the essential
Fourteen years later, James Ellroy is back in Toulouse, a new book under his arm, the powerful “The Enchanters”, in which he continues his uncompromising autopsy of America. He will be at Ombres Blanches this Friday, October 4. An unmissable encounter.
With “The Enchanters”, his 17th novel, Ellroy signs the third part of his Los Angeles Quintet (after “Perfidia”, 2015 and “The Coming Storm”, 2019). It begins on August 4, 1962. Moviegoers prick up their ears, Marylin Monroe is no more, and the city is suffocating under a terrible heatwave. Gwen Perloff, a B-movie actress, is kidnapped in mysterious circumstances and the LAPD offices are overheated. Chief Bill Parker must call on Freddy Otash, who knows Hollywood like the back of his hand, to lead the investigation. But in its own way, very unorthodox. Twists and turns, false leads, dizzying dives into the environment, a clear portrait of a corrupt police force and nameless brutality: nothing will be spared to Otash… and to the reader.
Terrifying violence
A river novel under (very) high tension, “Les Enchanteurs” is a great Ellroy. Intense and truly terrifying in violence, the novel plunges the reader into a tragic world whose “name-dropping” (the Kennedys, Peter Lawford and his “Catalogue of Girls”, Orson Welles, the comet Carole Landis, etc.) blurs the boundaries between historical reality and fictional fantasy.
Fantasy: the word often comes up in Ellroy’s pen. The America of the 60s is corrupt, scandalous, inaccessible… but there is no question of him letting go of it. All his work must be read in the pale light of his mother’s assassination, Geneva Hilliker Ellroy, June 22, 1958. IHe was only 10 years old at the time and will have to live with the image of this particularly atrocious murder (Geneva will be horribly mutilated) and theintolerable idea that the’assassin nand evening never stopped.
It will take writing so that Ellroy does not become a gangster or a suicide. “Writing brought order to my life,” he told us in January 2011. “It allowed me to tell the specific stories I had inside me. You won’t find psychological explanations for why I write . I write because I love it, because it brings me the greatest joy in my life.”
When Ellroy debunks the Monroe myth
His character is “Freddy O”, this “shit magnet” as rotten and devoid of morals as the city whose neighborhoods he continually roams, from the most beautiful villas to the “clandestine baisodromes” of Los Angeles which we had already encountered in two books. His diary is a hallucinatory text that can be considered as Ellroy’s inner story, this typically American “stream of consciousness” which runs like a torrent in his veins and on the pages of his novels. Ellroy aficionados will recognize in Freddy many biographical similarities with his creator…
Also read:
Amélie Nothomb: “The literary return allows me not to lose my mind”
Also read:
“I only put 20% of the horrors I saw in the book…” Kamel Daoud, author of “Houris”
By tackling the Monroe myth and the ramifications of his death, James Ellroy continues to look America in the face, straight in the eyes and with his heart on his lips. By signing one of his best novels in passing.
Related News :