⇒ Libro Gratis The Big Clock Kenneth Fearing Nicholas Christopher 9781590171813 Books

The Big Clock Kenneth Fearing Nicholas Christopher 9781590171813 Books

Download As PDF : The Big Clock Kenneth Fearing Nicholas Christopher 9781590171813 Books

The Big Clock Kenneth Fearing Nicholas Christopher 9781590171813 Books

Kenneth Fearing (1902 -- 1961) is sometimes called the "Chief Poet of the American Depression". His noir novel, "The Big Clock" (1946), while set in the aftermath of the Depression, captures a great deal of the lost, wandering character of New York City life in the early 1940's. The novel is intricately plotted and builds tension skillfully to its conclusion. But the book succeeds through its atmosphere, metaphors, and depictions of places more than through its story.

The book is told in the first person but with multiple speakers. This technique offers different perspectives on events as the story moves forward. The different speakers are identified in the separate chapter headings which makes the shifts easy to follow. The primary character is George Stroud who works as an executive for a large magazine conglomerate and lives in the suburbs with his wife and six-year old daughter. Stroud is a hard drinker and a womanizer who is torn between his ambitions for success in corporate life and his own dreams of a more independent footloose life, as evidenced in his earlier jobs as the owner of a roadhouse, a race-track detective, an all-night broadcaster, among other things. Stroud becomes involved with a woman, Pauline Delos, the mistress of his boss, Earl Janoth, who also narrates two chapters in the novel. Janoth is trying to save his magazine business from a corporate takeover.

The plot involves both the stifling, conformist nature of corporate life and a murder. There is a great deal in the book about personal identity and its lack. When Stroud brings Delos to her apartment after a tryst late one night, he sees Janoth from the car. Janoth sees a man but not well enough to make an identification of Stroud. As the evening progresses, Janoth kills Delos in a jealous rage. He and an assistant then ask Stroud to search for the witness on the street, on the pretext that the person was involved in the takeover machinations. Stroud thus is in a position of searching for himself and of throwing off the search.

The key metaphors of the book include "the big clock" which symbolizes the deterministic, remorseless, and purposeless movement of corporate life, for Fearing. Another mataphor, the opposite of the big clock, is a shabby place called Gil's bar, where people simply drift in and out. The proprietor keeps a museum of old junk and challenges his patrons with the stakes of a drink to name something he doesn't have in the "museum". Painting and art also play important roles in the story in the person of an artist named Louise Patterson, who also narrates a critical chapter of the book. Stroud is an admirer of Patterson's work. The twin titles given to one of her paintings which shows simply coins changing hands, "Judas" and "Study of Fundamentals" also capture the themes of the novel.

In his ambivalent roles as hunter and hunted, organization man and free spirit, Stroud reflects at one point in the story about his rigid, pressure-filled, business life:

" [T]he whole organization was full and overrunning with frustrated ex-artists, scientists, farmers, writers, explorers, poets, lawyers, doctors, musicians, all of whom spent their lives conforming, instead. And conforming to what? To a sort of overgrown, aimless, haphazard stenciling apparatus that kept them running to psychoanalysts, sent them to insane asylums, gave them high blood pressure, stomach ulcers. killed them off with cerebral hemmorrhages and heart failure, sometimes suicide. Why should I pay still more tribute to this fatal machine? It would be easier and simpler to get squashed stripping its gears than to be crushed helping it along."

In 1948, Fearing's novel was made into a movie starring Ray Milland. "The Big Clock" effectively uses the noir, crime genre to explore larger themes. The book is included in a Library of America volume "Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1930's and 40s" Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1930s and 40s: The Postman Always Rings Twice / They Shoot Horses, Don't They? / Thieves Like Us / The Big Clock / ... a Dead Man (Library of America) (Vol 1) for readers who wish a broader exploration of American noir writing.

Robin Friedman

A review called "Not Yet: On the Novels of Kenneth Fearing" by McKenzie Wark focused my attention on the double symbolism of the big clock and Gil's bar that I discuss in the review.


Tags : The Big Clock [Kenneth Fearing, Nicholas Christopher] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. George Stroud is a hard-drinking, tough-talking, none-too-scrupulous writer for a New York media conglomerate that bears a striking resemblance to Time,Kenneth Fearing, Nicholas Christopher,The Big Clock,NYRB Classics,1590171810,Murderers,Murderers;Fiction.,Organized crime,Organized crime;Fiction.,Suspense fiction,Witnesses,Witnesses;Fiction.,Women - Crimes against,20TH CENTURY AMERICAN NOVEL AND SHORT STORY,FICTION Mystery & Detective General,FICTION Noir,FICTION Thrillers Suspense,Fiction,Fiction - Espionage Thriller,Fiction-Mystery & Detective,GENERAL,General Adult,MysterySuspense,Thriller suspense,Thrillers - Suspense,United States,mystery;noir;thriller;thrillers;thriller books;mystery and thrillers;mystery books;mystery and suspense;crime books;suspense;suspense books;mystery novels;police;detective novels;murder mystery books;betrayal;mysteries and thrillers;fiction;novels;mysteries;fiction books;books fiction;suspense thriller books;books mystery;mystery thriller suspense;mystery and thriller;suspense fiction;crime;crime fiction;hard case crime;crime thriller;short stories;detective;murder;horror;anthology,noir; crime; crime fiction; murder; thriller; mystery books; thrillers; crime books; detective novels; detective; suspense books; suspense; 20th century; hard case crime; mystery and thrillers; pulp; mystery and suspense; murder mystery books; mystery; thriller books; mystery novels; mystery thriller suspense; mysteries and thrillers; fiction; fiction books; mysteries; suspense thriller books; suspense fiction; mystery and thriller; john d. macdonald; crime thriller; short stories; burke; anthology; travis mcgee; gambling,FICTION Thrillers Suspense,Thrillers - Suspense,Fiction - Espionage Thriller,20th Century American Novel And Short Story,Fiction,MysterySuspense,Thriller suspense

The Big Clock Kenneth Fearing Nicholas Christopher 9781590171813 Books Reviews

Kenneth Fearing’s The Big Clock is an atypical noir that puts us square inside of the big corporation, in this case Janeth Enterprises, run by the big man, Earl Janeth. George Stroud, an editor of Crimeways, is a mechanism to this daily grind, often referred to as the “big clock.”
Trouble finds George after his night out with Pauline, one of the girls who works at Janeth Enterprises. When Pauline winds up dead, things really get complicated for George, especially since Pauline was Earl’s girlfriend.

There are two major conflicts and predicaments that keep The Big Clock running from start to finish. One is that George himself could be implicated in the murder, so he is trying to save his own skin. The second delimma involves bringing forth the real murderer. And these two objectives have a deadline, so it is a race to see this through.

One effective aspect to The Big Clock is the author’s methods. Fearing weaves an effective noir that breaks into other genres and modes. While this is an exceptional mystery, it is also a superb psychological thriller that builds with suspense as we get closer to a George’s ultimate dilemma. Fearing’s technique of constantly shifting narrative point of view with different characters narrating also adds dimension to vantage points of the plot. Tension builds, and then keeps building. And this is what pulls us in to the book’s final conclusion. There are really times when it seems as though Fearing has written himself into a corner, but he is masterful towards the end.

In another sense, the “big clock” comes to symbolize not only the essence of time against the corporate grind, but the individual being pulled in into an escapable, fateful path that comes in the way of inevitable mortality. George, early in the novel, reflects on this
“Time.
One runs like a mouse up the old, slow pendulum the big clock, time, surries around and across its huge hands, strays inside through the intricate wheels and balances and springs of the inner mechanisms, searching among the cobwebbed mazes of this machine with all its false exits and dangerous blind alleys…”

The Big Clock is an effective change of pace for noir, one that enthusiasts for this genre should check out.
Kenneth Fearing (1902 -- 1961) is sometimes called the "Chief Poet of the American Depression". His noir novel, "The Big Clock" (1946), while set in the aftermath of the Depression, captures a great deal of the lost, wandering character of New York City life in the early 1940's. The novel is intricately plotted and builds tension skillfully to its conclusion. But the book succeeds through its atmosphere, metaphors, and depictions of places more than through its story.

The book is told in the first person but with multiple speakers. This technique offers different perspectives on events as the story moves forward. The different speakers are identified in the separate chapter headings which makes the shifts easy to follow. The primary character is George Stroud who works as an executive for a large magazine conglomerate and lives in the suburbs with his wife and six-year old daughter. Stroud is a hard drinker and a womanizer who is torn between his ambitions for success in corporate life and his own dreams of a more independent footloose life, as evidenced in his earlier jobs as the owner of a roadhouse, a race-track detective, an all-night broadcaster, among other things. Stroud becomes involved with a woman, Pauline Delos, the mistress of his boss, Earl Janoth, who also narrates two chapters in the novel. Janoth is trying to save his magazine business from a corporate takeover.

The plot involves both the stifling, conformist nature of corporate life and a murder. There is a great deal in the book about personal identity and its lack. When Stroud brings Delos to her apartment after a tryst late one night, he sees Janoth from the car. Janoth sees a man but not well enough to make an identification of Stroud. As the evening progresses, Janoth kills Delos in a jealous rage. He and an assistant then ask Stroud to search for the witness on the street, on the pretext that the person was involved in the takeover machinations. Stroud thus is in a position of searching for himself and of throwing off the search.

The key metaphors of the book include "the big clock" which symbolizes the deterministic, remorseless, and purposeless movement of corporate life, for Fearing. Another mataphor, the opposite of the big clock, is a shabby place called Gil's bar, where people simply drift in and out. The proprietor keeps a museum of old junk and challenges his patrons with the stakes of a drink to name something he doesn't have in the "museum". Painting and art also play important roles in the story in the person of an artist named Louise Patterson, who also narrates a critical chapter of the book. Stroud is an admirer of Patterson's work. The twin titles given to one of her paintings which shows simply coins changing hands, "Judas" and "Study of Fundamentals" also capture the themes of the novel.

In his ambivalent roles as hunter and hunted, organization man and free spirit, Stroud reflects at one point in the story about his rigid, pressure-filled, business life

" [T]he whole organization was full and overrunning with frustrated ex-artists, scientists, farmers, writers, explorers, poets, lawyers, doctors, musicians, all of whom spent their lives conforming, instead. And conforming to what? To a sort of overgrown, aimless, haphazard stenciling apparatus that kept them running to psychoanalysts, sent them to insane asylums, gave them high blood pressure, stomach ulcers. killed them off with cerebral hemmorrhages and heart failure, sometimes suicide. Why should I pay still more tribute to this fatal machine? It would be easier and simpler to get squashed stripping its gears than to be crushed helping it along."

In 1948, Fearing's novel was made into a movie starring Ray Milland. "The Big Clock" effectively uses the noir, crime genre to explore larger themes. The book is included in a Library of America volume "Crime Novels American Noir of the 1930's and 40s" Crime Novels American Noir of the 1930s and 40s The Postman Always Rings Twice / They Shoot Horses, Don't They? / Thieves Like Us / The Big Clock / ... a Dead Man (Library of America) (Vol 1) for readers who wish a broader exploration of American noir writing.

Robin Friedman

A review called "Not Yet On the Novels of Kenneth Fearing" by McKenzie Wark focused my attention on the double symbolism of the big clock and Gil's bar that I discuss in the review.