I
discovered a new book 'Noir' by Robert Coover, translated to Spanish,
that fascinates me. No, I didn't mean the translation does as I haven't
read the original to compare if it had been translated straightly
keeping the author's ideas precisely and respectfully. I mean the story
and the way it's told. It's really several stories put together.
The
part that tells the story of an oriental prostitute who had her entire
body tattooed, covering every centimetre of skin, used by 2 Mafias to
send coded messages to each other, an epistolary relationship that
documents 2 things: the competitiveness of the 2 men who continuously
demonstrate, mutually, each one's power and, the other, absolutely
everything could become literature.
It's
one of the many collateral stories with the text that follows strictly
the clichés of the kind with a new layer of paint - copy, imitate,
duplicate if you like - in black & white. The protagonist is a
detective called Philip M. Noir, his secretary Blanche - which is to
say, a black & while novel. Coover had learned the lesson of
transforming it in the labyrinth, a tangled web of languages. The
digression , deviation from the main point, is more interesting than
the principal story, practically non-existent.
To
our hero, who acts as if he had escaped from the hard boiled experiment
of Mickey Spillane or from the Sin City of Frank Miller, couldn't care
less about the object of his mission, didn't even know the name of his
client, a black widow. Each story opens a new hole in a heavily coded
universe. Each character extends a hand in Noir to meddle in another
space, another time.
In
a certain way, this magnificent Noir is the culmination of formal
investigations which Coover, pioneer of hypertext , announced in an
article, so visionary like 'The end of books'. One of his worries in
that brief article was: what would happen to the novel when it loses
it's centre of gravity, what would happen when the lack of closure
pushing the readers against the cords.
It's
a literary project difficult to conclude but Coover, who has
de-constructed myths, legends and fairy tales in exemplary books like
'Poker magic', or 'Zarzarrosa' knew to transcend the condition of the
post-modern artefact to transform it, with Noir, in a novel that talks
to the reader, one to one. a very different and perturbing high jump
without a net.
Next: 21st Feb 2012 An Irresistible Ad.
