I'm a nihilistic pessimist at the best of times, so when a non-fiction book about some serious problem--the drug war, Afghanistan, political corruption, fiscal corruption--ends with a chapter on how things are really turning around, how there are good people fighting the good fight, it disappoints me to no end. That's because it's a compromise: it suggests hope where there might not be reason for it, giving a tragic situation a Hollywood ending, and ironically, depressing me, at least, even more. If a book about the banking crisis of 2008 ends with the inspirational story of ten different people all doing the right thing, I think: there are only ten people doing the right thing? And they're supposed to stop all this horrible shit? Acting like the problem is being solved negates the tragedy of the problem in the first place.
So it's a very dark relief to read "Murder City," by Charles Bowden, about the violence from the war on drugs in Juarez, Mexico. There is little sentimentality. There are many slaughters. The problems he addresses are not insoluble, but nevertheless they will not soon be solved. And throughout the whole thing, he only describes--albeit very sympathetically--three or four residents who fight the noble fight, and it is all the more affecting because the reader is made to understand that they are just drops in the bucket.
There's something impressionistic about Bowden's writing. He doesn't spew out too many statistics, and because so many of his subjects, sources and contacts require anonymity, what we are left with is a large variety of characters who all, to great effect, merge together; one finishes "Murder City" not having forgotten a lot of facts, but instead remembering a few important details and an overall mood, a deeply factual understanding of the toll that both drugs and the war on drugs have taken on this city, and more importantly, on its people--both alive and (more frequently) dead.
And so we get paragraphs like this:
"In 2004, the budget of the Mexican army was $4 billion. In 1995, by DEA estimates, the Juarez cartel, at that time a wholesale organization moving heroin, marijuana, and principally cocaine from South America and Mexico into the retail markets of the United States, was earning about $12 billion a year. No one on earth thinks its income has declined."
Next to:
"For years, I thought I was watching the city go from bad to worse, a kind of terrible backsliding from its imagined destiny as an America with different food. I was blind to what was slapping me in the face: the future. A place where conversation is a gun and reality is a drug and time is immediate and tomorrow, well, tomorrow is today because there is no destination beyond this very second."
The grisly details of crimes are given line breaks and transformed into poetry. Women victims are given the nickname "Miss Sinaloa" to make the individual tragedies simultaneously unique and ubiquitous.
It's not a pretty book, but it's a good one, and as far as I've read, it's very much in its own league in terms of style--and this is a good thing. Not always, but in this case, it turned out something of a masterpiece.
And an addendum on how I came across this book:
I'm a big fan of "Breaking Bad" and came across this article about the writers of the show.
I had already read "Methland" by Nick Reding--a good book as well, albeit one that someone goes down the "but-things-are-getting-better" route towards the end--and out of the others I looked at, of course a book called "Murder City" jumped out at me. I'm a Nick Cave fan. Of course it did.
So it's a very dark relief to read "Murder City," by Charles Bowden, about the violence from the war on drugs in Juarez, Mexico. There is little sentimentality. There are many slaughters. The problems he addresses are not insoluble, but nevertheless they will not soon be solved. And throughout the whole thing, he only describes--albeit very sympathetically--three or four residents who fight the noble fight, and it is all the more affecting because the reader is made to understand that they are just drops in the bucket.
There's something impressionistic about Bowden's writing. He doesn't spew out too many statistics, and because so many of his subjects, sources and contacts require anonymity, what we are left with is a large variety of characters who all, to great effect, merge together; one finishes "Murder City" not having forgotten a lot of facts, but instead remembering a few important details and an overall mood, a deeply factual understanding of the toll that both drugs and the war on drugs have taken on this city, and more importantly, on its people--both alive and (more frequently) dead.
And so we get paragraphs like this:
"In 2004, the budget of the Mexican army was $4 billion. In 1995, by DEA estimates, the Juarez cartel, at that time a wholesale organization moving heroin, marijuana, and principally cocaine from South America and Mexico into the retail markets of the United States, was earning about $12 billion a year. No one on earth thinks its income has declined."
Next to:
"For years, I thought I was watching the city go from bad to worse, a kind of terrible backsliding from its imagined destiny as an America with different food. I was blind to what was slapping me in the face: the future. A place where conversation is a gun and reality is a drug and time is immediate and tomorrow, well, tomorrow is today because there is no destination beyond this very second."
The grisly details of crimes are given line breaks and transformed into poetry. Women victims are given the nickname "Miss Sinaloa" to make the individual tragedies simultaneously unique and ubiquitous.
It's not a pretty book, but it's a good one, and as far as I've read, it's very much in its own league in terms of style--and this is a good thing. Not always, but in this case, it turned out something of a masterpiece.
And an addendum on how I came across this book:
I'm a big fan of "Breaking Bad" and came across this article about the writers of the show.
I had already read "Methland" by Nick Reding--a good book as well, albeit one that someone goes down the "but-things-are-getting-better" route towards the end--and out of the others I looked at, of course a book called "Murder City" jumped out at me. I'm a Nick Cave fan. Of course it did.
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