About book Blut Will Reden: Eine Wahre Geschichte Von Mord Und Maskerade (2014)
I really wanted to like this book - it has all the elements of something I'd love - true crime/trashy semi-celebrity story/good author. I've read a lot of Walter Kirn's magazine writing in the past and liked it. But something about this book didn't quite get there for me. It felt like a magazine article that just went on for too long rather than a book. It just felt like there could have been a lot more detail in there than there was, but perhaps this is because I just finished reading an 1162 page book, so anything else would be fluff. And also, it felt like Kirn was exploiting his few stories about Clark Rockefeller to make a book out of it. I don't doubt Kirn actually did know Rockefeller and had some level of friendship with him, but it seemed like he took a few pieces of their friendship and amplified them in to some far more important piece of both "Rockefeller's" life, and the book itself, than they deserved. It felt like Kirn was trying to elevate his own place in this guy's life. I would have rather heard more about Rockefeller and his crazy exploits than his few interactions with Kirn and Kirn's own self-absorbed musings. I'm surprised. I really set out to like this book, and was excited to read it, but it just kind of fell flat. In the summer of 1998, Walter Kirn a youngish novelist set out on a very peculiar errand: to deliver a wheelchair bound dog from an animal shelter in Montana to its new owner, a rich young man called Rockefeller who had adopted it over the internet ,in New York. Kirn’s reasons for setting out on this journey were mixed – his child bride was pregnant and he was in the middle of renovating their ranch house. He was writing a story for Time magazine about crystal meth and is keeping himself going with a combination of Ritalin and Ambien. He has not yet written the Great American Novel, and scenting a story he wanted to meet the dog’s improbable new owner. It could be the opening for a novel but in fact it is the beginning of Blood Will Out one of the most unsettling and compelling memoirs I have ever read.After one telephone conversation with Clark Rockefeller where the scion of the famous oil family talked about his role as a ‘ freelance international central banker’, and detailed the recipes he gave to his private chef to prepare three course meals for his dogs, and the sources that had told him among other things that Prince Charles and the Queen had conspired to murder Diana, Kirn decided that he had to meet him – ‘ as a novelist I would be guilty of professional malpractice if I didn’t try.” Clark Rockefeller did not disappoint – he took Kirn and his wife to dinner at the Sky Club an exclusive Manhattan restaurant which overlooks ‘the family’s place” the Rockefeller Center. He invited Kirn to his apartment to show him his collection of Rothkos and Pollocks that he allowed the dogs to lick, “ I believe that animals and art should be allowed to coexist comfortably.” The only duff note in Kirn’s encounter with this eccentric American aristocrat was the cheque he was presented with for his services, it was for five hundred dollars a sum that only half covered Kirn’s expenses. But Kirn did not protest, he had been hooked by the peculiar appeal of his new ‘friend’.But the Gatsby like character that Kirn, who like F. Scpott fitzgerald was born in Minnesota and went to Princeton, hoped to chronicle turned out to be a figure drawn from a very different genre . Clark Rockefellerborn the amoral sociopath Ripley created by Patricia Highsmith. Clark Rockefeller was born Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter in Bavaria. He had come to America on a high school exchange and had realised that this was a country where he could become whatever he wanted. In California he posed as Sir Christopher Chichester, an English Baronet who just happened to know George Lucas, and who had a talking car. While Sir Christopher was living in San Marino in the early 80’s, he murdered the adopted son John sohas of his landlady and most probably the son’s girlfriend, dismembered the body and buried it in the back yard. A week or so later he had some friends over for a Trivial Pursuit contest which he held outside in the yard. Shortly after that he took the truck belonging to his vicitim’s girlfriend and drove to New York where he revinvented himself as Clark Rockefeller. Kirn narrates much of the book from the Los Courtroom where Gehartsreiter is on trial for the murder of John Sohas thirty years earlier. Gerhartsreiter’s crime was discovered when as Clark Rockefeller in 2008 he kidnapped his daughter Snooks by his ex wife Sandy and took her to a safe house in Baltimore where he had prepared a whole new identity under the name Chip foster. There was a fourday nationhide manhunt until Clark Rockefeller was finally tracked down and arrested. Kirn who had maintained a sporadic friendship with ‘Clark Rockefeller” through their respective divorces, was dumbfounded by the revelations about a man he had pigeonholed as good writing material. But as he learned more about Rockefeller/Geharstrieter’s shapeshifting career, he realised that he was the one who had been used for material – during the trial it emerged that he had used details of Kirn’s life on a ranch in Montana as the basis for one of his identities. Kirn parses Gehartsreiter’s career more as a literary critic than a detective. finding the origins of some of his more macabre gestures in tbe works of Patricia Highsmith and Alfred Hitchcock. The Trivial Pursuit party on top of dismembered corpse is straight from Hitchcock’s Rope. One of the most unlikely names that Rockefeller appropoiraties is that of Leslie titmuss from John Mortimer’s Paradise Postponed. He was a very well read sociopath.The only thing that is unbelievable about this incredible book is that none of his victims seemed to notice Gehartsreiter’s German accent. Surely Kirn who had been to Oxford would have noticed that the self styled American blue blood had very Teutonic cadences. But then Rockefeller/Gehartsreiter was a a master of distraction – when one of his dupes was asked in court why he was friends with Rockefeller, he answered, “he was entertaining.’ But what makes this book so disturbing is the way that Kirn sees Geharsteiter as his double. He acknowledges that they were in a way in a sort of partnership. At one point Kirn seriously considers helping Rockefeller with a series of novels he has written until it it transpires that they are based on the Star Trek series. Rockefeller, unsurprisingly, did not seem too worried about copyright infringement. They are both men who have assumed identities – Kirn makes a self conscious transition from a hick town in Minnesota to a Rhodes scholarship at Oxford. KIrn like Clark Rockefeller has a painful divorce and knows the pain of absent fatherhood. But more than that both men have an almost vampiric need to meet people and mine their life histories, Geharstereiter for his criminal ends, Kirn for artistic ones. Both men, to make their living, have ‘to entertain.’ One man is now in jail for life, the other has written a New York times Bestseller. Kirn did get a book out of his unlikely friend, it just wassn’t the book he thought he’d write.
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Could not finish, expected more from the story.
—yourmom
