The Lime Twig [Paperback]

John Hawkes (Author), L. A. Fiedler (Designer)

Product Details

• Paperback: 175 pages
• Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation; 1st PB ed. edition (December 1961)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0811200655
• ISBN-13: 978-0811200653
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 4.5 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #239,497 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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23 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Oddly surrealist little mystery., November 23, 2002

By 

Robert P. Beveridge "xterminal" (Lakewood, OH) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Lime Twig (Paperback)

John Hawkes, The Lime Twig (New Directions, 1960)

A friend of mine once said of the film Eraserhead that it was as close as cinema came to capturing a nightmare onscreen. (I disagree, but the parallel is useful.) The Lime Twig, in that sense, is the rough literary equivalent of Eraserhead; it's a Dick Francis novel edited by Jean-Paul Sartre with finishing touches added by Aime Cesaire. The whole contains a marked nightmarish quality; for once, I was actually grateful for the blurb writer at New Directions explaining some of the basics to me as I went along.

The story revolves around one of the oldest plots in horse racing; a team of small-time crooks buy an old racehorse to enter in a stakes race, the Golden Bowl at Aldington Race Course (being a Neanderthal American, I've no idea whether there actually is an Aldington Race Course in England). The horse in question won the race a number of time previously, but in the days before lifetime past performances, few bettors had memories stretching back five and six years. The crooks alone are enough to make the nameless rabble in Reservoir Dogs look like competent professionals, but things get worse when a big-time operation decides it wants in on the deal. (This is the part where the blurb on the back saved me; I figured out that others were getting in on the action, but they seem just as disorganized as the first lot, only more savage about it.)

Everything is presented as a kind of pointillist painting; pieces float in and out, some disappearing altogether, some being tied up at the end. Hawkes relies on the reader perhaps more than any other mystery writer here to fill in some blanks. This is in no way a bad thing; when has an author been criticized for OVERestimating the intelligence of his audience? However, readers of more mainstream mystery novelists may feel as if pieces are still missing by the end. (Jessica Fletcher Mr. Hawkes is not. There are no neat pages of explanation at the end.) A couple of re-reads of the most relevant passages will suffice to tie things up, and unlike most mystery authors, Hawkes does very little in the way of stopping the reader from recognizing the major foreshadowing or clue-dropping as it happens. And yes, despite all that, the book still reads as if the reader has taken a rather large dose of laudanum before sitting down.

As with most New Directions books, there is a core of critics who feel John Hawkes is the best thing for the mystery genre since, and perhaps before, sliced bread. This may well be the case. There's no denying the effectiveness of Hawkes' literary style and his ability to keep the reader turning pages despite it. However, it's one of those cases where it almost seems too much of a good thing. To draw another film parallel, Alejandro Jodorowsky, who holds much the same core-of-critics role in film as Hawkes does in letters, created a few masterpieces of exactly this sort. His most famous film, El Topo, just goes way over the edge, and its style eclipses its substance too far. I got that feeling more than once while reading The Lime Twig, and while I'd certainly recommend it for fans of the ubiquitous British Horse Racing Mystery™, it should probably come with a "warning: literary writing ahead" sticker. *** ½

3 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A good book for those still interested in such things..., December 21, 2009

By 

Mark Nadja "Literary Outlaw, author *Hardcore... (New York City) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Lime Twig (Paperback)

John Hawkes decides to call this book "The Lime Twig" thereby putting off a great number of people who can't imagine any book with such a title worth their time. "The Lime Twig"?! Well, the book doesn't have anything directly to do with limes except that lots of stuff you wouldn't think would smell like limes do to many of the characters in the novel. What does a lime smell like, anyway? Does it even have a smell. I can sort of call up the smell of the lime's brighter cousin, the lemon, in my mind's nose. Can you call a lemon the lime's cousin? Yes or no, it makes no difference to any of the sentences preceding this one. Or, for that matter, any of those which follow.

Sort of like Robbe-Grillet, Hawkes attempts to splice the experimental (for want of a better word), avant garde (for want of another better word), literary (for want of a word that actually means something) novel into the pulp fiction genre, in this case, the crime thriller. This high-brow/mid-brow hybrid, which Hawkes has called the "The Lime Twig," for reasons not made very clear above, is a deconstruction and reconstruction from the inside-out on what is a crime genre staple: the fixed horse-race.

What Hawkes does is to take this rather time-worn tale out of the familiar realm of justice avenged and into a multi-perspectived world of relativity, where any character's story-viewpoint-life at virtually any time can end violently, even as the story (like the world outside our own lives) as a whole goes on without them, inexorably it seems, to its tragic conclusion. The jump-cuts that Hawkes makes from character to character, from scene to scene, the way he slows down fictional time almost to a crawl, and speeds it up like a rollercoaster just over the hump and screaming down the rails, his cool objective handling of his characters...all make "The Lime Twig" literature, rather than genre crime fiction, and therefore excuse him from the straightforward narrative that readers of genre fiction would expect.

A movie equivalent of "The Lime Twig" might be Tarantino's "Pulp Fiction." I don't know why that occurred to me, but it may be of some help. It may not be. What is "relevant" is, after all, almost by definition relative; well, at least the two words sure look the same.

They say that John Hawkes was never a very popular author when alive; and I don't think that's changed a whole lot now that he's dead, except he probably doesn't care that much. Surely titling his novels such things as "The Lime Twig" isn't going to help either. But this is hardly my problem; it's not even John Hawke's problem.

Anyway, that's it; that's my review of Jown Hawkes's "The Lime Twig." I wash my hands of the matter.

6 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An experience well worth the effort, May 14, 2003

By 

Bernard M. Patten "Book worm" (Seabrook, TX United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Lime Twig (Paperback)

Each week on a Monday I go to the library and read plots. This is a way that I get ideas for my own writing. One day I ran across one of the most interesting and imaginative plots I had ever seen and of course I had to get the book. John Hawkes, a Gothic novelist, must be the least read novelist of substantial merit that I know. His story is quite like the consciousness we live but which is not often recorded in books - untidy, half-focused, disarrayed and incoherent. And yet, and yet, he keeps our interest because his story is real. And so Sidney Slyter says go read The Lime Twig and see if you don't agree that it is one of the most perfect novels of our time.