Frankie Machine vive en el Chicago de los años cuarenta, y tiene claro que como crupier clandestino «Todo es cuestión de muñeca y yo tengo el toque». Porque él tiene el toque, y un brazo de oro. Mafiosos, camellos, drogadictos, prostitutas, éste es el ambiente que rodea a Frankie, en el barrio polaco de la ciudad. Como veterano de la Segunda Guerra Mundial, Frankie se esforzará por estabilizar su vida personal, tratando de ganarse la vida y luchando contra una creciente adicción a la morfina, pero no le va a resultar nada sencillo huir de la vida de perdedor que le augura su entorno.

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"Yet the week ran out on Saturday night and he was no richer than he had been Monday morning. The old merry-go-round was rolling again and he had to ride as hard as any."

"Some cats just swing like that."

It took me quite a while to get into this book, which was the winner of the first National Book Award, I think primarily because of the extensive use of 1940's slang, particularly slang related to cards and gambling, drug addiction, and the out and out poverty, despair and ugliness surrounding all the book's characters. It's set in the Polish ghetto of Chicago in the years immediately after World War II. The main character, Francis Majcinek, aka Frankie Magic, aka the Dealer, is the man with the golden arm. He's a card dealer, a good one, and he deals the game run every night in the back room by Schwieftia. He is almost always accompanied by Solly Saltskin, aka the Sparrow, aka the Punk, aka the Steerer, and together they commit petty crimes to get by, whenever they are not involved in a card game or some serious drinking or in jail for a bit.

There's another reason Frankie is the man with the golden arm--he's also a drug addict. Because of a wound during the war, he is frequently in pain, and craves the relief morphine brings. He frequently believes he can kick it at any time, and is not an addict, but his fixer, and we the reader, know otherwise.

Frankie is married to Sophie, and she has been in a wheelchair since a car accident with Frankie drunk at the wheel left her apparently unable to stand or walk. Her only outlet in life is in keeping a scrapbook of fatal accidents. Frankie doesn't love Sophie, and no longer wants to be married to her, but stays with her out of guilt. And Sophie reminds Frankie constantly that he is the cause of her predicament.

Algren has been described as the "poet of the lost," and the book is unrelentingly bleak and dark. Beyond the main characters I've described above there are many other denizens of this gritty decrepit urban neighborhood with whom the book involves us, many of them known just by their nicknames or occupations. Besides the Fixer, there is the landlord of the seedy rooming house where Frankie and Sophie live known as "the jailer," there's Drunkie John, "a mouth at the end of a whiskey glass," Blind Pig, whose actions lead to the ultimate downfall of Frankie, and many other poor and lost souls. All of them are in on "the great secret and special American guilt of owning nothing, nothing at all in the land where ownership and virtue are one."

Despite the hopelessness of his characters, Algren writes beautifully. He is an amazing prose stylist. As I said, because of the slang, it was at first hard to follow, but once I learned the characters (many of whom are referred to by multiple names) and got into the flow of the story and the language it was hard to put the book down. I can well understand why this book won the National Book Award, and why it is on the 1001 list.

First line(s): "The captain never drank. Yet toward nightfall in that smoke-colored season between Indian summer and December's first true snow, he would sometimes feel half drunken."

Last line: "To rustle away down the last dark wall of all."

4 1/2 stars ( )

The book has been staring at me for some time and finally I got to reading it.

Unfortunately can't get through. I've tried, putbit away, tried again, but the result is the same.
The language used is slang, which doesn't make it easier to follow the story, keep apart the scenes, the characters.
For now I give up.
I think I'll look for a Dutch edition, if there is one. Sometimes reading in my own language works wonders.

I understand why this book is considered a classic of a sorts. I understand that it was groundbreaking, and there still are not a lot of books like it. But I wasn't crazy about it. I found the vernacular hard to wade through. On top of that, Algren often writes an opaque sentence full of flourish, in which meaning gets lost, rather than just saying what's happening. But most importantly, these are ugly people who have given up even before they have come of age. I didn't like any of them, except for the prostitute Molly-O. I found that most of the time, I just didn't care what happened to them. I am not sorry I read this book, because it is important to read the classics, the books that made a mark, but if you don't share that value with me, I'd say skip it. Bleh. -cg ( )