Post by pimpinainteasy on Aug 21, 2018 9:38:23 GMT
i also read TIJUANA STRAITS by the NUNN:
Once in a while (very rarely), the stars align and the disillusioned fan of crime fiction discovers a genuinely talented writer who rejected the elitist cabal that is literary fiction and ventured into the muddy waters of crime fiction. Norman Mailer and Graham Greene have occasionally muddied their feet. Kem Nunn is one such writer.
"The woman appeared with the first light, struggling across the dunes, a figure from the revelation." That is the first line in Tijuana Straits. I was hooked. Sam Fahey was once a talented surfer. Now he is out hunting wild dogs (he also runs a worm farm) on the dunes of Tijuana, when he saves Magdalena, who is an environmental activist on the run from assassins hired by foreign factory owners who have destroyed her country. Armando, an ex-boxer and factory employee, the sort of person for whom Magdalena is fighting for, is on Magdalena's trail. With him are two violent cohorts.
Nunn describes the fetid and devastated landscape of Tijuana and Mexico with the same cinematic grandeur of Francis Ford Coppola who filmed a destroyed Vietnam in Apocalypse Now. I was also reminded of a Jack Nicholson film called The Border. Tijuana Straits is very much a book of place. The rotting and desolate places ("the beaches they found littered with patches of foam and uprooted kelp and these arranged in positions that might have passed for bodies of the slain") described in the book are wastelands filled with factories to employ the weak, the defeated, the violent and the damaged and bars and whorehouses to keep them dulled.
Nunn uses vivid imagistic language to further intensify these epic scenes - "He had this way of holding his arms when he surfed, like a gull swooping across the face of the ocean" or "The valley was a labyrinth, a trick done with mirrors".
But then, why the 3 rating? Well, the novel was a case of the parts being better than the whole. The writing is brilliant, but it becomes kind of dull in the middle. The relationship between the criminal Fahey and the activist Magdalena is without much tension. The long chase sequence across the beach towards the end sort of made up for it. I intend to check out more of Kem Nunn's work, but they seem to be quite obscure and expensive.
Once in a while (very rarely), the stars align and the disillusioned fan of crime fiction discovers a genuinely talented writer who rejected the elitist cabal that is literary fiction and ventured into the muddy waters of crime fiction. Norman Mailer and Graham Greene have occasionally muddied their feet. Kem Nunn is one such writer.
"The woman appeared with the first light, struggling across the dunes, a figure from the revelation." That is the first line in Tijuana Straits. I was hooked. Sam Fahey was once a talented surfer. Now he is out hunting wild dogs (he also runs a worm farm) on the dunes of Tijuana, when he saves Magdalena, who is an environmental activist on the run from assassins hired by foreign factory owners who have destroyed her country. Armando, an ex-boxer and factory employee, the sort of person for whom Magdalena is fighting for, is on Magdalena's trail. With him are two violent cohorts.
Nunn describes the fetid and devastated landscape of Tijuana and Mexico with the same cinematic grandeur of Francis Ford Coppola who filmed a destroyed Vietnam in Apocalypse Now. I was also reminded of a Jack Nicholson film called The Border. Tijuana Straits is very much a book of place. The rotting and desolate places ("the beaches they found littered with patches of foam and uprooted kelp and these arranged in positions that might have passed for bodies of the slain") described in the book are wastelands filled with factories to employ the weak, the defeated, the violent and the damaged and bars and whorehouses to keep them dulled.
Nunn uses vivid imagistic language to further intensify these epic scenes - "He had this way of holding his arms when he surfed, like a gull swooping across the face of the ocean" or "The valley was a labyrinth, a trick done with mirrors".
But then, why the 3 rating? Well, the novel was a case of the parts being better than the whole. The writing is brilliant, but it becomes kind of dull in the middle. The relationship between the criminal Fahey and the activist Magdalena is without much tension. The long chase sequence across the beach towards the end sort of made up for it. I intend to check out more of Kem Nunn's work, but they seem to be quite obscure and expensive.