Double blech ( )

When a rabbit invites a snake into his warren, what other outcome could their possibly be? ( )

As much as I wish I was French, I’ve got to admit these anglophone writers really know what they’re doing.

Updike manages to pull off a Heart of Darkness set within a 60’s suburb, with all of the racially based tumult that is part and parcel of that kind of thing. Colonel Kurtz is now a black man on the run, convinced he is Jesus and liberator, lodged like an enigmatic tumour in Rabbit’s home. The blind vitality of a Lolita is exploited and pilfered by both white colonisers and dispossessed black men. The open sore of Vietnam and the sterile exploration of the Moon don the role of catalysts for religious fervour and naive optimism. All of these factors, as well as a ‘fucked out cunt’ (one of my favourite Millerism’s) of a marriage, just go to demonstrate the state of the cogs of the American machine of the 60’s. As the spectacle of a black man fucking a white young girl with the windows wide open shows, the artifice of those repugnant ‘well-to-do white neighbourhoods’ has been dashed. The eyes may be the window to the soul, but now one must wonder what these suburban windows now point to. No one can keep up appearances any longer, the cat’s outta the bag.

This book is great.

P.S. don’t read on the train, got a lot of concerted looks for reading a book laden so heavily with n bombs. ( )

Updike can be hard to read. You have to commit. But if you commit, you won't regret. The plot of this book, like Rabbit Run, simmers slowly and builds organically to a very satisfying conclusion, and along the way, you get to experience whatever decade Rabbit's experiencing.

In this case, that's the Sixties, during the civil rights upheaval. I marveled at the tangle Rabbit gets himself into and delighted in his handling of it (Rabbit tends to just go with the flow of whatever happens in his life).

This is a great book. I highly recommend it. ( )

En los años sesenta, un Harry «Conejo» Angstrom ya maduro siente de pronto que se tambalean las frágiles bases sobre las que él cree haber asentado sus escasas convicciones tras sus primeras correrías. Conejo intenta entonces acercarse a un grupo de jóvenes intransigentes e inconformistas, más o menos comprometidos en la lucha por cambiar las instituciones que rigen la sociedad en que viven, pero sus ideas y sus argumentos, si bien parecen cargados de razón, no consiguen ofrecerle la salida y la esperanza que el necesita para paliar su desconcierto. Más bien, poco a poco, va descubriendo que su intento por comprender a esos jóvenes fracasa porque ellos mismos viven en la incertidumbre de un mundo que condenan, pero que ignoran por qué otro orden de cosas sustituir. Su propio drama es el de toda una generación que trata desesperadamente de hallar en vano un nuevo código de conducta.