Sensitivity always ends up shining through to prose when the poet decides to move away from rhymes. And that's the case with Denis johnson, poet at heart and renowned prose narrator for the outside world. Furthermore, Johnson, as a good representative of a current poet, also abounded in the lyrics of perdition, leaving the skin of his characters in the corners of the alleys of the underworld, where the night of dreams and murky desires find a way out of their prison. of morality.
It could be in a sad dump or in the middle of a skirmish on the other side of the world, where you can kill without accounting for any justice. The question for Johnson was to narrate the world from that inside-outside notion that is transforming reality according to what each tormented character draws from within.
But not everything is doom. From that "sin city" that the human wishes to visit from time to time, consciously or unconsciously, there may be room for mutation, for the recomposition of the sadness that leads there. It is only a matter of being aware of one's own miseries to slap them and leave them behind, along with that self-destructive and exclusive instinct of the human being as an individual and as a civilization.
Denis Johnson's Top 3 Recommended Books
The smoke tree
The Vietnam War is an almost obligatory scenario for every narrator or filmmaker. In films like Apocalypse Now or Good Morning Vietnam we find that direct and critical visualization of a strange conflict for most Americans who thought about what their young people were doing there, on the other side of the world and falling for war reasons that were not always fully explicit.
As for the novel, Denis Johnson wrote the most critically recognized story about that apocalyptic and labyrinthine scenario of a Vietnamese territory subjected to skirmishes, attacks and victims for 20 years.
The American intervention to prevent communist unification in this area was never fully understood in the midst of a Cold War that also never clarified its most vicious political extremes.
Together with Skip Sand we discover all those typical contradictions of war, finally materialized in the soldiers Bill and James, who arrived from deep America to that other side of the world to defend something inserted in their ideology as a sum of ultimately meaningless slogans. on the bodies of the most unexpected victims.
Operation Smoke Tree sounds like an American "final solution", and its materialization looms in the course of history as a counterweight to the few vestiges of humanity that may remain in a war.
Mermaid's favor
In the five stories that make up the book we delve into very disparate life projects, but always brimming with the deepest sensations approaching the end.
Characters who face what they are with a veiled smile faced with tragedy, with melancholy turned into that full happiness of being sad. Because they have no other choice. For the five protagonists there is always a glimmer of full beauty in life. Especially in its greatest final enigma.
Otherwise the most beautiful would be submerged in the pathetic darkness of reason that has made them face their fears or accumulate old traumas; or that points them into the abyss of the emptiness of a consumed life, when all past time announced the eternity of the moment like a false slogan seen in the today of their last days...
After loving intensely or hating without possible amendment; After the greatest successes or the worst mistakes, these characters do not care about the accessory of their circumstances, since the nostalgia is the same.
And they only have to uncover the farce and laugh at the rudeness of the time trick that nullifies any conquest or buries any possible error. Death haunted the author while he indulged in these stories.
An act of deliberate farewell literature. Five characters that may well be just one. Because in the end we live many lives, different situations, different scenarios and we have to say goodbye to all of this.
Nobody move
It is always interesting to discover an author focused on a specific genre, approaching something different. This foray by Denis Johnson into the crime novel represents a renewal per se.
Everything that a writer of interior scenes contributes to a genre that is mostly focused on effect, on the theatricalization of crime, on the critical social reflection, ultimately supposes enrichment. The most purist lovers of the black genre did not always appreciate this proposal, but it is certainly an interesting novel, loaded with acid humor.
Without a doubt a release from an author who wanted to see in the most gruesome black a way to expiate demons, laugh at the gloomy and offer real insights into a world of the underworld that he finds in gambling and betting, a practically permitted way of life.
The struggle between Jimmy, a compulsive gambler, and Gambol, a hired thug, turns the story into a frenetic evolution of two puppets driven by the brains of the gambling mafia and the chance of their lives.
