Some Words

Over the past few months, I have read three Poirot novels bby Agatha Christie. It took me a while to get over how racist they are. In Murder on the Orient Express, a man is stabbed. While they are trying to figure out the case, someone advances that it must have been the Italian passenger who did this. His only reason? He feels that Italians are a stabbing people. That would be one thing, but the other characters all take that at face value. No one questions it. In the other two books I’ve read, characters who love money have pointedly been called Semetic.

At times I don’t know why I keep reading. She wasn’t a particularly good writer of sentences. There are plenty of bits that read like bad fiction workshop stuff. That may be a result of her success, or it may simply be a reliance on cliche. I mean, God, she wrote how many of these things?

But I keep reading them, and I’ll probably read a few more, at least the one where Poirot dies, and the rest that are in the binding of five novels I have. I’ve heard a lot of people complain about how formulaic she was, and indeed she is. But, as I started in on the latest one, I realized what kept them entertaining. She knows how formulaic she’s gotten. A few pages into The ABC Murders, Hastings, Poirot’s requisit foil, turns to Poirot and basically announces that this mystery is unlike any of the other they have worked on. Poirot agrees with him. For all I know it’s true, but who are they trying to convince? I like the feeling of watching a writer trying to derail the train to get the spark of life back into things. I like that the stories all feel shopworn before I’ve even read them. I like using them to put off the end of 1984. I don’t want to read about poor Winston getting tortured by rats.

1984 related note. On this, my… I think fifth attempt to read it all the way through, I have now gotten farther than before. Previous attempts left me grumpy and depressed about halfway through. This time I’m over two thirds through. I see why so many high school students fall in love with it, but I wonder if mayby I missed the window to really love this book.