Είναι, ίσως, το πιο 'λυρικό' και λογοτεχνικό μυθιστόρημα του Τσάντλερ, και το πιο μεγάλο σε έκταση, όπου ο κυνισμός, η απαισιοδοξία και η απαξίωση, συχνά, εναλλάσσονται - από την άλλη πλευρά, όμως, αργεί ο γνωστός συγγραφέας να 'απογειώσει' την πλοκή, ενώ τα κίνητρα συμπεριφοράς των ηρώων, πολλές φορές, είναι κάπως αδιαφανή. Αρκετά, όμως, εύστοχη παρουσιάζεται η 'ασταθής' μεταπολεμική ατμόσφαιρα των μέσων της δεκαετίας του '50 στις Ηνωμένες Πολιτείες.

Θεωρείται ένα από τα 3 αριστουργήματα του Τσάντλερ. Το 1955 κέρδισε το βραβείο 'Edgar Allan Poe' Καλύτερου Mυθιστορήματος.

Βαθμολογία: 4,3/5 ή 8,6/10.

Θα γίνει και αναλυτικότερη κριτική στο βιβλίο.

I could not set this book down.

One of the many gems of dialogue:

"Alcohol is like love," he said. "The first kiss is magic, the second is intimate, the third is routine. After that you take the girl's clothes off."
"Is that bad?" I asked him.
"It's excitement of a high order, but it's an impure emotion-- impure in the aesthetic sense. I'm not sneering at sex. It's necessary and it doesn't have to be ugly. But it always has to be managed. Making it glamorous is a billion-dollar industry and it costs every cent of it."

(Come to think of it, Stephin Merritt also compares love to a bottle of gin. The analogy must be valid.)

How is this book so good? How did someone like Raymond Chandler walk the earth and type out this masterpiece? After reading this book I am more convinced than ever that I must read every Philip Marlow mystery in existence.

On the edition that I was reading (Everyman's Library) there is photograph of the author on the cover that's just great. He's on old man sitting on a couch at a cocktail party. He's wearing horn-rimmed glasses and holding a highball. On his left is a young lady in a silky dress smoking a cigarette in a cigarette holder. Yes. Yes! That's it! I want to be like that in forty years. I want to write a dozen brilliant books, then sit on a couch next to a beautiful woman at a cocktail party and wear horn-rimmed glasses. Ah. That's the life.

Triste, solitario y final

Il congegno narrativo – coppie scoppiate, ricconi e gansters, omicidi-suicidi, usa-europa-mexico, nuove identità - intrattiene ancora bene nonostante letto oggi sia un po’ scontato, ma questo è inevitabile perché qui siamo in presenza del canone del noir/hard boiled.

E’ Marlowe che ci rimane dentro. Abbastanza duro da navigare tra poliziotti rudi e di pochi scrupoli e pericolosi malavitosi. Cinico al punto giusto per non lasciarsi travolgere dagli eventi. Tenero e malinconico quando inizia o finisce un amore o un’amicizia.

Dal suo rifugio sulle alture di Lauren Canyon osserva la grande LA.
“Laggiù, nella notte intessuta di mille delitti, individui morivano, venivano mutilati, tagliuzzati da schegge di vetro, schiacciati contro i volanti delle automobili o sotto le ruote di pesanti veicoli. Altri individui venivano percossi, derubati, strangolati, violentati e assassinati. Altri individui ancora erano affamati, ammalati, annoiati, disperati, tormentati dalla solitudine, o dal rimorso, o dal terrore, o dallʼira, erano crudeli, febbricitanti, squassati dai singhiozzi. Una città non peggiore delle altre, una città perduta e corrotta e colma di vacuità. Tutto dipende dalla posizione in cui ci si trova, dagli interessi personali. Io non ne avevo alcuno. E me ne infischiavo.”

Frequentatore di bar in penombra e silenziosi, in cerca del dolce stordimento dell’alcool.
“Mi piace gustare adagio il liquore. Il primo sorso tranquillo del pomeriggio in un bar silenzioso... è stupendo.”
Fui dʼaccordo con lui.
“Lʼalcool è come lʼamore,” disse. “Il primo bacio è magico, il secondo intimo, il terzo unʼabitudine. E poi si spoglia la donna.”

Un addio, dopo una notte d’amore ed il rifiuto di una fuga a Parigi.
Ci dicemmo addio. Seguii con lo sguardo il tassì fino a quando non fu scomparso. Salii la rampa di scale, entrai nella camera da letto e disfeci il letto completamente e lo rifeci. Vʼera un lungo capello nero su uno dei cuscini. Vʼera un grumo di piombo nel mio stomaco.
I francesi hanno un modo di dire per situazioni del genere. Quei bastardi hanno un modo di dire per tutto, ed è sempre giusto.
Dirsi addio è un poʼ come morire.”

E l’addio finale all'amico.
“Avete avuto molto da me, Terry. In cambio di un sorriso, e di un cenno del capo e di un saluto fatto con la mano e di qualche minuto di serenità in un bar silenzioso, di quando in quando. È stato bello finché è durato. Arrivederci, amigo. Non vi dico addio. Vi dissi addio quando significava qualcosa. Vi dissi addio in un momento di tristezza e di solitudine, quando sembrava definitivo.”

Sarà anche l’addio di Chandler che dopo aver scritto il suo miglior libro, questo, produrrà poco altro, proverà il grande dolore per la perdita dell’amata moglie, si perderà sempre più nell’abisso dell’alcool e tenterà il suicidio prima di lasciarci qualche anno dopo.


Robert Altman, Nina Van Pallandt, Elliott Gould, nell'omonimo adattamento cinematografico (1973), non proprio fedele.
Sulle note di John Williams (“...It's too late to try When a missed hello Becomes the long goodbye”).

I had read The Long Goodbye many years ago, and liked it. In the meantime, I have aged -- not exactly like a fine wine, but aged nonetheless -- and found myself loving Raymond Chandler's penultimate work. I might even go so far as to say it is his masterpiece, though back then I liked The Big Sleep and Farewell My Lovely more.

This time I detected the raggedness. Chandler's wife, Cissy, was dying and he felt more vulnerable. This is no tight Agatha Christie thriller than runs like a Swiss clockwork. Not by a long shot. It's about a nasty, persistent evil that, once you poke it with a stick, keeps coming back to snare you and hurt you. Somehow, Chandler's detective Marlowe walks the straight and narrow path and comes out alive at the end:

I was as hollow and empty as the spaces between the stars. When I got home I mixed a stiff one and stood by the open window in the living room and sipped it and listened to the groundswell of the traffic on Laurel Canyon Boulevard and looked at the glare of the big angry city hanging over the shoulder of the hills through which the boulevard had been cut. Far off the banshee wail of police or fire sirens rose and fell, never for very long completely silent. Twenty-four hours a day somebody is running, somebody else is trying to catch him. Out there in the night of a thousand crimes people were dying, being maimed, cut by flying glass, crushed against steering wheels or under heavy tires. People were being beaten, robbed, strangled, rape, and murdered. People were hungry, sick, bored, desperate with loneliness or remorse or fear, angry, cruel, feverish, shaken by sobs. A city no worse than others, a city rich and vigorous and full of pride, a city lost and beaten and full of emptiness.

And mind you, this is just the background in which a series of murders and/or suicides take place that call Marlowe's actions into question and put him in personal peril, such as the time four toughs waylay him in his own house. They included the following:

A man was sitting across the room with his legs crossed and a gun resting sideways on his thigh. He looked rangy and tough and his skin had that dried-out look of people who live in sun-bleached climates. He was wearing a dark brown gabardine-type windbreaker and the zipper was open almost to his waist. He was looking at me and neither his eyes nor the gun moved. He was as calm as an adobe wall in the moonlight.

That last sentence inspired writer Walter Mosley to begin writing his own series of detective novels featuring Easy Rawlins.

I feel I have not rendered justice to this great novel -- probably because it is still working its way through my bloodstream and opening channels in my body that I did not know existed.

Chandler’s known as the king of LA noir and word is this is his best. His writing is lean and clean, short staccato sentences with not a word wasted. Almost poetic in its brevity – not to be confused with lack of substance. Humour me, I’m trying it out on this review it's fun - you should try it sometime  Marlowe’s amazingly complex, a fast-talking P.I. surviving on tough cynicism. Deep down just a stand-up guy with a soft spot for underdogs. Got a moral core that earns him no thanks, just a whole whack of trouble and an enemy around every corner. There’s a suicide and a murder everybody’s pushing Marlow to drop. "You know something, kid? You think you're cute but you're just stupid. You're a shadow on the wall.” But walking away just ain't in his make-up.

A taste of Marlow's world “I drove back to Hollywood feeling like a short length of chewed string. It was too early to eat, and too hot. I turned on the fan in my office. It didn't make the air any cooler, just a little more lively. Outside on the boulevard the traffic brawled endlessly. Inside my head thoughts stuck together like flies on flypaper.” He builds characters effortlessly – again in just a few words. Take this pair of Homicide Detectives "He was gray blond and looked sticky. His partner was tall, good-looking, neat, and had a precise nastiness about him, a goon with an education. They had watching and waiting eyes, patient and careful eyes, cool disdainful eyes, cops' eyes."

Plot's a bit convoluted but moves along nicely. Don’t get caught up trying to keep it all straight. Instead enjoy the ambiance and the deliciously broken people. Majority of them clinging to sanity by a thread. Roger Wade is interesting, a bestselling pulp fiction author who hits the bottle hard. Rumour has it this is semi-autobiographical.
Heads-up: Written in the 50’s so you'll need to take in stride some racism. Women are broads and they're all bad news. He seems to like them anyway. "So they're human, they sweat, they get dirty, they have to go to the bathroom. What did you expect-golden butterflies hovering in a rosy mist?”

Way I see it I lucked out. My GR buddies guided me to Chandler as an intro to the world of hard-boiled detective novels. My 1st stab at it, have nothing to compare it to. Can’t rate by genre so 4.5 stars as pure entertainment – it was a blast.

The Long Goodbye

"The Long Goodbye" is the sixth novel in Chandler's Philip Marlowe universe, written some years after Chandler's other Marlowe novels and at a time when Chandler was going through a rough patch. "The Long Goodbye" is a large departure in some measures from the other Marlowe novels and has a different feel and rhythm to it altogether. Gone is the frenetic pace, the snappy dialogue, the quick pulling it all together. There is a certain melancholy, a wistfulness, to this one. And, it's more personal to Marlowe as he's emotionally involved with all the players. There are no more caricatures, no more typecasts. These are all characters developed slowly over a long novel. And of course the question is how well do you really know someone. Do you know what really makes them tick?

I loved this book. Absolutely.

I'm not going into plot here, but if you want to know what little I'm comfortable with divulging about this novel, you can find it at the crime page of my  online reading journal.

The Long Goodbye just might be my favorite Marlowe book yet. Loved The Big Sleep and The Little Sister, but this one trumps both of them. When I started reading this series, it was because I wanted to read Benjamin Black's new book The Black-Eyed Blonde: A Philip Marlowe Novel (which I got yesterday!), another Marlowe novel, and I wanted to see how his Marlowe stacks up to Chandler's, but I'd never read any Chandler. Since The Big Sleep, however, I've discovered that I genuinely love these old books; and before you say that they're too old to be relevant, think again. Reading pleasure is not all about new and contemporary -- especially considering that Chandler has been an influence on many authors on down the crime-writing line; he also, as far back as 1939, touched on many facets of social criticism that continue to have resonance in our modern world.

After reading and reporting on the five previous Marlowe novels, there's very little left for me to say about my favorite PI except for the fact that here his penchant for doing the right thing will turn into one of the most severe and personal betrayals of his career. However, it's really what Chandler says in and around Marlowe's work that I found most intriguing. He is no stranger to social criticism in these books, but here it's like he's also inserting much more of his personal life into the story. Everyone knows that Chandler was himself an alcoholic, and in this novel, alcoholism plays an extremely large and important role, with two alcoholic characters. One of them, the novelist Roger Wade, who admires F. Scott Fitzgerald, "the best drunken writer since Coleridge, who took dope," writes mass-appeal, popular historical books and is so drunk much of the time that he can't finish his latest one. Once he refers to himself as "a literary pimp." Through Wade, Chandler seems to be evoking his own emotional and other struggles with alcoholism as well as the whole writing biz. There is a most telling scene where Marlowe reads something "really wild" Wade wants him to get rid of before Mrs. Wade sees it (203-206), where Wade describes his ambivalence about drinking and writing. I must say, while I love all of the Marlowe novels, this one probably is Chandler at his ultimate finest.

I'm so loving this series, and I loved this book. The Long Goodbye appeals to my need for edge, for in-depth character study, for traces of social criticism, and my constant search for intelligently-written crime fiction. These books are, as I've said a number of times, some of the best literary works in the crime genre. If you have not yet made the acquaintance of Philip Marlowe, it's something you need to do and soon.

The Long Goodbye is Raymond Chandler at his best. Beautifully bleak, blatantly noir, a sense of impermanence, with an underlining need to create justice is an unjust society. Chandler's not so subtle exposé of class and social status compose the backdrop for his twisted tale of love and revenge. He creates loser underdogs as heroes, and then turns then into villains, or leaves them where they are to stay. His uber rich are above the law, but not above fear, self-hatred, deceit, and revenge. There's a continual circle jerk of backstabbing and petty quarrels. But the reader expects it, we can see it all coming as his characters broadcast their every move - and they do it in a good way - as only well constructed characters can. There is nothing one dimensional about them. And even though the book was written almost sixty years ago there's still a lot of similarities to today's headlines. Doctor prescribes drugs that eventually kill his client, he even makes house calls a la Micheal Jackson. Police botch investigation of heiress' death due to powerful industrialist's influence and abundance of money - just as in real life Casey Johnson of the Johnson and Johnson's - her death due to possible drug overdose amid questionable circumstances barely made the news and then next day was forgotten. Cops on the take, politically hungry District Attorneys, rich folks in seclusion hiding behind money - seems the insanity never changes and Chandler gives us a front row seat to all of it in its 1950's L.A. glory.

The Long Goodbye is one of those novels that you want to read with a strong cup of coffee, sipping with mindful pleasure, surrounded by varnished wooden furniture with an overall air of elegance. It's also one of those novels that happen to be a sublime example of American literature.

A down and out friend of Marlowe's flees to Mexico with Marlowe's help, his wife dead under suspicious circumstances. Marlowe's friend soon turns up dead, an apparent suicide. But what does his death, if anything, have to do with a drunk writer Marlowe finds himself watching?

I'm not really sure how I feel about the Long Goodbye. It's Chandler so the writing is great, with Chandler's trademark similes and hard-boiled atmosphere. On the other hand, it's written a little differently than his other Philip Marlowe books. It's more philosophical and less crime-oriented. The two victims in the story seem to be stand-ins for Chandler himself.

It's still crime oriented, though. It took me forever to figure out how the two seemingly unrelated cases were linked. I got there just before Marlowe did but it was a close shave.

What else is there to say without giving anything away? Chandler once again delivers the goods, just not in the same package as usual. Still, it was a very enjoyable read.

Brilliantly written. A portrait of a complex set of relationships revealed layer by layer in two interrelated investigations. A tour de force of Chandler's writing, where piquant verbs ramp up delightful sentences on every page.
Though Chandler has a lot to say about the way wealth can empty a person's life of meaning and purpose, this book is about a friendship, and what lengths Marlow goes to, in order to clear the name of his dead friend. I won't say more. It's a beautiful, heartbreaking book, with all the grit and angst and honorable grumpiness of his previous work, but be prepared to shed a few tears too.

"He wasn't much of a man," says a cop to Marlowe, about his friend Terry Lennox.
"What's that got to do with it?" asks Marlowe.

And that's the poignant message here, we care because we care, not because of any special quality of the person we care about, or what they've said, or done. To be oneself is enough. A fine view of the world, despite its seediness, which Chandler unflinchingly holds up to the light. As usual Chandler does not think much of women, but they are complex and troubled characters, fully formed and powerful. Above all, is the view of an independent man, "spoiled by my independence" who resists the lure of being bought, even when it seems a damn foolish thing to do.

08/2017

2017
So I read this again after five years. I didn't remember much, I never do after one reading of Chandler. My reaction to it now is that it is extraordinarily long. It really takes its time and unpacks Marlowe's life, and it is a good book, but lengthy. I have a LOVE /HATE relationship with Chandler. I like this, the Big Sleep and the Lady in the Lake. But I really do not admire Farewell My Lovely or the Little Sister. And I have read all those twice. I've read the High Window only once, so I will have to read it again. And then... He has three other books I have not read. So... I have goals!

2012
I'd never read this one before! I usually don't watch a movie if I want to read the book it's adapted from, but this was an exception, as I've seen the 1973 Altman version 3 times at least. It's irreverent and very 1973 Altman, and Elliot Gould is the best Marlowe ever. However they of course changed so much that it didn't detract from the book. It gave away the ending, but didn't capture the mystery itself. The book was still captivating, and I didn't even picture Elliot Gould (Marlowe says he's 6 ft and 1/2 an inch, so Gould was actually too tall). I thought it was one of Chandler's best. I liked Marlowe's observations, and his maturity.