash against the toothed rocks with sodden. bruising blows, and he imagined the egglike crunch of a cracked skull or the hideous grating grind of breaking bones in his arms and legs. "

The paranoid fears of course were skilled foreshadowing for the real incident

...

The Wine of San Lorenzo

"The vast crescent backdrop of mountains began to merge into the darkening sky and a few stars glowed faintly through the incredibly clean air. It was both day and night, an overlapping of both, that infinite moment in the twenty-four hours that Juan Diego loved best..." -Herbert Gorman

Much of the book is downright cheesy actually using the terms "villainous" and "savage men" as a writer only could in 1945. But his flourish works well for certain applications. Mine is a used copy of course.

The Forest People

Really an anthropological text, The Forest people tells the story of living among the pygmy to tell the story of the pygmy. On some levels it fails. Writer/anthropologist Colin Turnbull changes the turn of events by being there. His writing gets a tad nostalgic and even misty when he describes how amazed he is by the pygmy. He's more of an active player than is probably appropriate. But he does have some truly great insights. But the two sides are somewhat at odds. (capitalization and italics are his)

"I heard him Murmur once more "You will see things you have never seen before... You will understand why we are called People of the Forest... When the Forest dies, we die." And for the last time I heard the chorus of that great song of praise: "If Darkness is, Darkness is Good."

I have no recourse but to beleive that is is as he describes, but so much of the rest of the book reads less fantastically. It's minimalism is so much more effective when used to express the stunning newness.

"The Pygmies express various degrees of illness by saying that someone is hot with fever, ill, dead, completely or absolutely dead, and, finally, dead for ever."

off topic.

I scanned a DIY comic I bought 15 years ago. Thought I'd share. The artwork is deliberately low-brow, but the plot line is disturbed.
http://www.divshare.com/download/5926089-1c3

L.S.D.-25

A modern Kerouac, a 255 page narrative on youth, rebellion, misery and of course drugs. It's a bit of a cult classic. Good luck finding it.
"I'd hoped that I would taste something strange - all this talk of synesthesia - but the turkey was just turkey.I was still me, neither happier nor more depressed, and, aside from a bit of vertigo, the world was still the world." - Jess Yandow

Robert Herrick

From the book The Web of Life, by Robert Herrick first printed in 1900. He was an early American realist, and one really engaged with all the Gothic trappings of our then fresh industrialization. He's the American answer to George Gissing. Of his 13 books this is generally considered by critics to be his best. Due to the wonderment of public domain you can download it free if you can find it. It was on Google Books, but has been mysteriously withdrawn.

"Thus the body social threw out much smoke, but no vital heat; here and there, the red glare of violence burst up through the dust of words and the insufferable cant of the world."

Jorge Luis Borges

Jorge Luis Borges describes the meeting of deserter martin Fierro and Tadeo Isidoro Cruz. None of us may ever write a sentence this powerful in our lives.

"Any destiny at all, however long and complicated, in reality consists of a single moment: the moment in which a man once and for all knows who he is."

Carlos Fuentes: The Old Gringo

A normal run-on sentence is pedestrian. The forceful, marauding use of polysyndeton to drag out a sentence into a multiple page narrative is badass. The comma, the semi colon, the parentheses, and the em dash all feature. Carlos Fuentes wrote in Spanish, as his native language. In translation, his grammar and punctuation was preserved as much as possible. It leaves me to wonder if this one sentence was even longer and more ungainly in the original.

"I could breathe with the place and see what each one was doing in his own bedroom, in his bathroom, in the dining room, there as nothing either secret or public for me the little witness, Harriett, I who saw them all, heard them all, imagined and smelled them all by simply breathing with the rhythm they didn't posses because they didn't' need it, they took it all for granted, I had to breathe in the hacienda, fill my lungs with its smallest flake of paint, and be the absent witness to every single copulation, hurried or languorous, imaginative or boring, whining or proud, tender or cold, to every single defecation, thick or watery, green or red, smooth or caked with undigested corn, I heard every fart, do you hear, every belch, every spit fall, every pee run, and I saw the scrawny turkeys having their necks twisted, the oxen emasculated, the goats eviscerated, and put on the spit, I saw bottles being corked full of uneasy wine of the Coahuila Valleys, so near to the desert that they taste like cactus wine, then the medicine bottles being uncorked for the castor oil purges, and the fevers running high in death and childbirth and children's diseases, I could touch the red velvets and creamy organdies and green taffetas of the hoopskirts and bonnets of the ladies, the long lace nightgowns with the Sacred Heart of Jesus embroidered in front of their cunts: the quivering, humble devotion to the votive lamps quietly sweating away their orange-colored wax as if caught up in a holy orgasm; contrasting, gringa, with the chandeliers of the vast mansion of stylish, expensive wooden floors and heavy draperies and golden tassels and grandfather clocks and wingtip chairs and rickety dining room chairs bathed in golden paint-I saw it all, and then one day my old friend, the most ancient man in the hacienda, a man maybe as old as the hacienda itself, a man who had never worn shoes and did not make noise (Graciano his name was, now I recall it), dressed in white peasant shirt and pants, a piece of rawhide that man, wearing clothes patched over and over again will it was impossible to distinguish between the patches on his clothes and the wrinkles on his skin, as if the body had also been patched over a thousand times: Graciano with his white stubble on his head and chin was the old man charged with winding the clocks every evening, and one night he took me with him."

Try to top that.

Annie Dillard

Annie Dillard is overtly spiritual making most of her books degenerate into insane glossolalia-worthy gibberish. She connects utterly unrelated thing son the way to not ever making a point. But the stories are interesting if you don't mind skipping the pages of drivel. But in that jumble of deeply heartfelt dookie, are some wonderful turns of phrase. My example, For the Time Being Knopf books circa 1999.

"Later, if the boy saw a book left open on a bench, he spreads a prayer shawl to cover its open pages. In his world, people respected books. When a book wore out, they buried it like a person."

These two sentences make a cult of this boys thinking. The outside world disrespects books, possibly property, It symbolizes a disrespect for language, knowledge and maybe even the boy. Most importantly it isolates him and also gives him a ghostly seeming presence. It's very intriguing. If only she could carry a plot.

cockpunch

" ...the Russian operation in Georgia was straight out of Col. Boyd's playbook: Roll in hard and fast with overwhelming force, administer the cockpunch, and be finished before anyone can prepare a response or start blathering on about peackeepers and/or UN resolutions. Because that's how it's done in the New Century of the Naked Ape."

-S.A.W. (courtesy of Strudel and Shotguns)

This was an incredible turn of phrase. The juxtaposition of the formal word "administer" a verbose synonym for "apply" or "do" and the very informal, perhaps vulgar "cockpunch." It reminds me of the TV series Deadwood. Deadwood and it's own turns of phrase that won David Milch such laurels. For example:

"I may have fucked my life up flatter'n hammered shit, but I stand before you today beholden to no human cocksucker."

It's a rare writer that can do thsi with fluidity and still carry a plot, a dialog or a message. Strudel & Shotguns manages all three.

Breece D'J Pancake

It's probably one of the best books I ever read. His sentences are short like Hemingway but they stack up better somehow. The voices are truer, and the locale grittier and more tangible. It lacks the 1950s maudlin quality that Hem couldn't help painting all over France, Cuba and Africa.

"I should never show up in these little river towns until my tug comes in - but I always come early, wait, watch people on the street. Out there vapor lamps flicker violet, bounce their light up from the pavement, twist everything's color. A few people walk along in the drizzle, but they don't stop to look into cheap shop windows."

There is a collection of his short stories available. His catalog is short. In 1979 at the age of 26 he shot himself in the head.

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200404u/pancake
http://www.appalachianbooks.com/Authors/Breece%20Pancake.htm
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1151208

Linda Yablonsky

Linda Yablonsky is a music critic. She's not quite on par with me, but she's much more suave and that's worth something. She also used to be on Smack and you can't beat that real-life experience in writing. Her book "The Story of Junk" is a strangely detached tale of a drug-fiend. While some may recoil at the inhumanity. Sincerity cannot be overrated. I quote a single sentence from a concert review she wrote in another less graphic book: The Show I'll Never Forget.

"I remember Roach go at his drums as if they were the pages of a book of joy and madness that he was reading and writing at the same time, that Simone picked up to add color and meaning."

You had me at "Joy and madness."

DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.

Most newspaper writing today is disposable, it's of less substance than magazines or (gasp) blogging. But like any broad encompassing statement, there are exceptions. I found this recently and stopped to re-read the paragraph. It's self-aware like meta text and reads like a narrative magazine article. I am surprised most of all, to find it in the New York Times. Here.

"Ten years ago, I stood in a clearing in the Cameroonian jungle, asking a hunter to hold up for my camera half the baby gorilla he had split and butterflied for smoking. My distress — partly faked, since I was also feeling triumphant, having come this far hoping to find exactly such a scene — struck him as funny. “A gorilla is still meat,” said my guide, a former gorilla hunter himself. “It has no soul.” So he agrees with Spain’s bishops. But it was an interesting observation for a West African to make. He looked much like the guy on the famous engraving adopted as a coat of arms by British abolitionists: a slave in shackles, kneeling to either beg or pray. Below it the motto: Am I Not a Man, and a Brother?"

Billy Ray's Farm

The language is deceptively simple. He only branches off into the wow and flutter in a very measured way. I really like the way he does it. Sometimes it's just country language. It's not real country language, it's shit he made up, like referring to a bulls genitalia as a "calf-maker." It adds color but not at the expense of the tale. I'm going to quote the book twice here to show two other ways he goes about that business.

"I could imagine stinking heaps of bream and carp, maybe bulletheaded behemoths in torn T-shirts standing in them, bloodied, with fishbillies in their hands, the weeps and near-orgasmical moans of grandmaw in a cotton housedress, a big buffalo lodged and wiggling dumbly between her thighs, others wading for help, clubs raised. I could smell the blood and death of it, could see how the sun woudl be shining down on the carnage at nine o' clock in the morning."

The first part is so exaggerated and comical then in the last sentence so Gothic and abrupt. It just ends the run away idea so it can end at all. Here he does the same thing but the feel is comic instead of stark. The grammar is deliberately broken moving the continuity from feeling of a character in control, who has a plan.. then exhibiting doubt, but also awareness of his own folly.

"I approached him slowly, speaking calm words of encouragement. There was a wire gap somewhere along the fence, and it I could just get it open and somehow get behind him without spooking him it might be possible to herd him gently back toward where he belonged, without getting too close to him. I be a man who be afraid of his own bull."

The Power and the Glory

It's hard to imagine that in 1940 this book was controversial, but it was. Catholics condemned the book. Evelyn Waugh and others defended it. Mr. Greene ended up meeting with the pope who told him the book was offensive to Catholics. The popester took 14 years to get around to condemning it. They are a delicate and sensitive bunch who need to get out more. The book is in my opinion some of his best work. He was bipolar and you can tell.

"The buzzard came picking its way across the yard, a dusty and desolate figure: every now and then it lifted sluggishly from the earth and flapped down twenty yards on."

-Graham Greene

These People Are Us

George Singleton write conversationally, fluidly like real life. He writes like the monologue that narrates our memories, simply and without undue adornment. It emphasizes the singular occasions when he gets artful. It leaves his works relying mostly on players and plot.

He said in an interview once that "I am my main characters, for better or worse." Their faults are his faults, their virtues (if there are any) are also his.

"I'd look down at the lake and wonder why our bodies seemed more water then dirt, more dirt than air or fire."

-George Singleton

Rene Maran is Batouala

Batouala was first published in 1921. Rene Maran, while born in Martinique he moved to Gabon in Central Africa when he was 7. It's the setting for his book Batouala. It was written in French of course, my translation was printed in 1930 from a 1922 translation by Thomas Szold Seltzer. The text is now in the public domain. While my copy was $2, your can be free here.

As with all translations I assume that the story line is the work of the writer, but the language that of the translator. As with all my assumptions it is probably only part right. the language is overt and flowery and almost Victorian.

"Gradually colors faded, from shade to shade, from transparence to finer transparence, and the beams in the immense sky scattered. the last shades of color were blotted out. The indefinable silence that watched over the agony and the death of the sun spread over the whole earth."

Jean Thomas

Jean Thomas was a charlatan, but her reverence for mountain music lend a certain tone to her writing about the gene that was unique to her. Problematic in her work is separating real words from what she fabricated. It is said that often she just made up crap. It's a shame as well, her own writing is staunch and vivid. There's no reason for her to be attributing false words to non-existent people.

"He lay there in this fix, cold as a rock for some time. He were laid out for dead. And after a long spell he were revived up with this song on his lips"

This was followed by the tablature for a traditional rendering of "O'Death"
More here.

John Muir

John Muir was kind of a hippie botanist, and also a racist which was pretty much standard fare in the late 1800s. He walked from Kentucky to Florida. His writing was somewhat Victorian in it's overt flowery form. But he was somewhat different than his contemporaries as he was a botanist first, and a writer second. Actually he had enough other hobbies that writing was somewhere trailing long behind.

"Of death among our own species, to say nothing of the thousand styles and modes of murder, our best memories, even among happy deaths, yield groans and tears, mingled with morbid exultation; burian companies, black in cloth and countenance, and, last of all, a black box burial in an oll-omened place, haunted by imaginary glooms and ghosts of every degree. thus death becomes fearful, and the most notable and incredible thing heard around a death-bed is , "I fear not to die."

nada y pues nada

Repetition is a difficult tool to use. It's well-explored in poetry and in song, but in prose it's difficult to apply. Here's a fine instance.

Here's a passage from the short story A Clean Well-Lighted Place.

"Some lived in it and never felt it but he knew it was nada, y pues nada y nada y pues nada. Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada, nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada. Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing it with thee. "

Interchanging the Spanish and English tells you thing about the character as does the use of the lords prayer and it's mildly sacrilegious modification. Without revealing anything about the story, you know things about the character.

The Johnstown Flood

It's been continuously in print since 1968. Mine is an original hardback. Author David McCullough has a mixed catalog. But something about the tragedy of Johnstown brought out his better qualities. His movement between cold hard facts, and first hand accounts mixes seamlessly with his smooth but dark prose.

"The cold was nearly as cruel as it had been the night before. Pitch-blackness closed down over the mountainsides that crowded so close; but across the velley floor bonfires blazed, torches moved among the dark ruins, and the rivers and big pools of dead water were lighted by the fire that raged on at the stone bridge."

It’s all on Google books of course

Wayne Ude

Wayne wrote the book Becoming Coyote in 1981. In the middle of a cultural punk movement in music and literature he delved into American Indian culture. In the book he literally and figuratively takes the title into the text.

"For years I'd walked suspiciously around the idea, sniffing at it, kicking my leg up occasionally and pissing on it so I'd be able to find it again, then wandering away for a while knowing that the piss smell would help me identify it when I came back. Now I was ready to accept the idea, to piss on it not just so I could find it again, but to mark it as mine, within my boundaries."

He totally contorts, reshapes and abuses the metaphor in every way possible. It's really a very strong passage in a totally underrated book.

Max White

It was printed in 1946, after his well-received novel "Tiger -Tiger." The Book "In the Blazing Light" was about the life of the artist Goya. While unauthorized biographies of today exist to tarnish, or propagandize, at the time this book of drunken debauchery and violence was somewhat unique. Time Magazine wrote a telling review here. The title is taken from a quote on the title page:

"This was the conduct of a man who feared nothing, not even death. He, whose eyes were getting dimmer, lived constantly in the blazing light of his own genius."

Blazing light is not an entirely unique term. But using it zoomorphicly is odd. Even more oddly he may have stolen it from Sir William Jones in an article written about British Lawyers in 1830. It's in the public domain and can be downloaded here.

"His studies were so various, yet so deep; his knowledge so universal, yet so profound, and his abilities so extraordinary, yet so unlimited, that nothing that the human mind had compassed, however deep and metaphysical its researches had been, whether employed in developing the hidden principles of matter, or of disclosing the secret laws of nature, or of searching into the deep and mysterious truths of philosophy; nothing, however infinite and vast; nothing, however subtle and obscure, but he threw upon it the blazing light of his own genius, or grasped it in the powerful embrace of his gigantic intellect."

The New York Public Library

Mort Rosenblum

Mort Rosenblum published his book "Olives - Live of a noble fruit" in 1996. It's largely autobiographical, injects all too much politics and really just strings together a long essay on olives with numerous quotations, bland poetry and a few decent recipes. But the portions in first person, as real as they appear to be the dialog seem to be exaggerated. They're just too consistently good to be true to life. For example, he visits a series of olive groves, and olive oil makers. This exchange with Juanito appears in Chapter 5.

"Never measure," he said. "you must never measure. Splash. Pinch. Use your eyes, your instinct. Never spare the oil." What did he think about butter people? "Tontos." he replied. "Fools."
When we got up to leave, finally, I asked Juanito, "Are you sure you never cook anything in butter?"
"Feh," he spat. "Poison."