"What was the date?"
"It's in my memory book. April 14, 1945. Why does it matter?"
"Because you can't explode reality. Life hangs together in one piece. Everything is connected with everything else. The problem is to find the connections."
She said with some irony: "That's your mission in life, isn't it? You're not interested in people, you're only interested in the connection between them. Like a--" she searched for an insulting word-- "a plumber."
-- Ross Macdonald. 1965. The Far Side of the Dollar.
Thursday, October 27, 2011
Grandmaster wisdom
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3 comments:
Suppose Andrew Taylor had that in mind when the wrote his Sallis review? As he said there and as you quoted:
The detective is aware of patterns, too, and they underpin what another sort of crime writer might call the denouement
It does occur to me that this connections/patterns notion could be used as a critical tool to define certain types of novels -- and to answer once and for all why Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald really have very little in common...
It seems to be a characteristic modernist approach -- almost a form of abstraction. We want art to be more organized and orderly than life, but there are no longer any universally acknowledged ideas that can be used to do that.
Or something.
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