Why is this guy considered a literary genius, exactly? It's true he had good prose, but I'd say Raymond Chandler's prose was at least equal, and he's not considered a literary genius.
>I'd say Raymond Chandler's prose was at least equal
>>7441193
>he's never read Raymond Chandler
Chandler's prose was patrician af desu
i hope you meant raymond carver. and even then im pretty rustled. 10/10
>>7441193
>>7441216
She was twenty or so, small and delicately put together, but she looked durable. She wore pale blue slacks and they looked well on her. She walked as if she were floating. Her hair was a fine tawny wave cut much shorter than the current fashion of pageboy tresses curled in at the bottom. Her eyes were slate-gray, and had almost no expression when they looked at me. She came over near me and smiled with her mouth and she had little sharp predatory teeth, as white as fresh orange pith and as shiny as porcelain. They glistened between her thin too taut lips. Her face lacked color and didn't look too healthy.
"Tall, aren't you?" she said.
"I didn't mean to be."
Her eyes rounded. She was puzzled. She was thinking. I could see, even on that short acquaintance, that thinking was always going to be a bother to her.
"Handsome too," she said. "And I bet you know it."
I grunted.
"What's your name?"
"Reilly," I said. "Doghouse Reilly."
"That's a funny name." She bit her lip and turned her head a little and looked at me along her eyes. Then she lowered her lashes until they almost cuddled her cheeks and slowly raised them again, like a theater curtain. I was to get to know that trick. That was supposed to make me roll over on my back with all four paws in the air.
>>7441272
fuck this is so cheeseball
gotta get around to reading this guy
seems like it would be comfy as fuck
>>7441197
you do realize he was making fun of your syntax, right?
>>7441310
whats wrong with it to be honest?
>>7441289
It was adapted pretty well into The Big Lebowski.
Miller's Crossing = Dashiell Hammett
The Man Who Wasn't There = James M. Cain
The Big Lebowski (a play on The Big Sleep) = Raymond Chandler
The woman he's talking to in that excerpt was the basis for "Bunny". Her husband (wealthy, elderly and confined to a wheel-chair, with a blanket perpetually over his legs) likewise is the basis for the husband from The Big Lebowski.
>>7441289
Despite all the hardboiled palaver, Chandler's books are fantastic comedies (well, except for The Long Goodbye). Thousands of parodies and rip-offs have unfortunately diluted the effect somewhat for the modern reader. They can now read as if they have a cliched 'private eye' style, but when he first started, no one else was writing private eye stories in that style. Hammett and others preceded him, but their style was very different.
>>7441418
Yeah, Hammet's isn't even first-person.
>>7441410
how's the long goodbye? great fucking movie.
>>7441501
The Long Goodbye is great, but it's less overtly comedic than The Big Sleep or the Farewell, My Lovely. Marlowe is still funny, but the overall tone is a lot more serious.
>>7441272
Cancerous prose.
>>7441572
The Long Goodbye. You're just describing Marlowe as a character. Altman's interpretation of him is much closer to the books, Bogart's is more Sam Spade.
>"Well, you do get up," she said, wrinkling her nose at the faded red settee, the two odd semi-easy chairs, the net curtains that needed laundering and the boy's size library table with the venerable magazines on it to give the place a professional touch. "I was beginning to think perhaps you worked in bed, like Marcel Proust."
>"Who's he?" I put a cigarette in my mouth and stared at her. She looked a little pale and strained, but she looked like a girl who could function under a strain.
>"A French writer, a connoisseur in degenerates. You wouldn't know him."
>"Tut, tut," I said. "Come into my boudoir."
Then the coffee didn't steam any more and the cigarette stopped smoking and was just a dead butt on the edge of an ash tray. I dropped it into the garbage can under the sink. I poured the coffee out and washed the cup and put it away.
That was that. It didn't seem quite enough to do for five thousand dollars.
I went to a late movie after a while. It meant nothing. I hardly saw what went on. It was just noise and big faces. When I got home again I set out a very dull Ruy Lopez and that didn't mean anything either. So I went to bed.
But not to sleep. At three AM. I was walking the floor and listening to Khachaturyan working in a tractor factory. He called it a violin concerto. I called it a loose fan belt and the hell with it.
A white night for me is as rare as a fat postman. If it hadn't been for Mr. Howard Spencer at the Ritz-Beverly I would have killed a bottle and knocked myself out. And the next time I saw a polite character drunk in a Rolls. Royce Silver Wraith, I would depart rapidly in several directions. There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself.
