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Very obviously an early work - not only is it unfinished (especially noticeable towards the end, where it doesn't so much end as just stop) and not as quintessentially Kafka as his later works, but you really notice him developing the identity of the novel as it goes on. From a simple short story about a hapless immigrant, to an often hilarious litany of shatuponing at the hands of a system of fixed structures (including the German language itself), to a beautifully absurd final chapter that seems like the start of the novel it might have been. My guess is he never finished it because he realised he'd have to go back and re-write the whole thing from the beginning to incorporate the stuff he came up with as he wrote it. What's there is still worth reading, though.

Liked it a lot, if by "liked" you mean "experienced a slightly nauseous feeling of creeping dread that didn't require anything more supernatural than people being dicks towards each other". A story of two 40-year-olds lost in Paris, tied together by invisible threads that aren't even allowed to snap. Good stuff.

I read Moominpappa At Sea earlier this summer and Moominvalley In November just now, first time in a very long time that I've re-read the last two Moomin books, and they still hold up incredibly well; if anything, they work better now than they did back then. The series starts out as "just" well-written children's stories, then gradually get more adult - not in the sense that she adds more sex and violence, but simply in that the characters (both young and old) grow up and are forced to look at themselves, at how they see others, and their place in the world, all set against the backdrop of one of the most gorgeous descriptions of autumn and winter I've ever read. This last book doesn't even have the Moomins themselves in it except in spirit, instead it focuses on a bunch of minor characters who happen to wash up in the same house. It almost edges into metafiction at times, with one of the characters reading a book that seems to mirror his own life and ending each chapter with "End of chapter", and above all of course the central plot: a half dozen lost souls who actively seek out the Moominvalley, knowing that it's a children's fairytale land where nobody is ever sad or alone or neurotic or stuck in a rut, and not only finding it abandoned but also having to face that the world doesn't have places like that, and that hiding inside the image of one doesn't work. And of course, being sad or alone or neurotic or stuck in a rut is what the Moomin books were always about on some level, it's just that by now, the characters have grown up enough to face it head on. Beautiful.

There are certainly a lot of parallels between the later Moomin books and The True Deceiver (the characters are all but interchangeable, just substitue "paws" for "hands") introverted characters deliberately building a false image of the world and their relationships to others, the very typically Scandinavian head-down-fist-clenched-in-pocket-mumbling-under-breath stubbornness, and obviously the sense of being at once disconnected from and a slave to nature. Oddly, Moominvalley In November still ends more hopefully as winter comes crashing in, than The True Deceiver does when spring breaks the ice again.

When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.

CW Sughrue is a private eye in the tradition of Marlowe and Spade, which means that ten years after Woodstock, ten years after coming home from Vietnam, ten years after Kent State, etc etc etc he's as hopelessly out of time as the other remnants of a more hopeful time he keeps coming across. He's hired by the ex-wife of a famous novelist to bring said novelist back from one of his many 3-week benders, and when he finally finds him in a bar in California he gets to talking to the woman behind the bar. She asks him to look for her daughter, who disappeared into San Francisco in 1969 and hasn't been seen since. And for whatever reason - it certainly isn't money - Sughrue can't not take the case, so off he goes on a trip through a late-70s America full of ex-hippies, coke addicts, Vietnam vets, drunks, porn stars and clever exploiters, looking for a lost flowerchild.

It's a brilliant setup, sort of a low-budget hardboiled detective version of Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas, in a late-70s setting where everything seems covered in cheap upholstery and owned by some skeevy fuck in a plaid sports jacket and large sideburns driving a late-model Chevy with a plastic dashboard. ...And if that sounds a little too dramatic, then maybe that's part of the problem of the book as well. Sughrue is constantly monologizing like a Tom Waits character, and it gets a little too much at times. At the same time, that's part of the novel's charm; we have a novel where the typical cynical private eye, a man who's killed women and children in the name of democracy, suddenly finds himself almost the last person in the world who still cares about anything but money and power. As a detective story, it's deliciously slow-moving - no murder every 50 pages to keep up the interest, no endless descriptions of clues, violent and harsh when it needs to be but never looking away from the consequences (in this world, when you punch someone in the jaw, you break your own fingers). As a description of its time, it's fascinating if not quite as sharp as, say, James Ellroy - who, of course, has the benefit of hindsight.

The Last Good Kiss takes on two genres; the detective novel meets post-Vietnam Americana. It's not a perfect fit, and certainly not a marriage that lets anyone in it live happy ever after, but a fascinating one.