"It is coated with a yellow poison paste and comes from Canada"

Why Robert Musil's story "Flypaper" might interest readers here at Detectives Beyond Borders: First, because the opening sentence of his story "Flypaper" gives my native country a shout-out:

"Tangle-foot flypaper is approximately fourteen inches long and eight inches wide; it is coated with a yellow poison paste and comes from Canada."

That's enough to make anyone from Kitimat to Come By Chance proud.

Second, while the story is cooler and more detached than noir generally is, its final paragraph includes this:

"Sometimes even the next day, one of them wakes up, gropes a while with one leg or flutters a wing. Sometimes such a movement sweeps over the lot, then all of them sink a little deeper into death."

Noir is sometimes about the horror of sliding toward death. Musil's story is about the horror, and the dirty little thrill, of watching something else do the sliding.

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Musil's great novel, The Man Without Qualities, which remained unfinished when he died in 1942, weighs in at about 1,100 to 1,700 pages in English translation, depending on how one counts. But I once boiled it down to six words, in response to a challenge on social media:

"Empire decays. People talk. War looms."

You should still read the book, my choice for greatest novel of the twentieth century. But if you don't have time, my summary is accurate.

© Peter Rozovsky 2016