SAO PAULO BLUES by JIM CHAFFEE
One of the few remaining satirists with guts, Chaffee is as precise as he is vaulting - A resolute (ir)realist more than experienced with, and cognizant of, American barbarism.
What could be worse than stumbling on the mutilated corpses of a scad of Brazilian hookers? How about falling hard for a Brazilian prostitute marked for death by torture? A web of passion and homicidal fervour snares retired detective Mike Devere on his first excursion to Sao Paulo. Watch the clueless gringo wriggle as he is reluctantly sucked in. Following the information-theoretic-puzzler drift of Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, Sao Paulo Blues careens along a geodesic flow where old-fashioned sex and violence replace the polite veneer of obfuscatory science lingo. Can Devere untangle the web and straighten the trajectory? Can you? Jim Chaffee, the former Nam medic, is the greatest writer of violence since Homer. When a guy gets clobbered in a Jim Chaffee book, he doesn’t lie down and lose consciousness for a narratively convenient period of time. He kneels down and pukes. When bullets are involved, blood and mucus ooze from exposed sinuses. “Hearty lungs full of air” are gulped: a reflex of the intact brain stem, “a chemical memory prompting useless remains to take an occasional needless breath.” São Paulo Blues is a detective novel in the same way that Journey to the End of the Night is a physician’s day book. This is the sort of genre-pulverizing feat you would expect from the inventor of mathematical pornography, the only genuinely new literary form to appear in the last seventy years, for all the plague of “genres” that have lately been pulled out of publicists’ asses. — Tom Bradley, author of The Sam Edwine Pentateuch Now available at Amazon |
SP BLUES on the Web
CHAFFEE on the Web
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