the lit bit - march 2o26

Since I list every other damned thing.  Or do, whenever I remember to.

The Steel Spring (1968) - by Per Wahlöö

This manages the pleasant trick of not being a crime thriller, exactly, even as it manages to avoid being a dystopian sci-fi thing in an unnamed european country.  In the end it's very talky & very tidy and not very rewarding, but the overall atmosphere & dissociative clarity goes some ways toward carrying the reader through a "cosy" catastrophe.  The film nerd in me aches for it to be as messy & choked with noise as 'The Element of Crime', and my inner lit-twit wishes it was closer to 'Dhalgren' or Moorcock's 'Breakfast In The Ruins'.  It's for the best that it's not those things.

I already have the n*tflix adaptation of 'El Eternauta', if I need dystopia on tap.

Per plot, it's pretty wild.  There's a conspiracy of medical professionals.  A cabal of mad, dying fascists in surgical gowns, abducting whole blocks of citizenry to procure transfusions.  There's a beatdown, depressed population, utterly unprepared for the occupation.  There's a conspiracy of politicians & technocrats & a whole lot of everyone fucking up pretty massively.  Literally catastrophic failures of communication....  Although we don't get to see most of that.  Inspector Jensen spends the whole book not solving anything, just picking through the aftermath, taking notes, caring for those who let him and nursing the damaged.  He's on a doomed mission, and knows it.  Overall a very enervated atmosphere.

If there's one stylistic element that really sticks with me, it's how colourless the narrative is.  This paucity of bandwitdth--  i mean, 'The Steel Spring' is so rarely concentrated on the quality of light all that registers is its relative intensity, or absence  --this paucity of descriptive bandwith makes for an intensely constricted atmosphere, such that when Inspector Jensen has his first emotional reaction of the novel, it's 120 pages in.  That moment really lands, because there's so little light.

It speaks to this particular moment.  For reasons that barely need explaining.

The Twenty Days of Turin (1963-1971) - by Giorgio de Maria

Victorian Psycho (2025) - by Virginia Feito