There are some books that spend their time, such as plants, and wait contracts on the flower. If you are lucky enough to get Agave Americana On your land, be careful enough to stay of their sharp leaves with teeth, and the patient enough to hang out for anything from eight to thirty years, you will be rewarded, finally, by watching the yellow butter flowers. Likewise, if it is a copy of “”Underground“A novel from 1971, written by Ross McDonald, was sitting on a ride throughout the ages, unread and barely noticed, tried to open it now. Suddenly, it is a book in complete flowering.
The reason for this flowering is not difficult to find. You hear a hint in the opening sentences: “I wake me up the leaves for some time before dawn. How long has the weather infiltrated, chasing us while sleeping? After the page, a few hours later, we get a wider possibility:
Something we realize, ready to shoot. The man we listen to is Lua Archer, the private eye who appeared in eighteen novel by McDonald. It was closer.Moving target“From 1949. It was“ was “was”Blue hammer“It was released in 1976. With a previous wife.
What matters most, as with any cat, is not who is where he wanders. Its primary pulse is southern California. in “The way some people die((1951), Santa Monica covers somewhere called Pacific Point (most likely Los Angeles position), and Palm Springs. Previous Book, “Drowning((1950), offers a general overview of the state-“They built beaches from San Diego to the golden gate, light bulldozers across the mountains, and reduced a thousand years of red wood growth, and built an urban wilderness in the desert”-before enlargement in the northern town of Los Angeles, which compared it to Mistrezur. Paul NewmanThe procedure was re -directed to Louisiana, and the result fell expected. It was like a transmission Madame Boufari To Marseille.
From time to time, Artcher heads further. “Cold((1964) takes it as much as Chicago. But his heart, or his crowded brain, is still on the western edge of the country. He cannot stop examining the types of people who live there, inside different pockets of the earth, sharp shifts of the texture and light that greets him moving from one pocket to another.The immediate enemy((1968), he takes a punch and stumbles, and hit the back of his skull against concrete – in another day in Pacific Palisades, where the emotional relationship of the couple gives up “wrong smoke smell”, and where “the flowers of the purple princess glow between the papers.” Reaching Malibu, in “The barbarian coast((1956), he drives his car first to a club with a swimming pool of fifty yards and then to a cottage -like cottage.
Archer’s reports, the walls of the cottage, “were searched for naked and notes by blowing the sand.” You can all rub your fingers against the grains. This is the way the gravel is in a private eye. You can say the same thing to the Philip Marlowe, who is suffering through the works of Raymond Chandler, but what is unusual – and I feel this more, after years of indulging in Chandler – is how these works are, in the end, to a long prose poem.
On the map, the hunting lands overlap in Marlow or interfere with Archer, however the mood of their investigations is completely distinct. Chandler chases you and makes you laugh. McDonald keeps you a leaflet, although its removal in California is not without its own rapid lyrical hardness. Through the Archer method, it tells us how the landscapes rise, fall, and smell; How it looks through the windshield of the car (“The Power of Jump, the blue sky flows back”) or from the window of the plane; And most do not erased from everyone, thanks to the “underground man”, how he burns.
the Los Angeles fires This started on January 7 this year was great for several reasons. Among these, it was, first, its geographical spread, within half a scale of provinces in the capital area. According to the Ministry of Forests and Fire Protection in California, more than fifty thousand acres have been burned and more than sixteen thousand were destroyed. Second, there was longevity: on the last day of January, Palisades and Eaton Fire were not extinguished. And thirdly, there was a rush to fire. Between Midmorning and Midafternoon on January 7, the fire that started around Pacific Palisades from ten acres to more than twelve hundred.
It goes without saying, among the endless aspects of this catastrophe, the fact that it was partially predicted in the story of fifty -five years of ambiguity, with any account, the most trivial and the least parallel. If I approached a family in Altadena, while they were standing in front of their burned house, and informed them that a man named Ross McDonald had seen everything coming, they would ask you right to go to the place where the fires are never going out. However, there is something creeping and persuasive in the prophetic power that is housing, and is slowly detected, through certain books. (Or by a specific author: in Cafka“The case, the insight is terrifying). What is arrested more severely in” The Underground Man “, and what comes to mind as I saw clips from La, is the huge speed that these disasters can reveal. Hell comes quickly.
Arther first gets a word fire, indirectly, from the radio report. Then he sees a veil of smoke, with “glimpses of fire like flashes of heavy weapons so far so that they cannot be heard.” As soon as possible, he tries to accommodate another: “The fire that was from a distance appeared to appear to be artillery flashes that were broken through thick knights like knights.” The military similarity remains (“they were heading from the flame, jumping down the slope to the left”) before it gave way to other images – we are told, and he says that we resemble “the sunset of the displaced sun” and “smoke acid” or “loose volcano”, and the air resembles “the breath of hot animals.” Later, with fading today, the presence of the war is returning:
What happens here? One can argue that McDonald is stuck in a combination of analogies. The most charitable view is that he thinks heavily through the eyes and ears and the hero of his hero, and that, if Archer is struggling to determine what he is facing, then this is because the fire is not really described. (It is very wise for cracks) in an attempt to clarify what we am amazing, fail, start, and try again.
After something else in “underground man”. What Archer notes is not only the hurry of fires, or constantly changing shape, but they attack. At one point, he goes to the exhibition of a woman called Mrs. Armstid. In instinct to the principle she protects what she loves, she saved her mink coat from hell. It is located at the bottom of its swimming pool, away from harm, and it is likely to be liked due to what looks like jewelry boxes. She and Archer leave a pause at a curve on the road, and we look at her home:
