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marmoo 's review for:
Farewell, My Lovely
by Raymond Chandler
There’s a reason that Raymond Chandler was a genre-defining talent. The evocative metaphors and the pitch-perfect tone of Marlowe’s narration are deservedly iconic. The novel’s atmosphere was memorable, and the wordplay engaging.
It is also a pretty fundamentally racist book. “But surely it is a book of it’s time,” you might protest, “And who decides where the line is between depicting racism and embodying it?” But can be all just all agree that the then-social acceptability of the racist violence and language in this novel—or the enthusiastic homophobia of The Big Sleep—is not the same as moral acceptability?
(While we’re at it, perhaps we can also do away with framing these observations solely in terms of how they land to “the modern reader,” as if nonwhite and nonstraight people with a point of view on their own personal worth weren’t invented until the 21st century.)
If the question, then, is whether a novel can have a disturbing moral vision and still have literary merit, this one makes a good case for maybe.
It is also a pretty fundamentally racist book. “But surely it is a book of it’s time,” you might protest, “And who decides where the line is between depicting racism and embodying it?” But can be all just all agree that the then-social acceptability of the racist violence and language in this novel—or the enthusiastic homophobia of The Big Sleep—is not the same as moral acceptability?
(While we’re at it, perhaps we can also do away with framing these observations solely in terms of how they land to “the modern reader,” as if nonwhite and nonstraight people with a point of view on their own personal worth weren’t invented until the 21st century.)
If the question, then, is whether a novel can have a disturbing moral vision and still have literary merit, this one makes a good case for maybe.