2010/36

Nelson Algren: A Walk on the Wild Side (346p. in a mint first American print)

I’m running a bit of a Lou Reed theme lately. Reed was once approached to distill a musical out of Nelson Algren’s A Walk on the Wild Side, the project got canned, but he still got a song out of it all right.

Fuck, how much fun reading can be, and the bewilderment at discovering yet another author, a special one at that, off the chart even in a space so huge as is the space of the language English.

There’s three parts in the book. In the first part, Dove Linkhorn (the protagonist) rides the Santa Fe railway across Texas (as a hobo), in the second he spends his time in a New Orleans brothel, in the third in a New Orleans jail (all under Hoover in the 30s). The pimps and the whores, the hoodlums and the downtrodden – the world of Nelson Algren.

Advanced English reading, smack dab right in the middle of America’s South.

Awesome.