•
Rating:
- No, come on! Fuck, tell me you're joking, right? Don't you see that club has more curves than Brigitte Bardot? If you swing it, it'll come back and hit you on the back of the head, guaranteed. I don't think you need a damn degree in botany to understand you need something that resembles a straight line: unless you want it to come up like a twisted, rusty corkscrew? -
- What's the matter, didn't you get laid last night? If you look at it as a whole, from a distance, it's almost straight because its "curves" balance out beautifully. Okay, I admit, it might not be conventional wood, but I like it and besides, dear newbotanist of my balls, remember that the plants are mine and this one here, in particular, will either learn to climb or it will die. Trust me. -
The sky is bleeding a sunset to be remembered, while clouds intercept the last rays of the sun, becoming little sheep in tango red; fallen, accidentally stumbled, into a bucket of still fresh paint. They remain there, colorful and suspended, even when the big shining circle goes down behind the mountains. He gets home and takes a look at the strange plant; the only one he wanted to plant. Over the years, who knows how it will grow, the tough, strong, lush, and obviously messy bitch. Atypical. A single large multicolored tangle, a contradiction, a ball of leaves and branches, Mary Poppins' bag in which who knows what the fuck you might find inside if you just stick your hand in.
Hap & Leonard. White, liberal, straight, and fundamentally romantic, the first one; black, gay, cynical, and Republican, the second. Thick as thieves; different but inseparable friends. Do-it-yourself vigilantes. Rangers who, riding battered pickups, race around Texas: to bust some asses and bring their personal vision of justice to this world that's going adrift. Like their lives. Without hurry, they wait for events to fall upon them. They face them with the black humor of braggarts typical of superheroes who believe themselves, and perhaps are, invincible. Anyway, without dragging it out, Hap was breaking his back under a scorching sun in the fields for a few pennies an hour, Leonard recovering from the last adventure that left him limping. By chance, they find themselves with a house inherited under whose floorboards begins the race to find the killer who annually makes a black kid disappear...
The two form the chessboard, the playing field, the pillar, the piece of wood upon which the story climbs and twists in the swift 300 pages that compose "Mucho Mojo". A thriller should have in the hunt for the killer its fucking fuel. The plot, however, is mediocre; a not too robust branch of the aforementioned plant in which it talks about racism and religious fanaticism. The culprit, however, becomes apparent immediately and the suspense is minimized. But Lansdale is not a fool unable to find a sufficiently tangled thread or to place a couple of nice distractions to ensure that the ending makes us blurt out: fuck, I really didn't expect that!!!
Obviously, this isn’t his purpose. Lansdale uses the Hap & Leonard stories as an excuse to tell us about his beloved Texas. He feels the need, and as he wrote in the preface, the author sees himself in the figure of Hap. A tough guy with a tender heart. And as a narcissist, he recounts his exploits. Mucho Mojo is a plant with many stories, branches that sometimes intertwine with the case to be solved, sometimes merely brush against it or serve as mere background to emerge in a delightful and satisfying dead end.
Read and it feels like you’re really there with them on the creaky swing observing the colors of sunrises and sunsets in this desolate land; in the third world of the U.S.A. where racism, even verbal, is far from tamed. You flip through the minichapters and feel the dust on your sweaty skin from a scorching summer without wind, shortly after you're in the midst of a storm that seems to have no end. The mosquitoes buzz around you, you see the seasoned wood planks bend under the weight of boots. And the smell of those mangy and nauseating vanilla biscuits dipped in coffee never leaves you. The freshly baked apple pies invite you to meet a wrinkled old lady, a non-alcoholic beer with a troublemaker and so forth, endlessly.
Lansdale doesn't give a damn about the story. It’s nice, but a way to speak in a fast, dynamic, and successful style (comprised of slang, swearing, cynical jokes, and even sharper comebacks) about his land. He photographs its grime, inter-racial coexistence, landscapes, and scents in a masterful way.
In an absolutely alien character to the thriller who searches with a shovel, amidst swearing and a crooked smile, for the denture accidentally dropped in the latrine there’s the whole of Texas and Lansdale’s cynical style. Which I like a hell of a lot.
Dedicated to you 2.
ilfreddo
Loading comments slowly
