Tue 11 Apr 2023
K. FERRARI – Like Flies From Afar. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, hardcover, 2020. Picador, softcover, 2021.
So, yeah. I’m an idiot. A dupe. I fall for it every freaking time. Like a fish on a hook. But a quote out there on your dust jacket saying stuff like:
“This amazing mix of crime novel and detective story—think Jim Thompson—is even more of a nightmare—think Kafka—stunning in its power and originality.” —David Keymer, Library Journal (starred review)
“A darker shade of absurdist noir featuring an Argentine businessman, as contemptible as he is successful, who finds his life inexplicably falling apart . . . a madcap mixture of Kafka, Bukowski, and Jim Thompson.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Not only is Like Flies from Afar a tough, perfectly constructed novel, it was written with the understanding that the noir is the new protest novel of the twenty-first century.” —Paco Ignacio Taibo
“This novel should come not with blurbs but with a hazardous-material warning: There’s bone and gristle here, be ready for that taste in your mouth you can’t spit out. First words to last, it’s strong stuff.” —James Sallis
I fall for it every time.
So nobody’s fault but my own I guess. But the book just isn’t that good. It’s not. When you throw Kafka and Jim Thompson out there you’re setting a pretty high bar, man. Be careful throwing that crap around or you lose your credibility. Right? You can’t give every restaurant five freakin’ stars. Amiright?
So the book’s about a rich capitalist pig. The book opens with the blonde mane of his ‘secretary’ bobbing between his legs, telling his wife on the phone he’s gonna be a bit late.
The pig, Machi is his name, but he’s so freakin’ 1-D cardboard you can see nothing but his front. He treats everyone like dirt, and when you see inside his mind it’s all dirt in there too.
This is the one thing Thompson teaches us. Rule number 1. The bad guy isn’t a bad guy. The bad guy is just a guy like you and me. He’s doing the best he can. Knowing what he knows, thinking what he thinks, he’s NOT a bad guy. He’s making the only choice that makes sense to him at the time. You can almost see where he’s coming from. Yes, you know the protagonist probably deserves the hell that is his ineluctable fate. But you kinda root for him or feel sorry for him or at the very least, you can understand where he’s coming from and how he, as a human, came to behave the way he does.
The idea that there is pure unadulterated evil in the world is a comfort. Because it allows one to repress the knowledge of the evil that resides in every single one of us. All of us have a dark side, a shadow side, a death instinct, however much we refuse to acknowledge it. (And ironically, those who doth protesteth too much are frequently the worst perpetrators of evil of all).
So anyway, the capitalist pig Machi is a completely vulgar unredeemable swine. All he does all day is take a shit on his workers, literally screw every female subordinate in his staff every time his wife turns her back. And sometimes not even waiting til she turns. He alienates his kids and shits on them as well.
And then, after having made everyone in the world hate him (and after hammering you on the head for an hour about what a horrible piece of crap he is you hate him too, dear reader; you’d have to), he starts to put the asshole thru purgatory.
So of course you love it, right? Schadenfreude is fun! The detailed purgatory suffered by a one dimensional bourgeois scumbag is delightful. This is my problem with Tarantino’s recent output. Yes it’s great fun to watch Nazis and Slavedrivers and the Manson Family get their comeuppance. But the problem is that it’s bullshit. Not just historical bullshit. It’s bullshit in the sense that it makes the villains a caricature. (I won’t even mention Spielberg here as another grand offender)
The scariest thing to acknowledge is that evil resides within. And the corollary: the most redemptive thing is to acknowledge is that goodness resides without. That is to say (without being an apologist for the atrocities of slavery, Nazism and Charles Manson) that there was not pure evil there either — nor anywhere.
A wonderful example of this is the movie Das Boat. All you see in the film is the struggles of the people on the submarine to stay alive. That’s it. There’s no ideology. They just want to make it back home. It doesn’t even occur to you until afterwards that they were Nazis.
There’s also a great Roald Dahl short story showing this poor Austrian woman having a terribly difficult childbirth, such a struggle to save the baby who surely will be stillborn. You’re rooting so hard to mom and baby both. Til he’s born and named Adolf Hitler.
So anyway, to get to the point: The McGuffin in this book is that the asshole capitalist pig is driving down the highway when his tire blows out on his top of the line BMW. He checks the trunk for a tire and finds a dead body. He doesn’t wonder who it is because that’s the kind of guy he is. The body’s face is shot off. We never find out who it is either. Because the whole book is happening from the limited perspective of this asshole (along with occasional commentary from the author reminding us of what an asshole this guy is — in case we didn’t notice on our own).
So the capitalist pig is thrown into great turmoil by his paranoia about who put the body in the car, why they put the body in the car, when did they put it in the car, how am I gonna get rid of it, and blah blah blah. He’s worried he’s being backstabbed. But why? He can’t understand it. He’s just a businessman. Why would anyone do this to a plan old ever-loving businessman? He’s got no enemies. (But again, montage this with one dimensional scenes from his past making mortal enemies left and right thru his cutthroat, tone-deaf, humiliating treatment of everyone in his orbit.)
Anyway. I hate this book. I hate everything about it. To me, it’s everything that’s wrong with the world today. We dehumanize our political opponents. When you dehumanize someone it’s okay to torture them, to kill them, to put them thru the proverbial wringer. Because they’re not really human. There was a Nazi propaganda film called “An Existence Without Life†that tries to convince the viewer that mental defectives aren’t really alive — they simply exist. Thus rather than paying for mental institutions we should just incinerate them. It’s not really killing because they’re not really alive. They’re not really human. Same with Jews or any other scapegoated enemy.
It’s coming to that today. To our current polity. On the right and on the left both. All over the world. It’s way too easy to dehumanize your adversaries and then to destroy them. You would never kick a dog. But Satan? Hitler? You turn your adversary into Hitler and all of a sudden all bets are off. Who gives a crap? Kill them. Do whatever. They deserve to die.
Except they don’t. No one deserves to die. From their own perspective anyway. Most of the time.
And until we acknowledge that our enemies are human too we will never understand them. And we will never have any peace. Just more and more wars with enemies we cannot understand and make no efforts to do so.
April 11th, 2023 at 8:35 pm
I fell for it too but was too disheartened and annoyed to even review it.
I didn’t hate it, and I assumed the reviews were over the top, but while I appreciate a good amoral protagonist once in a while and don’t object to realism, this really isn’t realism, its nihilism, something completely different, and falls in the category of what John Gardner (the American one) called Dis-Pollyana, a kind of unearned cynical and dark view coming out of assumption and not experience.
April 12th, 2023 at 7:02 pm
Some shrewd observations in the OP’s review.
I admire what he’s saying with the ‘Das Boot’ reference.
On the other hand, the Kriegsmarine in real life did commit maritime atrocities. It became a matter of routine practice.
If a citizen participates in war –agrees to be trained to kill, to push buttons, fire torpedoes, sink civilian ships –then he has arguably, forfeited part of his humanity.
No one can be forced into soldiery. Conscientious objection, passive resistance, and civil disobedience are valid alternatives.
Yep, all this time after WWII, we’re still annihilating ourselves. Plenty of warfare still happening all around the globe.
Russia is still slaughtering her own citizenry same as she always did, the UN is assembling war crimes trials as it always does. China is now talking war as well.
And today’s homefront is just as bad –or worse — than it was under Hearst. Media warmongers always style our fellow-men as sub-human as a first reaction.
Any ally might be smeared as brutal, primitive, and ape-like the moment they turn bad neighbors.
But on the other hand, Germany did build gas ovens and the Japanese did rape Nanking.
Some argue that America did no better: we had eugenics in the ’30s, and we A-bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki instead of military targets.
I share with the reviewer’s distress over de-humanization. I agree it’s the root problem.
But the Industrial Rev presented us with a Pandora’s Box. The catch is still the same as in the original Greek fable: you can’t safely open it a smidgen to nab only the safe, harmless, fun stuff inside.
If we want to keep our microwave ovens, we have to accept cruise missiles. And if other nations aren’t de-arming, we can hardly do otherwise.
Unfortunately, even the much-vaunted internet has not brought about global camraderie or mutual understanding.
Far from it. We’re probably more prone to nuke today than we ever were. Would America ever again send a major land force overseas? Why, when we can push a button instead? Military retaliation is easier than ever with touch-screens. After all, we handle everything else around us today, “remotely”.
My point: it’s too late to reverse dehumanization and live a harmonious 1800’s lifestyle as the Amish still do.
Yea, the submariners in ‘das Boot’ were likeable guys. And the Vietcong camp guards in ‘Deer Hunter’ were exaggerated into monsters. Mis-characterizations can be damaging.
Nevertheless, “judge the tree by its fruit”. We’re not the ones who start the world wars.
The West has gone to a lot of trouble to moderate life with law, government, and religion.
Does “understanding” a foe make the threat go away? Maybe. Or maybe not.
Other nations are sometimes deadly real threats; sometimes determined to strike us first and deny it later. They’re not always interested in humane principles.
If you guess wrong about a friend/enemy, you wind up like the foolhardy Dr. Carrington in 1951’s “Thing from Another World” when he steps forward to shake the hand of the crash-landed alien.
Beg pardon for these long-winded remarks.
April 12th, 2023 at 8:07 pm
Lazy,
I agree with you that dehumanization can be strategically useful. And I think the author, k. Ferrari, knows exactly what he’s doing. He’s creating a work of propaganda, fomenting anger against oligarchs.
But for me? I’m just a guy. Just trying my best to be a decent person in a world gone to shit. Philip Marlowe’s my kind of hero. I’d rather die by my principles than go on living without them.
Plus, to me, when an author overdetermines and overstates the evil of a character they are doing more than just dehumanizing them. They are also dehumanizing the reader by taking away their role in interpreting the work for themselves.
April 12th, 2023 at 8:35 pm
Hallo! I appreciate the opportunity to exchange views with you, the OP of the lead review.
I respect outright anything you have to say on the matter, it’s your book review after all. I gained from hearing you appraise the work. I had never heard of the novel before, and I deem it worth knowing about; worth considering the issues it raises.
My reply was just in the way of a little ‘point and counterpoint’, which I hope served good purpose. As long as we cleave to Reason, as long as we stay civil in these contentious times, it’s valuable (and fun) to kick ideas ideas around.
I thank you for the privilege of a little back-and-forth. Cheers!
April 13th, 2023 at 10:28 am
Lazy,
I agree. Back and forth respectful dialogue is an important thing we’re having trouble with in social discourse these days.
But I’d aver that our discussion here involves one of the culprits of this inability to see (or at least make an effort to see) the other guy’s point of view. In America right now it seems like there are precisely two points of view on everything. And as soon as it is revealed where the person stands on Ukraine or electric cars or cigarettes then we just assume that the entire person can be completely understood as one or another right/left caricature. We’ve got em pegged. And from there everyone is either friend or foe. Ross MacDonald has a title: The Instant Enemy. George Carlin says: everyone driving slower than me is an idiot and everyone driving faster is a maniac.
Jefferson and the American founders, based in aristotles nicomachean ethics, believed in the necessity of developing good habits in the citizenry. They believed that good habits were the lifeblood of the republic and developing and encouraging good habits led to virtue and flourishing in republic and citizenry both.
Jefferson wrote a letter to a protege saying that one of the ways to learn virtue and develop good habits is to read novels where great issues were confronted and dealt with bravely. The experience of the story virtually can impact you nearly as much as if you yourself experienced it directly.
Literature thus can impact the way we think about other people, even the way we interact with others in the world. It can affect whether people have learned how to dialogue lest every conversation and discussion turn hateful and virulent drivel. Godwin’s Law is no joke: No matter what the subject, all online threads lead to somebody being accused of being a Nazi. https://www.businessinsider.com/godwins-law-why-someone-always-brings-up-adolf-hitler-2014-2?amp
April 13th, 2023 at 3:57 pm
A good comparison to this particular book is what Stark/Westlake did with Parker or Highsmith with Tom Ripley, where the ‘hero’ is essentially a sociopath drawn sympathetically but realistically by the writer.
Any number of writers have managed to create charming if despicable rogues that are still allowed their humanity from Hornung’s Raffles to Fraser’s Flashman, and more recently Bonfigiloli’S Mordechai and Massimo Carlatto’s ex con private eye the Aligator and his sociopathic Giorgio Pellegrini books, some of these even monsters, but human ones, not cardboard cut outs consisting only of negative qualities designed to preach to the reader.
Richard Condon wrote several books such as THE OLDEST CONFESSION, MILE HIGH, and WHISPER OF THE AXE with such characters given human dimension, and still made his point about their sins within human traits. Sax Rohmer even found the need to make Fu Manchu more human and admirable by having him act as an agent of the League of Nations and later be anti Fascist and anti Communist.
This book simply draws its protagonist as a one dimensional monster with no signs of humanity and doing so fails the reader because the book ends up more interested in preaching than entertaining. Crime writers like Cain, Willeford, Fisher, Goodis, Hitt, Rabe, Thompson and others managed to write these types of characters and make their points about them while still making keeping them identifiable humans.
For all its literary pretense this book fails to come up to the standard of the average soft core paperback original of the late fifties and early sixties with its sleazy no good protagonist trapped by fate.
I think any time we make too much of a point of the politics of fiction we are on thin ground. I’m pretty liberal and many of my favorite writers were always conservative because by and large thrillers are a conservative genre, but whenever the writer goes too far in politicizing entertainment they tend to self sabotage. Sometimes it even works differently than the writer expects as here, where the reader ends up more annoyed with the writer than disgusted by the cardboard oligarch.
William F. Buckley’s Blackford Oakes novels rewrite modern American diplomatic and intelligence history where we turn out to have secretly won every blunder of the Cold War (Sputnik, Hungary 56, Vietnam, Cuba, Kim Philby), it’s wish fulfillment fiction, and entertaining in a sophisticated way, but no one reading them accepts Buckley’s tinkering with reality as anything but wishful thinking, and Buckley, tongue in cheek, doesn’t really try that hard to sell them. His historical rewrites are as playful and jaundiced as the Flashman novels.
But Buckley uses wit and not a hammer to sell his playful historical rewrite. Ferrari slams the reader upside the head constantly with what a disgusting monster his protagonist is to the point the book becomes repugnant to read. This kind of thing can be done brilliantly, Grahame Greene’s Pinky in BRIGHTON ROCK, the twist that derails the reader in Ellis AMERICAN PSYCHO, but it takes a more subtle writer than Ferrari proves to be.
April 14th, 2023 at 12:06 am
I appreciate Tony’s perspective as articulated above. I’ve mulled it over all evening. It’s cogent. It is well-expressed. It’s passionate. I admire it. I may even endorse parts of it.
But –I ultimately can’t go along with the whole premise.
It’s quite true that popular literature can often be so convincing, that we are left pondering what our basis is for such stern judgment of our fellow men.
Are these poor souls, not just as as poor as we? How can we execute them? Do not there –but for the grace of God –go I?
Here’s where I demur. Here’s where I disagree. Best-selling literature does not have final say towards guilty men. Courts do.
And our courts do not rely on pop-lit when they render a verdict. That would be jurisprudence by emotional ‘relativity’.
‘Relativity’ is never a valid defense.
“Hey buddy come on now, I’m just a regular joe like you” –this never holds water. Many murderers are affable, genial, and winsome.
But if we indulged their self-serving rationality, courts would be chaos.
Any defendant might spout, “Gee ..but I didn’t mean to kill ‘im, really I didn’ …we just had no other choice. He got in the way, what else could we do? Come on now brudda, gimme a break”
This just doesn’t fly. There is no pop-lit which makes it fly.
Pop-lit appeals to human emotion. It draws upon similarities among men for the sake of entertainment. But we don’t rely on it for our judgments.
Courts must adjudicate over (objective) fact, not (subjective) sympathies.
You remember how far Clarence Darrow was out of his gourd when he pleaded for Leopold & Loeb.
He claimed they had “no other choice based on their upbringing”. That was sham.
Other wealthy elites matriculated in the same way as L&L, but they never murdered anyone.
Other eloquent sages –Truman Capote, Norman Mailer –can scribble whatever they wish. It’s of no moment. Law runs on fact, not lit.
Does our leisure lit reflect some perverse inner need on our part to propose false ‘monstrous’ others (Nazis, Sikhs, Commies)? Are all our enemies made-up? Is “enemy-making” a blind-spot in our American psyche?
May be. Possibly so. But you can’t convince me that since I share some superficial traits with Dahmer, Bundy, Gacy, or Reinhard Heydrich (SS) that therefore I harbor any of their same urges.
You can’t tell me that under similar circumstances, I would ever behave as they did. There’s no relativity to suggest such a thing, other than purely fictional hyperbole.
The were all “just regular guys” and I’m “just another guy” too. But I’m not about to question my humanity based on the execution of these outright, self-admitted, mass-murderers.
That kind of introspection, I frankly do not need for the sake of my own self-improvement.
D I need to understand these vermin in order to better understand myself? Nope. Speed them to hell, with all dispatch, and with my best regards.
Concluding with a further nod of pleasure and respect in reading Tony’s POV in the first place. It’s a privilege.