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A review by novabird
The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
4.0
What I experienced while reading The Big Sleep was a sense of nostalgia and a sense of appreciation for how far exactly we have come in gender relations – “You've come a long way, baby.” (from the Virginia Slims cigarette campaign)
Who knew that reading noir could be a ’comfort’ read? Before colorization of movies, before cable, before video rentals or downstream of movies, I read books and watched black and white television. Those early days when I watched movies like: Key Largo, Night of the Hunter and Casablanca while during the same timeframe I had outgrown Cherry Ames, Sue Barton and Nancy Drew, books and was peeking into The Hardy Boys, I became bored and started dipping into my father’s bookshelves for full-grown male spy characters: The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Where Eagles Dare, and The Odessa File etc.
But it was that buffer zone between childhood and adolescence, that I remembered when I read The Big Sleep; that fuzzy feeling where I still believed in the goodness of the world, the sound of my cat purring and the smell and taste of freshly baked, home-made cinnamon rolls that I had made. Maybe it was because I heard a certain prominent male actor HB, doing an internal voice-over for me, yet I still think it has more to do with the time anchoring of my first exposure to that time period; when things were still black and white in my mind’s eye, and I was a lot less aware of all the gray shades, hues and tints.
Who knew that reading noir could be a ’comfort’ read? Before colorization of movies, before cable, before video rentals or downstream of movies, I read books and watched black and white television. Those early days when I watched movies like: Key Largo, Night of the Hunter and Casablanca while during the same timeframe I had outgrown Cherry Ames, Sue Barton and Nancy Drew, books and was peeking into The Hardy Boys, I became bored and started dipping into my father’s bookshelves for full-grown male spy characters: The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Where Eagles Dare, and The Odessa File etc.
But it was that buffer zone between childhood and adolescence, that I remembered when I read The Big Sleep; that fuzzy feeling where I still believed in the goodness of the world, the sound of my cat purring and the smell and taste of freshly baked, home-made cinnamon rolls that I had made. Maybe it was because I heard a certain prominent male actor HB, doing an internal voice-over for me, yet I still think it has more to do with the time anchoring of my first exposure to that time period; when things were still black and white in my mind’s eye, and I was a lot less aware of all the gray shades, hues and tints.