When I pick up a book by an author new to me who has gained some critical appreciation over the years, I look for clues as to style and content. I will usually read the first fifty or so pages and hope by that time I will have a handle on the writing that will enhance my enjoyment of the book. The Beetle Leg has a front cover that could be described as contemporary featuring a black on white jagged design which is anything but comfortable. The inside page tells me that it is "a new directions book" I was not surprised therefore to find a piece of experimental writing with sentences of unusual constructions, not that they were ungrammatical, but they turned this way and that with nouns adjectives and verbs that made them seem as jagged as the design on that front cover. I was not surprised that there was no narrative shape to speak of or that the book failed to follow a linear progression. I got used to the fact that events jumped around in time, but was thankful that the characters seemed to appear regularly enough to give some sense of consistency. However fifty pages in and I needed more information on the author and his style.

The most quotable reference from the author himself was:

''I began to write fiction on the assumption that the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting and theme, and having once abandoned these familiar ways of thinking about fiction, totality of fiction or structure was really all that remained. And structure -- verbal and psychological coherence -- is still my largest concern as a writer.''

and then that the New York Times had said Mr Hawkes:

was called a figure ''in a post-modern pantheon of experimental novelists who include John Barth, William Gass and William Gaddis'' by Mel Gussow in The New York Times in 1996.
Mr. Gaddis once said Mr. Hawkes's ''sentences are themselves 'events.' ‘'

Armed with this information I could read on in confidence knowing I was just going along for the sheer hell of the ride. I didn't need to worry about plot, characterisation or narrative drive, but I did have to pay attention to what those sentences were telling me or it would all pass me by in something like a blur so that I would be hard pressed to come to any conclusion about what I had just read.

The Beetle leg was published in 1951 and was the second of Hawkes fourteen published books. I had bought an electronic copy, because any surviving printed copies are quite expensive, which may tell its own story. It has a setting and there are recurring themes that can be picked out. The setting is Minnesota (America) Clare county in a small town that sat beside a dam and at some point in the narrative the dam burst (the great slide)flooding some or all of a town which now lies beneath a lake. There was one fatality Mulge Lampson brother of Luke Lampson and his family and friends have him on their mind as they go about their lives.

It is a harsh landscape that is stifling hot in the summer and very cold in the winter, it is a landscape for hardy people and native Americans and Hawkes sketches in the feel of the first arrivals to the area coping with the harsh conditions in a sort of tent city. It has the feel of a western which is enhanced by the current sheriff of the town and his dealing with a motorcycle gang known as the red Devils. We meet the sheriff in the first pages of the novel who reflects "It is a lawless country" a bit like the novel itself.
There is a primitive feel to the whole thing. Ma (Lukes Ma) prepares herself and her wagon for a wedding: she might be re-enacting a marriage to Mulge, but at her age she must face down the other women. Camper comes back to the town after an absence and wants to fish in the lake, Cap. Leech runs a medical business from the back of his wagon which is primitive in the extreme. Both of these characters stir up old hostilities. It is a mean hard world where people just get on with their lives.

The novel has its share of shocking images:


He lifted the huckleberry pole and there, biting the hook, swung the heavy body of a baby that had been dropped, searched for, and lost in the flood. The eyes slept on either side of the fish line and a point of the barb protruded near the nose stopped with silt. It turned slowly around and around on the end of the wet string that cut in half its forehead. It had been tumbled under exposed roots and with creatures too dumb to swim, long days through the swell, neither sunk nor floating. The white stomach hung full with all it had swallowed. God’s naked child lay under Luke’s fingers on the spread poncho, as on his knees and up to his thighs in the river, he loosed the hook, forcing his hand to touch the half-made face. His hook cracked through the membrane of the palate; he touched cold scales on the neck. One of the newborn sucked inside a gentle wave to the bottom of a stunted water black tree, its body rolled on the slippery poncho while the crouching figure of a young man shut his eyes, wet his lips. In both hands he picked it up, circling the softened chest inside of which lay the formless lungs, and stooped again to the water. As his feet moved it thickly eddied, splashed. He held the body closer to the surface, water touched the back of his knuckles, and letting go, he gently pushed it off as if it would turn over and quickly swim away to the center of the bankless stream.

I was not expecting any resolution and I was not disappointed, but we do get a reflection by Cap Leech when he finds the body of the drowned Lampson brother. I was intrigued by the reading experience and once used to the style of the writing there was enough to cling onto and to enjoy the vignettes without worrying too much about where it was all leading. To be fair we know this almost from the start when the Sheriff talks about the one fatality and the great slide. 3.5 stars. ( )

Tried twice, found this unreadable. As friend AC said, there's something "deeply inauthentic" here. Read The Lime Twig instead. You'll be glad you did. ( )

The book set a haunting mood. The writing was good, but the story was impossible to follow - if there even really was a story. Characters flitted in and out, locations popped up and dropped off....very surreal. ( )

Publicada en 1951, La pata del escarabajo, segunda novela de John Hawkes, consolidó el visionario estilo narrativo del autor. En este western gótico, de atmósfera onírica y opresiva, Hawkes nos muestra a unos personajes olvidados por el progreso, apartados a un lado por el discurrir del mundo. Sus vidas transcurren a la sombra de la presa de Mistletoe, obra fallida que debería haber transformado el desierto en un vergel, y en especial del recuerdo de Mulge Lampson, fallecido durante la construcción de la presa y convertido ahora en leyenda. A lo largo de una noche de trágico final, estos hombres y mujeres deberán descubrir si son capaces de romper sus vínculos con el pasado y afrontar el futuro.