Thursday, May 14, 2015

JAMES ELLROY ''PERFIDIA''

''There is a little-known Austrian documentary about James Ellroy entitled The Demon Dog of American Crime Fiction, in which the Los Angeles author can be seen howling at the sky and then dropping to his knees on the beach and making paws with his hands. Towards the end, Ellroy says: "I wanted to be Tolstoy … I wanted to be Balzac. Yeah. I wanted to be all these guys that – quite frankly – I've never really read. I wanted to give people crime fiction on an epic, transcendental scale."
I bring this to your attention because Perfidia is surely Ellroy's best shot at the second half of this ambition to date. My guess is that we're deep into the dark side of 200,000 words. The dramatis personae alone runs to four and a half pages. And – yes – this is an epic and bizarrely transcendental novel that represents an extraordinary achievement by any measure..''


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