A grand prize separates Patrick deWitt of that popular mythification of the writer on duty. For the rest, the literary career of this Canadian writer has well earned the recognition of critics and readers hard-won with that unstoppable proselytizing of the narrative quality beaten by weight.
For me, being a writer is above all taking time to be one after having to deal with other tasks with everyday demands. Writer is someone like Patrick who would start writing his stories late in the day, after work. And thanks to an inspiration that does not suffer from stress or exhaustion, he overcame the will to write just because.
The clear horizon as a writer can come later, when one has already made oneself a narrator in one's own right. And deWitt knows himself to be the honorary holder of the title of narrator. From such self-sufficiency is born a literature overflowing with imagination to the point of absurdity at times; a very rich bibliography, although not yet very extensive, that compiles works from the blackness of obsidian or comedies with tragic substrata. And Witt reinvents genres and makes them his own. An author always to discover...
Top 3 Recommended Novels by Patrick deWitt
Farewell to the French
Perdition is an inertia that reaches us from the side of laziness, hopelessness, boredom or nihilism. There is something enervatingly comical about someone who surrenders to that dolce far niente at the foot of the abyss. But faced with the tragic notion of advents that point the protagonists of this story to their particular decline, we curiously and comically discover the same sense of the unexpected that shakes us all, willing makers of our destiny or simple and comfortable survivors on their board in half of the ocean...
Frances Price and her son Malcolm (now an adult, but still living with her) lead a sophisticated and gifted life in the most glamorous Manhattan, thanks to the fabulous inheritance of her late husband. A husband about whose death they plan certain suspicions that point to Frances. These rumors have endowed her with the aura of a black widow, but they have not prevented her from continuing to enjoy infinite whims with a credit card.
Until so much excess ends up depleting the bank account and suddenly mother and son find themselves broke and with the need to start over. They flee onward to Paris with Little Frank, the family cat, who must be smuggled into France. There is a compelling reason not to leave it behind: Frances is convinced that the spirit of her late husband lives in the body of this feline ...
The Brothers Sisters
The Wild West composes an imaginary dotted with stereotypes with the common denominator of the journey, of the conquest, of the gold as a promise against the misery of each one. Charlie and Eli's golden particular is more of an assignment, a sinister mission for men of blind faith. Only in the sun of the American West everything can change, even the safest plans.
The Sisters live in Oregon City and work for the Commodore, a tycoon and perhaps aspiring politician who pulls many strings in the shadows and has multiple and varied businesses. The brothers, it must be said, are his thugs and sometimes his executioners.
And now they are heading to Sacramento, California, to do a new job for their boss, to finish off Hermann Kermit Warm, a gold digger. Because the novel takes place in 1851, in the middle of the gold rush. It is not very clear which gold river Warm is in, and the Commodore has sent Morris the dandy, who also works for him, to find out his whereabouts and follow him, to deliver him to the Sisters.
And the novel is not only the story of the encounter with the eccentric, wise and adventurous Hermann Kermit Warm, whom they do not know why they should kill, but it is also the path, the changing relationship between the two brothers and the encounters and adventures that In this drift through the Wild West they follow one another: tramps, madmen, brothels, whores and even a peculiar accountant who fascinates Eli, the youngest of the brothers, a temporarily amoral moralist who sometimes weighs his job and his loneliness. A very seductive, black and funny novel.
Sub-Steward Minor
Lucy Minor, a young man who is leaving his adolescence behind and entering the adult world, leaves the town in the mountains from which he has never left. He does it after suffering a love disappointment and realizing that in that place where rude giants abound, he will always be an outcast. He has a letter in his pocket with a job offer: a position of assistant butler at Von Aux castle.
The naive Lucy will run into various characters: a butler given to philosophizing and melancholy; an inept cook who does not accept criticism; an aristocrat who sends a desperate love letter every day without ever getting a reply; some peculiar guerrillas who fight in the mountains without really knowing why; two professional thieves who practice their trade on trains, and Klara, the daughter of one of them ...
Surrounded by this gallery of eccentrics, Lucy will investigate the mysterious disappearance of her predecessor, she will discover a wild human being that eats rodents in the castle, she will witness a strange orgy in which a cake becomes a sadomasochistic instrument, she will listen to some stories about perfidious seducers and masters of deception and, above all, he will discover the passions and sorrows of the adult world and the ups and downs of love, which "is not for the fainthearted."
DeWitt takes as his starting point the Central European novel, Robert Walser's antiheroes and the universe kafkaesque, and mixes them with a protagonist who seems to have come out of a slapstick with a few drops of expressionist cinema. The result is a Bildungsroman postmodern, which combines an outrageous humor with a deep look at the uncertainties and perplexities of a young man in the face of the paradoxes of life.
