Tag book

A bright yellow cover features a red cutout image of a revolver.

The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler

jeanboone1 Leave a comment
A bright yellow cover features a red cutout image of a revolver.

by Jean B.

I took an uncharacteristic turn this summer by watching a movie before reading the book. Heresy! When my book club decided to read the Raymond Chandler classic, The Big Sleep, I felt unenthusiastic and decided to first check out the famous film adaptation, starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. 

I discovered an atmospheric masterpiece that is like a train wreck: you can’t look away, even as the bodies are piling up and the unanswered questions are mounting faster. Seamy and steamy, the film’s careless violence and social dysfunction surprised me in a 1940s-era production. Of course, that’s why they call it film noir, right?  Bogart, as the hard boiled private detective Philip Marlowe, dives into the sordid world of the spoiled, rich Sternwood sisters (Bacall and Martha Vickers) to catch a blackmailer and through a meandering investigation, ignites all kinds of sparks – romantic and otherwise.   

I appreciated the film for its classic style and mesmerizing performances, but I also felt perplexed by the story. It turns out, I’m not alone: as one critic wrote, “The Big Sleep is the best scripted, best directed, best acted, and least comprehensible film noir ever made.” Interestingly, the screenplay was written by William Faulkner, known for his own complex literature. I wondered, did Faulkner make the plot incomprehensible or was that Chandler’s work? 

Clearly, it was time to read the book and find out for myself. Told in first person by Marlowe, the story unfolds through sharp dialogue and terse descriptions of people and urban landscapes. Having seen the movie first, I heard Humphrey Bogart’s voice as I read, a definite bonus! While I usually prefer to form my own image of a character from the author’s writing, Bogart and Bacall seemed perfectly suited to Chandler’s style and words, so I didn’t mind having them in my head. 

The book provided a wealth of detail and allowed me to add more depth to my understanding of the characters and their predicaments. Still, this is not the kind of mystery you try to solve on your own. As a detective, Marlowe makes no effort to be especially clever or careful; he doesn’t store up observations and deductions a la Sherlock Holmes. 

Instead, he confronts a suspicious character, spills whatever information he has, then stands back to see what happens. Although the plot feels more comprehensible in the book than the movie, it’s still like a many-layered onion: each time Marlowe deciphers one crime and its culprit, another one emerges and more motives, corruption, romantic relationships, and villainy appear. Still, Chandler’s language and pungent metaphors make the effort to untangle these webs worthwhile. When a writer can make even a dreary office evocative (“His office had the musty smell of years of routine”), you can’t help but turn the page to keep reading.  

So which was better:  the book or the movie? I’m glad to have experienced both. The Big Sleep is all about atmosphere – when you soak it up both through the author’s words and the performances of great actors on the screen, you get the full picture, even if you’re still a little fuzzy on whodunnit! 

Borrow either or both at HCLS: in print and on DVD.

Jean is a Children’s Instructor and Research Specialist at HCLS Central Branch. She loves talking about books with people of all ages, but especially enjoys leading the Heavy Medals book club for fourth and fifth graders, exploring award-winning books of all genres.  

Movie poster with Art Deco framing and the cast grouped n the middle, with the eyes wearing glasses peering from the back.

The Great Gatsby: Revised and Reimagined

Kristen B. 1 Comment
Deep blue cover has disembodied eyes and both above a lit up cityscape.

by Kristen B.

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece, The Great Gatsby, has always struck me as a story about selfish people doing terrible things, in the service of nothing much at all. It’s one of the books that most of us first encounter as assigned reading in high school or college. However, I find myself returning to it and continuing to be fascinated, as well as a bit repulsed. The slim novel packs of a lot of punch and has proven itself worth revisiting and even re-imagining.

In high school, we were given the dark blue cover with a lit-up city-scape and disembodied eyes looming above it all (see above). It haunts me. The jazz age fable recounts a tale of obsession and excess, capturing the essence of the 1920s. It also plays with some quintessential idea of the American Dream, but one that’s gone a little seedy and unappealing at the edges. After all, everyone seemingly aspires to the life of the rich and famous, spending summers in East or West Egg, driving fast cars, and attending Gatsby’s extravagant parties along with the up and coming, dreadfully naive Nick Carraway. But (again, but), there’s a cost.

The story takes place during one hot summer in New York, fitting for seasonal reading. The pivotal scene happens when the exhausting weather drives the main characters, Gatsby and Nick, Daisy and Tom Buchanan, and Daisy’s friend Jordan Baker into the city, hoping for respite and entertainment at The Plaza. From there, all the carefully maintained charades and illusions come apart, leading to unresolved tragedy. The book ends with a deep yearning for what might have been, if only other choices had been possible.

An Asian woman's with a short bob, wearing black gloves and holding a cigarette, is posed among white leaves.

What brought me back to Gatsby recently was The Chosen and the Beautiful by Nghi Vo. She is one of my current favorite authors (see The Singing Hills novellas), who turned this well-known story on its axis. The retelling stars professional golfer Jordan Baker and her lifelong friendship with Daisy, as opposed to newly-minted businessman Nick Carraway and his bewilderment with Jay Gatsby. Plus, the subtle (and not-so) metaphors of Fitzgerald’s text became all too real with the inclusion of magical realism. They really do float about in white linen in the opening scenes. Tom Buchanan continues to provide the White, patriarchal establishment’s status quo against which all their boats beat back so fruitlessly, but he is even less appealing through the female gaze. While everyone is still privileged to the point of carelessness, the feminine emphasis makes the book slightly more sympathetic and tragic.

It’s still a good idea to have the original under your belt before enjoying the other variations. I recently (finally) watched the 2013 movie, starring Tobey Maguire and Leonardo DiCaprio in a Baz Luhrmann production. It certainly does the story justice, and in some ways conveys the outrageous excesses better than the book with all the lush visuals and big scenes. The text and the film complement each other well. As is true for most Luhrmann movies, the soundtrack was amazing.

If you’re looking to refresh your memory of the story, without perhaps reading the original, consider the graphic novel adaptation by K. Woodman-Maynard. It does a good job of mixing the bare bones of the story with some of Fitzgerald’s more luscious prose. The illustrations and the placement of the words within the images makes some of the more subtle, interpersonal nuances more obvious.

The Great Gatsby, the ultimate tale of reinvention and breath-taking chutzpah in the name of love and ambition, is one of the cultural touchstones of the American literary canon. It’s worth retelling, to reconsider what else it can convey to audiences almost a century after it was published. If you aren’t familiar with it, summer is a great time to devote some time to those books that you have always meant to read.

Kristen B. is a devoted bookworm lucky enough to work as the graphic designer for HCLS. She likes to read, stitch, dance, and watch baseball (but not all at the same time).