"I didn't look at her. But I could see her dress. It was one of these white nurse uniforms, like they all wear, whether they work in a dentist's office or a bakeshop. It had been clean in the morning, but it was a little bit rumpled now, and mussy. I could smell her."
I wound up fixated on this book for years. It's a perfect book I think, perfectly executed. I was so affected by the muted blankness of Frank, the dark eroticism, the impending violence. I liked the idea of a character appearing fully formed but entirely unexplained, kicked off the hay truck, a dark and unmoving blank slate who seems indifferent on what he has for breakfast or who he kills. Like watching the bored eyes of a predator flitting around and taking things in.
The blankness of character is the same as the character in Camus L'Étranger . The detatched narrator, the inhumanity of not only the murder victim but everything and all things seemingly absurd or unimportant. It's a perfect tight and mean and erotic noir, you are expecting something tawdry and you get it, just not how you wanted it, it's like you've just seen a snake or something, there is some shiver of disgust I got reading the book. I think the thing I admire about the novel is that my disgust doesn't come from the violence, it comes from the blankness, it's something you don't want to touch. "I bit her. I sunk my teeth into her lips so deep I could feel the blood spurt into my mouth. It was running down her neck when I carried her upstairs."
