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What
can I say about my last novel that hasn't been said already? This is my last word before I put it to rest forever to put focus on Permanent Obscurity, my new sexploitation-film inspired novel. (More about that here.) The tag line of The Losers' Club (what distributors and publishing folk need to attach to its line of "product") is this: "Set in New York's Lower East Side, pre-9/11, it's the story of an unlucky writer addicted to the personals." The truth is that it's partly an urban romantic comedy, partly a coming-of-age story, partly a quasi-documentary of a time and place. It's a modest novel:
my attempt at a cinéma-vérité style narrative, influenced by French
New Wave films like François Truffaut's "Stolen Kisses" and
Jean-Luc Godard's "Masculin, féminin," Italian Neo-realism
flicks like Vittorio de Sica's "Umberto D.," and American
indie flicks like "sex, lies and videotape" (which for a long
time was my favorite film). My influences are almost always cinematic,
not literary, which might account for my love of hard cuts, the re-shuffling
of chronology in the narrative ("disjunctive editing"), and
my love for revealing character through dialogue (European filmmakers
in particular allow their characters to SPEAK [Éric Rohmer is a shining
example of this]). My novel, The Losers' Club, is a character-driven
piece and a comedy (which only technically means it concludes in an
“up” note [exactly the reverse of "Masculin, féminin"]).
Of the French New Wave filmmakers, I lean more toward Truffaut, who's the more romantic and heartfelt filmmaker of the two, the one least afraid of emotion. In the same way Antoine Doinel is Truffaut's alter ego, Martin Sierra (of The Losers' Club) is mine: at least that’s how I saw it at the writing of the book. The last movie I need to mention as a major influence on the novel is Ross McElwee's "Sherman's March," which begins, "For a long time, I've had this notion that love was possible, I mean romantic love—y'know, two people falling deeply in love with each other and somehow managing to stay together for more than two weeks. "But time after
time it seems that a woman would get involved with me and want some
sort of commitment and I would decide it wasn't right or vice-versa.
And no matter how passionate things were in the beginning, there was
never an equilibrium, and nothing ever seemed to last." To Purchase My Last Little Novel < Click (Click on the
image, for more) So what about Permanent Obscurity?  next: Origins of Permanent Obscurity: Or A Cautionary Tale of Two Girls And Their Misadventures with Drugs, Pornography and Death    This site is © 2010 Richard Perez |
