Replies to post #107017 on Tornado Alley (PROG)

[ordinarydude]

The man was unique, complex, talented and very sick.

He got drunk not from booze, but off a dangerous blend of success and the need to suppress his "pain" (brought on, presumably, by depression). Neither could ultimately be quenched. So he ended his life by blowing a 1/3rd of his head off.

Ordinary

[sortagreen]

and as a follow on

Well Nabokov's judgment of El Papa is certainly accurate - he was an appalling writer, and why everyone does not see straight through him continues to amaze me. His novel "To Have and Have Not" switches person (first and third) without any reason, and a story which begins about gun-running in the Caribbean turns into a story about the sex-life of a rich, drink-sodden, adulterous writer in Florida - someone must have told him to write about what he knows! Is this book meant, somehow, to be post-modernist? The last third of the book has no connection to the first two-thirds, and is clearly there to make up the pages. And that's not to mention the godawful prose, as full of cliches and as insincere as anything written by Graham Greene or Mario Puzo. You sure can fool some of the people all the time.

Posted by: peter | April 19, 2010 at 11:03 PM