A lacerating polemical memoir from the creator of V.I.
Warshawski."Every writer's difficult journey is a movement from
silence to speech," observes Paretsky, who looks here at five areas
in which she's struggled to wrest her individual voice from the
command to be voiceless. She begins with her Kansas childhood,
spent as the only sister among four brothers and a pair of needy,
feuding parents who depended on her mothering and expressed no
interest in what she thought or wrote. Next she recalls moving to
Chicago at the time of Martin Luther King's civil-rights ministry,
noting that she's always sided with underdogs because "I'm as needy
as the most helpless." She reviews the impact of Second Wave
Feminism on her attempts to imagine women who were neither
household angels nor rebellious monsters but simply human beings.
She analyzes the dialectic of individualism and community in the
hardboiled detective story, tracing Warshawski's development from a
Philip Marlowe in skirts to a heroine immersed in communal ties
despite her own independence. And she concludes by surveying
current threats to writers' freedom to speak out, from the
increasingly centralized power of market-driven publishers and
chain stores to the repressive specter of the Patriot Act. Her own
voice, untrammeled by the need of her Warshawski novels (Fire Sale,
2005, etc.) to provide detection, melodrama and shifts in mood, is
ardent, angry and almost painfully direct. Readers will overlook
occasional factual slips (talking about Raymond Chandler, Paretsky
maintains that Carmen Sternwood never killed anyone and transfers
the plot of Farewell, My Lovely to The Long Goodbye) in favor of
her impassioned plea for the freedom to find one's voice and her
uncompromising indictment of the forces - familial, social,
political - that would impose silence.Neither the sentiment nor the
passion is new. But Paretsky links different kinds of oppression in
compelling ways. (Kirkus Reviews)
This is a brilliant exploration of the writer's art, by the
bestselling author of the V. I. Warshawski novels. In this powerful
new book, Sara Paretsky explores the traditions of political and
literary dissent that have informed her life and work, against the
unparallelled repression of free speech and thought in the USA
today. In tracing the writer's difficult journey from silence to
speech, she turns to her childhood and youth in rural Kansas, and
brilliantly evokes Chicago - the city with which she has become
indelibly associated - from her arrival during the civil-rights
struggle in the mid-1960s to her most extraordinary literary
creation, the south-side detective V. I. Warshawski. Paretsky
traces the emergence of V. I. Warshawski from the shadows of the
loner detectives that stalk the mean streets of Dashiell Hammett
and Raymond Chandler's novels, and in the process explores American
individualism, the failure of the American dream and the resulting
dystopia. Both memoir and meditation, "Writing in an Age of
Silence" is a compelling exploration of the writer's art and
daunting responsibility in the face of the assault on US civil
liberties post-9/11.
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