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"I'm doing you a favor, Tony. I'm letting you know I'm alive."
"You stupid braggart-"
"Tony, I'm looking forward to killing you."
In case you're looking to re-ignite the debate about the place of fiction in society, you really have to turn to movies in order to make a case for its pertinence. Books don't exactly shape people anymore (at least not the majority of them), but movies do. FIGHT CLUB raised a generation of young men, and if you turn back the clock about a decade of so, you'll find that John McTiernan's DIE HARD had a similar effect on young men, only to a slightly lesser extent. It's slightly more difficult to stumble upon a mischievous thieves masquerading as terrorist than to punch your best friend in the face. It's still a little known fact that DIE HARD was inspired from a novel, though. NOTHING LASTS FOREVER, written by pulp journeyman Roderick Thorp doesn't top the thrills of its movie adaptation, but it is swinging for the fences nonetheless.
The story is almost the same, but not quite identical. Joe Leland's a World War II vet and a security consultant traveling to Los Angeles to spend his Christmas vacation with daughter Stephanie Leland Gennaro (!) and his two grandkids. Stephanie's working for a multinational named Klaxon Oil, who recently struck a suspicious infrastructure deal in Chile. German terrorist Anton "Little Tony" Gruber's crew took offense to a corporation dealing with a dictatorship (back when NOTHING LASTS FOREVER was written, Chile was still under Augusto Pinochet's regime) and decided to crash their Christmas party and torpedo their growth. Not on Ol' Joe Leland's watch, folks. Holding an Hemingway'esque war veteran's daughter hostage for a political cause is an extreme sport.
The elephant in the room here is: how different is the novel from the iconic movie adaptation? Truth to be told, it's about 60-70% the same. The iconic scenes are almost all there, most differences are stemming from how different the protagonists are. The difference between Joe Leland and John McClane is simple: McClane is more camera-friendly; dashing, quick-witted and resourceful, as Leland is more literary. He's darker, carries more bad memories he's barely trying to repress, and his age shows on the page, too. To give you a baseline, I kept imagining a contemporary Liam Neeson playing Leland. It's how different, but almost equally loveable NOTHING LAST FOREVER's protagonsist is from a prime Bruce Willis.
The story is almost the same, but not quite identical. Joe Leland's a World War II vet and a security consultant traveling to Los Angeles to spend his Christmas vacation with daughter Stephanie Leland Gennaro (!) and his two grandkids. Stephanie's working for a multinational named Klaxon Oil, who recently struck a suspicious infrastructure deal in Chile. German terrorist Anton "Little Tony" Gruber's crew took offense to a corporation dealing with a dictatorship (back when NOTHING LASTS FOREVER was written, Chile was still under Augusto Pinochet's regime) and decided to crash their Christmas party and torpedo their growth. Not on Ol' Joe Leland's watch, folks. Holding an Hemingway'esque war veteran's daughter hostage for a political cause is an extreme sport.
The elephant in the room here is: how different is the novel from the iconic movie adaptation? Truth to be told, it's about 60-70% the same. The iconic scenes are almost all there, most differences are stemming from how different the protagonists are. The difference between Joe Leland and John McClane is simple: McClane is more camera-friendly; dashing, quick-witted and resourceful, as Leland is more literary. He's darker, carries more bad memories he's barely trying to repress, and his age shows on the page, too. To give you a baseline, I kept imagining a contemporary Liam Neeson playing Leland. It's how different, but almost equally loveable NOTHING LAST FOREVER's protagonsist is from a prime Bruce Willis.
Civilization was full of Dwayne Robinsons, seeing everything that happened to them as opportunities for their own advancement and aggrandizement. They were the spoilers of society as much as all the Little Tonys who had ever lived, with Richard Nixon at the top of the list. Assholes.
Joe Leland is nonetheless NOTHING LASTS FOREVER's calling card. The man is an alpha dog in his own right. It was written in 1979, 36 years ago, in a world where adult males were completely different and Leland embodies their toughness and their stoicism through the way he keeps talking shit with Tony on the handheld radio (Leland's a master black belt shit talker) and through the spectacular way he talks himself into doing thing. Every crazy scene of the movie is in the novel, but Joe Leland rationalizes his way into things such as jumping off the building's roof with only a fire hose attached to his waist. It's what blurs the line between his action hero status and his everyman likability. He never feels like he's a fit for the situation, just like his movie alter ego John McClane.
NOTHING LASTS FOREVER is a lot of fun, and it doesn't feel like reading a novelized version of DIE HARD. The iconic movie adaptation, I thought was slightly better partly because of John McClane's marriage trouble which I thought cast a shadow of incertitude on his actions and forced him to take himself with a grain of salt. NOTHING LASTS FOREVER is darker, and a tad more earnest, but it has an identity of its own. It's like the same series of events happened to two different people in different realities. In any case, NOTHING LASTS FOREVER easily stands out on its own, as a classic throwback to the late golden age of pulp fiction. I've been looking to read it for several years not and it did not disappoint.
NOTHING LASTS FOREVER is a lot of fun, and it doesn't feel like reading a novelized version of DIE HARD. The iconic movie adaptation, I thought was slightly better partly because of John McClane's marriage trouble which I thought cast a shadow of incertitude on his actions and forced him to take himself with a grain of salt. NOTHING LASTS FOREVER is darker, and a tad more earnest, but it has an identity of its own. It's like the same series of events happened to two different people in different realities. In any case, NOTHING LASTS FOREVER easily stands out on its own, as a classic throwback to the late golden age of pulp fiction. I've been looking to read it for several years not and it did not disappoint.