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The novel celebrated by Stephen King and the New York Times

2021-04-07T16:52:47.595Z


SA Cosby is celebrated in the USA, and his gangster novel »Blacktop Wasteland« is now being published in German. It offers spectacular action scenes - and creepy sex metaphors.


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Writer Cosby: The Talent to Reinvent the American Detective Novel

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This book was spared a debate about who is allowed to translate whom, as sparked off by Amanda Gorman's poem "The Hill We Climb" - even if its author is an African-American writer: SA Cosby.

His second novel, Blacktop Wasteland, was translated into German by an older white man, Jürgen Bürger, who was almost a generation ahead of Cosby.

For a good 30 years, Bürger has been translating the works, almost without exception, of white authors from the crime genre - including greats like Jerome Charyn and James Sallis - excellently and with an unmistakable feeling for nuances and linguistic finesse.

There is no question that he did a good job at Cosby too.

However, one has to ask whether the novel, which caused an enormous hype in the USA and Great Britain last year and first landed on recommendation lists such as that of the New York Times and later on various annual best lists from the Guardian to NPR, actually is as good as the praises of fellow writers like Stephen King (who has to have an enormous reading workload considering the number of his blurbs), Lee Child or Michael Connelly suggest.

Cosby has succeeded in creating an exciting gangster novel that always works particularly well when he delves deep into his milieus or fully depresses the gas pedal when it comes to action.

But linguistically, he often enough scratches the kitsch and gives away his dramatic potential with an almost grotesquely conciliatory ending.

The starting point of »Blacktop Wasteland« is so classic that it would actually be a cliché if Cosby hadn't built in a shoot: Beauregard Montage, known as Bug, a professional getaway car driver who has come to rest as a mechanic and family man and now lives as law-abiding citizen leads (only if he runs out of money does he drive illegal races), has to do a job again.

"Damn it, you already have the White House"

The big number is of course, it's about diamonds worth millions.

And just as natural: the job goes wrong, and Bug and his redneck accomplices are targeted by a brutal gang boss.

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Blacktop Wasteland: Detective novel

Author: SA Cosby

Publisher: Ars Vivendi

Number of pages: 320

Translated by: Jürgen Bürger

Author: SA Cosby

Publisher: Ars Vivendi

Number of pages: 320

Translated by: Jürgen Bürger

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So far, so well known.

What is unusual, however, is that Bug, an African American and caring family man, is behind the wheel, the classic "drivers" are lonely wolves - and above all, they are always white.

In addition, whether in Michael Mann's crime ball stores or in Nicolas Winding Refn's cool James Sallis film "Drive", they are mostly out and about on the neon shimmering streets of major US cities.

Cosby's novel, on the other hand, is set in the southern states, in the wilderness of Virginia, where "Mother Nature takes back her land with relentless persistence."

He grew up here, white from the dividing lines between white and black, between rich and poor that divide the small towns as if they had been drawn with a bloody razor.

His descriptions of trailer parks and desolate backwoods pubs, of everyday racism and cities whose residents who remained after the factories were closed try to fight their frustration with oxycodone and crystal meth are of enormous intensity - and occasionally surprisingly funny: “He thinks we're all a bunch more backwoods , racist rednecks, "said the gang boss Lazy once about a competitor, and one of his boys asks in astonishment:" Isn't that us? "

Bug, on the other hand, has to be asked once when he enters a redneck bar: “Can't we have a place where you don't stick your face in?

Damn it, you already have the White House. ”Black humor born of desperation.

How grief and pain in general underline this novel.

The feeling of having been betrayed by life, of never having a chance and therefore being able to take whatever you can get, no matter what damage you cause with it, drives the characters - these "would-be Pablo Escobars and Redneck Walter." Whites, ”as it was once called - to do what they think they have to do.

And those are small and big deals, with everything that can be made quick money, and assaults, like the one on the jeweler, who went wrong so spectacularly that Cosby got the opportunity to show what he can do: more spectacular action scenes than in » Blacktop Wasteland «has not been read for a long time.

One would wish Cosby, however, that he would find a lecturer for his next novel who would cross out sentences like these: “Even after all these years, the barbarian who lived between his legs was fascinated by her. She was an Aphrodite dipped in caramel with his chocolate-covered pan. ”Then what the writer Walter Mosley, who three decades ago made black noir socially acceptable with“ Devil in Blue ”, said about his younger colleague could actually be true: that he did Reinvent American detective novel. Cosby has the talent and vision for this.

Source: spiegel

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