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4.0étoiles sur 5
Hitchcock's Rear Window, Kinky-Style, Juil 8 2004
Confined to his New York apartment at 199B Vandam Street for six weeks after contracting malaria--the "only truly deadly strain" of the disease--private detective Kinky Friedman (not to be confused with his creator, author, country singer, and potential future governor of Texas Kinky Friedman) happens to see, Rear Window-style, a woman brutally beaten in an apartment across the street. The problem is, feverish and delirious as he's been, Kinky does not make the most convincing of witnesses, and neither the police he summons nor his gang of variously accented, frequently inebriated cronies--the so-called "Village Irregulars," the collective Grace Kelly to his laid up Jimmy Stewart--believe him. When further investigation suggests Kinky wasn't imagining things, the game, as he and Sherlock like to say, is afoot.But the mystery in The Prisoner of Vandam Street is in a sense beside the point, entertaining though it is, for Kinky Friedman's novel is a departure from standard mystery fare. The author's prose is bursting with word play and Conan Doyleisms and pop culture references and irreverent philosophical musings. If at times it borders on the cloying, his writing is far more often downright funny: "Now, I'm not making light of people who are deaf or losing their hearing. I am not mocking a disability that afflicts millions of Americans as they grow older, effectively cutting them off to varying degrees from the hearing world. All I'm saying, and I'll try to speak loudly and slowly and enunciate clearly, is that they should get medical help or a hearing aid or a large, metal ear-horn like the kind that was used in medieval times, and stop constantly blaming hapless, sensitive friends like myself for mumbling." Friedman also has a serious side, evidenced in the book's closing parable and in the sweetly moving, brief chapter on his--Kinky the character's as well as Kinky the man's--continued sense of loss after the death of his parents. In short, mystery lovers with a taste for off-color jokes and pun-punctuated prose will get a kick out of Kinky.
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1.0étoiles sur 5
Verbose, Mai 29 2004
You no doubt have heard the theory that if enough monkeys spent
time pounding on typewriter keys, they would eventually produce
all the written works of Western Civilization. Maybe, but this book seems like one of the products of such a stunt, and one of the rejects at that.
If this author could make a point, or explain something, in 10 words, he always, instead, spends at least 100 words to produce
the same result.
And, worse yet, there are several instances in this book where
several pages can go by without the slightest advance in plot,
or development of character. Seriously, this book consists mainly of a string of words put together that seem to go on and on. Without any literary result at all.
This is the book that should be read only by someone confined,
who can't get out to find something decent to read, and is unlucky enough to have no one to come to his reading rescue.
Or, better yet, it should be given to people serving time for
serious crimes as part of their punishment.
This book is a supreme waste of time. Please avoid it.
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1.0étoiles sur 5
Phoned in From Borneo, Mai 10 2004
Apparently, between being lauded by the President, courted by Hollywood, and encouraged by Molly Ivins to run for Texas Guv, Kinky Friedman decided that taking the care and hours necessary to write a decent book would be too much of a drain on his otherwise star filled schedule. I enjoyed his earlier works, and have been a fan of Kinky's personality ever since I first became aware of its existence. His earlier works were masterful and created a world into which I longed to escape, as most good fiction does. Regretfully, this work not only doesn't do justice to the creative force that I understood to be Kinky Friedman, it seems to indicate that Kinky has begun, for better or worse, to believe his own bull***t. Instead of creating something new, or nuanced, he gives us a rehashing of the twenty things that we know to be "Kinky", presenting them one per ten pages, secure that mere nuggets of recycled humor, absent societal obervation and commentary, interspersed with more navel gazing than Sylvia Plath aged fourteen, will satieate his masses of followers. Regretfully, though he does compare himself to Jesus in the book, there is no way to take the crumbs of Vandam Street and feed anyone, much less a multitude.
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