“Just where I thought I was going out, they pulled me back.” This is what Michael Corleone said in the third part of “The Godfather”, which is also how many rascals feel in movies and literature. The story of the criminal who enjoys bourgeois life, but is later embroiled in his past, has been tested for many years. Anyone who uses it as the basis of a thriller can add an example to the cultural history of this subject. This can’t happen to the American writer SA Cosby, because in “Blacktop Wasteland”, he just pieced together some crime thriller themes, and then turned them over until they were almost unrecognizable.
The protagonist of the novel Beauregard Montage (Beauregard Montage) is known as a fugitive driver on the East Coast of the United States, but now prefers to play with cars in his workshop. It is extremely inconvenient for a competitor to settle down nearby and rush to work one by one. The most important thing is his mother’s nursing home and daughter’s education expenses. The plot takes shape when a little liar hints at a profitable robbery (diamond!). These people attacked the jeweler and caused a catastrophic chain reaction.
The whole drama of existence
This sounds like the familiar realm of thrillers, and should at best cause connoisseurs of that type to shrug. If not because of the nuances from well-known crime stories. Beauregard is not a lonely person, but a person with a family. It will not be heated through the streets of New York or Los Angeles, but through Virginia. It is not the criminal dregs of the metropolis who are playing in the haze, but a group of dangerous hillbilly psychopaths and drug addicts. His cousin once summed up the situation like this: “So you stand between Pablo Escobar, who wants to chop people up and put them in a bucket, and Walter White, a countryman. )between.”
The fact that the country folks are particularly uncomfortable here is due to Beauregard’s complexion.As an African American, he must move forward in time Donald Trump Let the president speak to you like this: “Can’t we have at least one place to hide your face? Damn, you already have the White House.”
High resolution narrative chase
Cosby knew how to outline the drama of existence in just a few short sentences. Regarding the family of the gallows bird who persuaded Beauregard to steal the diamonds, it is said: “His mother has been listening to the TV preacher on Sunday morning and sprinkled a lot of salt on her shoulders. You can salt an adult pig with it-but She was lonely, destitute and impoverished on the toilet floor of a bingo room in Richmond.”
The slang of the street contrasts sharply with such sadness and is presented in a concise form. This works well in the original version. Jürgen Bürger found it difficult to deal with drooling idioms in his overall good translation, which is understandable. Chinese: “You might as well go home and find your ugly wife. Try to find some cats on Tuesday night.”
Cosby’s greatest talent is to break firefights and fights, but the most important thing is that the details of car chases are so many that they are like a movie in the reader’s mind: “Boulgard stepped on the clutch, and Step on the brake and shift gears. Then he immediately released the clutch, stepped on the brake with his left foot, and full throttle with his right foot, and at the same time turned the steering wheel to the left.”
With this description, thrillers are natural, because in other genres, there are no small things that can produce similar dramatic effects. The author’s feeling about the drama is left to the author only once: ironically, the ending is a soft foreign object in the text. On the other hand, Cosby is still loyal to himself, because the rules and expectations seem to exist only to subvert him.
SA Cosby: “Asphalt Wasteland”. novel. Translated from English by Jürgen Bürger. Ars Vivendi Verlag, Cadorzburg 2021. 320 pages, hardcover, 22, -€.
