Finished In Cold Blood a week ago. Outstanding. What Capote achieves is rich insight into the minds of the killers without at any point granting validity to their reasoning. He presents it and explains it—as they see it in themselves and each other—but doesn't suggest that their reasoning is, in fact, reasonable. Rather, we're witnessing a kind of amoral Rube Goldberg device that results in the killing of the Clutter family. For me, what's most fascinating and trouble at the same time is the sense of how many such people move among us, those whose essential selfishness provides no brakes to their actions. Rarely does this result in murder; the consequences are, I think, more ordinary.
Such issues fit well with the considerations at work in "Clockworks," still on hold as I complete the revision of "My Story of Us Looking for My Comic Strip, by Franklin James Nemeth." I'll finish that tonight. It's much stronger now, having lost the second narrative voice and a large chunk out of the middle that had come from an early and far different version.
The Lost Books of the Odyssey is well crafted and thoughtful. Each small story (it is not, despite the claims on the cover and in its marketing, a novel) employs both the elements of ancient tale and (post)modern short story.
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I forgot to say, thanks for recommending Conrad's "The Secret Agent." Finished it a couple of weeks ago. Interesting not only for the elements you noted in your earlier post, but also it struck me how many of these concerns, especially terrorism, still ring true today.
Did your edition contain Conrad's introduction (written some years after the initial publication)? It makes for interesting reading and additional insight. A friend gave me that intro and a copy of the intro to the Barnes & Noble edition which, while not great, contained a lot of information about anarchist movements of the time. Conrad isn't really fair to them, since the anarchists tend to be humanists, unlike the characters in the novel, chief among whom is a nihilist.
No, this was just a university library edition (decades of underlining from successive generations of English majors, though). It seemed to me Conrad was more interested in the tragic comedy, or comic tragedy, of human motivation than of documenting carefully the anarchists' thought processes....
If you're interested in reading Conrad's intro, send me an e-mail. I should be able to send you a pdf from school.
Umm... I'm an idiot. Turns out my copy does have the 1920 preface.
Interesting that Conrad seems to feel the novel is primarily Winnie's story. Not that I would argue with him.
Just a few chapters into the book, I said to the friend and colleague who passed me Conrad's preface, "Conrad's playing with our expectations about who's really the protagonist." I then started reading the preface, which gives away some of the book's direction (so I put the preface aside until later), but I love how Conrad structures the book. The flashback is either clumsily handled or simply a wonderful deception, depending on how charitable you're feeling toward Conrad, as you find yourself initially asking who really died. But that chapter establishes Winnie's perspective, which he circles back to later.
I also loved how Conrad so carefully puts all of his players into position before escalating the tempo later in the book. The chapter in which Winnie confronts her husband is one of the best pieces of writing I can recall, marvelous at the sentence level while also demonstrating a mastery of how to suspend time in order to examine each character's thoughts.
Agreed on In Cold Blood. Often during reading the book I thought "to explain is not to excuse."
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