Not for me

The Long Take's portrayal of PTSD seems to me to be deadly accurate. I wouldn't exactly know exactly since I haven't had first-hand experience of it or know anyone how does. I read somewhere that PTSD is the inability to remember without reliving. This book captures that sensation with great precision. Walker, the protagonist, lives such a life, drifting through it, sleepless, reliving the experiences of the war and the ones that lead up to it. And it is his intention to kill his past, but this impulse only amplifies the past's effect on him. Walker roams restlessly through cities, trying to find a place where he can stay, but the entire world seems alien to him. The alienation coming from the world's disregard as to what happened in the war and the soldiers in it. He seeks out people who have had similar experiences as him, to talk about the war in general. But when it comes right down to him, his POV of story, the past becomes weighty, it can't be told and he alienates himself from them too, although he gets back to them now and then through a span of years.
The writer's ability to describe the city of cinema in a decade, the change it goes through, the very mild insinuation that McCarthyism is one the path of becoming the new fascism, the historical events that seared into the memories of everyone of that time is one point. Better of all is the dialogue of noir- which has the danger of being exaggerated or sounding unreal- which again is precise.
Plotwise, there is nothing that is going on which is exhilarating. In case, the reader lived in the time this book is set in, then it can act as a nice dose of nostalgia. The reader is compelled to read on to know the war experiences of Walker and the others and how it affects his present. In the end, when the city is completely torn down, Walker finally feels at home, he chooses the city, perhaps because it is reminiscent of the rumble of the war he lived through.

This year’s Booker prize judges chose several unconventional literary works (including a crime novel, a graphic novel and two novels which incorporate stand alone short stories) pushing the boundaries of what a novel can be.

Robin Robertson’s The Long Take is though perhaps the most unusual in form – a long prose poem which also happens to be a most moving account of the personal toll that war takes. It tells the story of a World War 2 veteran so broken by his experiences in France that he feels he can no longer return to his home to Canada. He decides instead to start a new life in America, first in New York and then in Los Angeles where he gets a job as a reporter in the crime section of the LA Times before being sent on assignment to San Francisco. He has a particular interest in the plight of the homeless, especially those veterans who have ended up on Skid Row because there are no jobs for them and society just doesn’t care. This is the American dream gone sour.

Walker (“ … he walks. That is his name and his nature”) wanders the streets and the descriptions of the cityscapes of the post-war years are finely detailed and sensuously evocative. Woven into the novel is a fascination for the films of the era (some of which he sees being shot) and jazz. The sense of time and place is further enhanced by the inclusion of black and white photographs. The research Robertson has put in to get the period details so precise is most impressive.

Walker still suffers from PTSD so any small sound “A dropped crate or child’s shout or a car backfiring” creates a whole strong of terrible associations. Within the fractured narrative are diary entries detailing his observations of the city, vivid flashbacks of the past – the natural landscape of Cape Breton isle where he grew up, of the woman he loves and whom he can never go back to, and then increasingly of Normandy; until we learn in the terrible climax of the novel exactly what he did.

The poetry never gets in the way of the story-telling. Robertson writes in the language of the everyday, but every image shines.

In a poetry-fiction hybrid form Robertson takes us through the lost wandering of a vet traumatized by his experiences during D-Day. The narrative is scumy and violent and bleak. It is about a hopeless country deteriorating in parallel with the protagonist's interior. It is about a country made up of outsiders and the lost cause of any war. The subtitle is A Way to Lose More Slowly and that feels right. Perhaps the femme fatale was the righteous cause of the war.

I appreciate the beauty here but I don't welcome the pessimism. I had to really concentrate to get through to the last page. Maybe that's just me burnt out on America lately.

A moving story about 1940s America and remembrances of the 2nd World War. It is a fast-paced read thanks to the free-verse which gives a rhythm to the story that draws it along.

never have I read something so intensely in love with a sense of place, with the desire to belong to something (anything), so desperately in need of moving on from the past.

the long take is stunning. It’s harrowing, unforgiving and relentless. but absolutely fucking stunning

#ReadAllThePoetryProject

I absolutely thought this was going to be some film noir thing and it is really not. It's traumatized homeless military veterans and Los Angeles in the 50s and 60s. Hard drinking and film. But in verse.