Sooooooo good!

3.5

Good not great-I read it because it’s brisk and Claire Denis is adapting it and I think it could be a great movie.

The book is a little too short-it hits on interesting things but doesn’t fully go into them enough. Erotic but not sexy enough, exciting but not thrilling, etc. There is a sense of poetry to it that’s engaging and thoughtful though, I’m interested in other Johnson novels

Μανάγκουα, τυλιγμένη από μια ανάσα ζοφερή, γεμάτη δέος.
Νικαράγουα κ όλο το ντελίριο του τροπικού , ανάμεσα στους Σαντινίστας κ στους Κόντρας, σε ένα ταξίδι ανέχειας, τρέλας κ εξωτισμου

Another excellent novel from Denis Johnson! His ability to create the perilous atmosphere of 1980's Central America and to enable me to relate to characters whose lives are so different from mine is incredible!

A book that can capture the tangled conflict in Central America as well as the one in the consciences and minds of Americans, and to do it in a such a short, direct and unhectoring manner, is what we have here. I rank it with Deborah Eisenberg's Under the 82nd Airborne (the story in the collection of the same name) and Robert Stone's A Flag for Sunrise. But it's also Denis Johnson and that lifts it into the poetic realistic realm, which makes it unique. In that sense, though they are very different books, I put it with Roberto Bolano's Distant Star, about the Chilean coup against Allende, also short, also poetic in heart and subject matter.

Denis was a classmate at Iowa but we rarely talked. He stuck with poets and impressed the hell out of all of us. I wish we had him here to do justice what is happening now--what feels like a blowback that seems to be turning us into Salvador and Honduras and Nicaragua.

My second rather obnoxious narrator in a row - this time a woman. She claims to be a journalist for an American paper but is working as a whore in Nicaragua in 1984 when we meet her. Here she meets an Englishman working for an oil company who has incurred the wrath of the Contras and the Americans by telling the Sandinista's where the oil fields are. The author forges the character of his two central protagonists around national clichés - the insecure bravado of the American abroad and the sterilising formality of the Brit abroad. It's a device which works really well because he works in a lot of subtlety to these generalisations. Less likeable for me was the noir voice the author deploys for his narrator, hard-edged and cynical and familiar to us from heaps of private detective films. The author did it well but it's not a voice I find very engaging. It's a novel that takes a while to burst into life but this is what happens at about the half way point when the two characters are on the run and seeking to escape Nicaragua. I ended up really enjoying it. Thanks to Candi for putting this on my radar. Definitely an author I'll be reading again.

I'm a huge Johnson fan, but The Stars at Noon is a bad novel. It's pretty gross about a few things: women, socialism, Central Americans. To name just a few. This is tempered by the inversion at the heart of the novel's Hell. It is a Hell where good deeds are punished. I'm bummed it's so bad, since it's the most overtly religious of his novels. It provides a lot of material for the idea I'm chasing. I marked at least a dozen passages about fate. The idea is this: Johnson's prose turns most lyrical when it is working spiritual themes about fate and chance and trapped-ness (both when he's being straight and when he's making a mockery, as he is a lot of the time here).

The last line is pretty staggering.

Holy Jesus, what this guy must have done in his time on Earth... To be put here with his dreams, but not himself, made substance.

There are bits of direct quotation of Merwin throughout the book. I don't know Merwin well enough to know if the line is lifted or a riff from him or neither.

The hysterical hostility of American imperialism comes through pretty well.

This is what the diary of a sap in LeCarre novel would be like.

The ambiguities are well done.

For me, Denis Johnson's writing has always been feast or famine. When it hits, his surreal descriptions and sharp, bantering dialogue strike me as enlarging my understanding of the worlds he creates and the world in which I live. When it misses, his language strikes me as overcooked, meaningless, hard-boiled nonsense.

Feast: Angels, Fiskadoro, Jesus' Son, Tree of Smoke, Train Dreams

Famine: The Stars at Noon, The Name of the World, The Laughing Monsters

I read this book purely because Robert Pattinson is going to be the starring in the film adaptation. I was hoping that reading the book would assist in understanding what is most likely an art house film that Rob frequently does and confounds me. Alas, the book read like a art house film and was little help.

3.5

A swift read from master Denis Johnson is told from the perspective of an American woman in Nicaragua during the revolution in 1984 whose motives are rather unclear, even perhaps to herself. She meets an English man with equally fuzzy intents, and their collision sets into motion an affair of sloppy intrigue and damp, dirty encounters that are soaked in rum and nihilism. There are moments of utterly brilliant prose, and the confusion of all involved is palpable, kind of akin to Under the Volcano, when reason is lost to the baking of one's brain with heat and booze. I liked it; lesser Johnson is still better than most novels out there, but the empemeral nature of the book left me wanting just a shred more to hang on to.

I listened to a lot of Hermanos Gutiérrez, the Skipper by Henry Franklin and Healing is a Miracle by Juliana Barwick while reading this one.