“L’homme de Londres”, un film de Béla Tarr (2008)

J’ai une copine qui a travaillé avec Béla Tarr et qui m’a dit qu’il était complètement taré. Elle le hait, lui et toute son équipe aussi. Et je ne dirais pas qui est mon amie – de toute façon, qui connaît vraiment Béla Tarr?

J’ai une autre copine qui a bossé avec lui, une technicienne du cinéma, et qui, quand on évoque le tournage de L’homme de Londres, devient très sombre et explique gentiment que parfois, on préfèrerait presque faire de la télé.

De toute façon, un réalisateur hongrois qui  pond des œuvres de plus de sept heures sans entracte en noir et blanc (Satantango, 1994), ne peut pas être tout à fait normal. L’homme de Londres, une adaptation du l’enquête policière de Georges Simenon, ne dure “que” 132 minutes, et c’est le règne de la lenteur et du plan séquence. Les plans filmiques maniaques de Béla Tarr sont inhumains. Au bout d’une heure dix de film, nous en sommes à onze plans en tout et pour tout (j’ai compté, je m’emmerdais). Pire encore, nous n’en sommes presque qu’à l’exposition des lieux et des personnages.

La première moitié de L’homme de Londres m’a parue être un véritable supplice, sorte de caricature du film dit “de l’Est”, en noir et blanc, lent à périr, joué de façon expressionniste, avec d’interminables mouvements de caméra sur des actions insignifiantes (une fille qui mange sa soupe). De quoi faire passer toute la Hongrie pour le pays de la dépression nerveuse. Béla Tarr semble alors mépriser le genre humain au point de lui préférer les longs travellings sur des paysages mornes et de filmer son héros presque tout le temps… de dos!

Pourtant, à la deuxième heure, et particulièrement à la fin, le film bascule, le pouls s’accélère, retrouvant la piste du film noir, en mettant cependant l’accent sur l’absurdité des entreprises humaines. C’est là que prennent tout leur sens les plans séquences infinis et les dialogues étrangement artificiels, dans cette tragédie grecque version 2009 qui se mérite un peu, qui ne s’offre pas comme ça à la première minute. La force du film s’apprécie lentement et finit, saisissante, sur un ultime plan séquence du visage d’une femme qui a tout perdu – honneur, justice et amour.

Oh, I have had a fun month of reading. Those of you who know me, may be wondering how I actually fit in reading between the chaos of renovating my new house. I’m not exactly sure how it happened either, but it’s working, and I’ve got a lot to share!

The Original Illustrated Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, illustrated by Sidney Paget

Before picking this up, the only Sherlock Holmes story I had read was the full-length novel, The Hound of the Baskervilles. I’m finding the rest of the stories highly entertaining, and am now super excited to see the new movie with Robert Downey Jr and Jude Law. Of note, this edition of the book (Castle Books, 1985) has reprinted the stories as they originally appeared in the Strand Magazine, complete with columns and illustrations.

Doyle chose a very interesting way to tell these stories—as most of you know, from the point of view of the sidekick, Dr. Watson. I rarely read narratives which are told in first person, but which do not focus inwardly at all on the storyteller himself. Watson is a shockingly invisible sidekick, and really doesn’t do much at all to solve the cases. I also find myself wondering how on earth he finds the time to attend to all of Sherlock Holmes’ mysteries when he’s a practicing doctor and recently married to boot.

At any rate, I love reading half or all of a case before bed, as they are fairly short (and not scary at all, which is refreshing with all the second rate crime on TV that glorifies inane violence and disgusting close-ups of open wounds).

The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne

This house, in Salem, Mass., was Hawthorne's inspiration. Given the location, you can understand why the haunting story has its roots in the witch hunts.

I can’t get enough of books like this one. While reading it, I was consistently reminded of another novel, Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier (which is one of my all-time favorite books, and I recently saw a wonderful performance of it at the Theatre in the Round on Washington Ave., Minneapolis) However, Hawthorne’s tale is less haunting than Rebecca, and at times, a wee bit boring. I do NOT mean to deter you from reading this one, since I am really happy myself to have read it. The House of the Seven Gables was Hawthorne’s own favorite—above The Scarlet Letter. As it is extremely character driven (rather than plot driven), just don’t go into it expecting a rolicking mind-blow, and you’ll come to be fascinated with the Pyncheon family. It’s a fantastic ghostly story, perfect for autumn.

Inspector Cadaver (An Inspector Maigret Mystery) by Georges Simenon

This was a very quick read that kept my attention, but unfortunately had a rather unsatisfying end. I haven’t read any other Maigret mysteries, but I wouldn’t let the ending of this one keep me from reading another.

I just love this era of detective novels. Set in probably the 1920s or 1930s French countryside, the narrative is more sensitive to the psychology of people and their motives, rather than focusing on minute technical details. And its not a chasing story. I have a gripe against modern crime novels, as you’ve probably noticed by now, which seem always to have the main character running away from an impending murder, only to escape at the last second because an “everyday hero”—often a journalist or a big-city professional who is not accustomed to solving crimes—is thrust into the situation and wins against all odds. Lame.

Go Maigret, a real detective—one who understands the importance of slowing down long enough during the case for a snifter of cognac.

Crítico de la revista cahiers du cinéma, cineasta de la nouvelle vague, amante de la buena comida y el buen vino, y admirador de Hitchcock y Lang, Claude Chabrol continúa hoy en día al pie del cañón, estrenando nueva película cada dos o tres años. Las dos últimas, Borrachera de poder (L´ivresse du pouvoir, 2006) y Una chica cortada en dos (La fille coupée en deux, 2007) -cuyo argumento, basado en un hecho real, ya había sido llevado al cine por Richard Fleischer en la magnífica La muchacha del trapecio rojo (The girl in the red velvet swing, 1955)-, no son de lo mejor de su filmografía, pero de uno de los grandes del cine que aún quedan en activo siempre se puede esperar que vuelva a sorprendernos.

        La que sí es realmente buena, y además muestra varias de las constantes del mejor cine de Chabrol, es El carnicero (Le boucher), retrato de la relación entre el carnicero (Jean Yanne) y la maestra (Stephane Audran) de un pequeño pueblo cuya rutinaria vida se ve alterada por el asesinato de varias chicas.

       A Chabrol no le interesa demasiado mostrar la violencia de los asesinatos ni la investigación policial (no es ésta una película de misterio, aunque en algunos momentos se recurra a él), sino el encuentro entre dos personas que tienen en común la soledad, la incomunicación, y el recuerdo de pasadas experiencias que les han dejado marcados, y que descubren el uno en el otro alguien en quien apoyarse. Como en la literatura de Georges Simenon -a quien Chabrol adaptó en Los fantasmas del sombrerero (Les fântomes du chapelier, 1982) y Betty (1992)- en El carnicero el crimen actúa como detonante, alterando la vida cotidiana de una comunidad, recuperando los fantasmas de un pasado que parecía olvidado, y mostrando la verdadera cara de las relaciones humanas.

        Tras quince portentosos minutos en que pasamos por el terror y el drama sin que Chabrol apenas varíe el ritmo inicial tan característico de su cine, la película termina con uno de esos planos que hacen grande a un cineasta, y que muestra como pocos, a través del rostro de Stephane Audran, el desconcierto y la soledad de un personaje.

              Editada en DVD por Suevia.  

Ví esse livro como indicação numa edição da revista MTV e resolví lê-lo e tirar minhas impressões.

Alguém dos meus milhares de leitores que não comentam já deve ter assistido ao filme “Eu sei o que vocês fizeram no verão passado”. E o que é que esse livro tem a ver? Nada, a não ser o que eu mais odeio em um livro ou filme, um final muito ruim e sem nenhuma imaginação! Tipo, alguém morre, aí você passa o livro inteiro pensando quem será o assassino, suspeitando de todos, analisando cada personagem a procura de qual deles é o real assassino, será a mulher dele? Será a mãe dele? Ou talvez seria o pipoqueiro que era ex-namorado da mão dele e agora chifrava ele com a sua mulher? E então, no grande final adivinha quem é o assassino? Zezinho, o vizinho do primo do amigo do enteado da avó da dona da cachorra que cruzou com meu cachorro, um cara que ninguém ouviu falar nele durante toda a história, isso me deicha muito, mas muito nervoso.

A história real é sobre um homem que saía todo dia de casa e voltava todo dia na mesma hora, com a mesma roupa e fazia sempre a mesma coisa até que um dia, puf, morreu. Aí o Maigret vai investigar e descobre que o cara era muito era mentiroso, ele trocava de roupa na rua, não ia trabalhar e ficava sentadim num banco de praça articulando roubos, até aí bem legal, pena que depois de o detetive investigar a vida do cara, as pessoas ao redor e tal, puf, aparece o assassino que é um cara que ninguém nunca ouviu falar.

Sei não, ainda bem que esse livro é de baixo custo e não cossome muito tempo para ser lido, senão eu teria jogado ele numa fogueira, penso em um dia ler outro livro de Maigret(ele tem muitos) para ver se não foi o que eu lí que era ruim e os outros eram bonzinhos, que sabe um dia.

My short story, “Missing Things,” was chosen among Glimmer Train Magazine’s Top 25 finalists in the Short Story Award for New Writers 2009. By clicking the relevant link here you can see that I am not making this up.

I turned 34 this week. Aside from the after-effects of quite a bit of wine on Wednesday when my girlfriend and I went out to the restaurant, le Nil Bleu on rue St. Denis, I have been feeling in good health. I am not limping gasping squinting straining or croaking. Mind you, nor are a good number of people in their 70s.

I am not missing being younger. No sir. I remember from the age of about 12 I wanted to be in my thirties, and now all my dreams have come true.

Well, some of them.

When I was walking home from work yesterday, despite the snow and the cold – which strike me as having arrived prematurely this year – I stopped off at a bakery on rue Villeray and purchased a loaf of bread that was still warm from the oven. This, at 7:30pm. It made me very happy indeed.

Upon my return home, Banchi greeted me with a feline squawk for food. She wanted to eat the bread but I would not let her.

Five hours later, I only had about a ten-minute attention span for reading a book before drifting off into slumberland. I am currently reading Faubourg by Georges Simenon, and it is very good. I find the way Simenon reveals important plot points so natural and effortless – they just unfold in the course of describing what the protagonist , De Ritter, is up to. And boy is he mysterious, this protagonist. It’s clever how Simenon really gives you the sense of knowing who De Ritter is and yet not really knowing, all at the same time – and in a way that is intriguing and not frustrating.

Tonight I will have a bit of a shindig at my abode in Villeray. It is safe to say that tomorrow I will feel every year of 34. It’ll be interesting to see if my neighbours show up. Pierre has been contending with some heavy shit recently it seems – got harrassed by the ex-boyfriend of his sister, who is currently staying with him.  Some stuff I didn’t entirely catch about some custody battle. Apparently the boyfriend character also made threats against Pierre’s car.

Speaking of threats against inanimate objects, the other day on St. Laurent I saw a man shout “Colisse! Fuck you!” at his bicycle. Later, during the same outing, I saw a dog digging out dirt from around a tree and scuffing it all over the nice St Laurent sidewalk. That really cracked me up. I don’t know what exactly it was. Perhaps it was the contrast of sniffy snooty shoppers out shopping for their fancy clothes and whatnot, and this bull mastiff with no greater joy in the world than making a mess of that sidewalk.

1958: Maigret tend un piège di Jean Delannoy

E’ il primo (e il migliore) dei tre Maigret che l’attore francese ha interpretato (gli altri sono Maigret e il caso Saint-Fiacre, regia di Jean Delannoy del 1959; Maigret e i gangsters, regia di Gilles Grangier del 1963).

Molti i Maigret sullo schermo (e sul teleschermo) ma sicuramente il più celebre e significativo è quello reso magistralmente dal grande Jean Gabin.
Maigret tend un piège è un bellissimo film che non ha perso nulla del suo fascino. Clima e atmosfera resi perfettamente da una regia asciutta al massimo (come solo i francesi sanno fare) e che si avvale di un cast che fa scintille. Annie Girardot è, come al solito, superiore a ogni possibile lode, Jean Dessailly offre una performance da applauso in un ruolo dalle mille sfaccettature e tutt’altro che facile.

Da Simenon un bel giallo drammatico e intimista (ilFarinotti).

J. Gabin è magistrale nell’aderire al personaggio. Bella atmosfera intimista, dialoghi efficaci di M. Audiard, una squadra affiatata di interpreti (ilMorandini).

Jean Gabin, che prima della guerra aveva raggiunto una straordinaria notorietà… sembra ritrovare nella seconda metà degli anni Cinquanta, e proprio grazie a Simenon, una seconda giovinezza. Fra il 1956 e il 1960 interpreta ben sei film tratti da suoi romanzi…
Gabin diventa così l’attore simenoniano per eccellenza, sia per il numero delle sue interpretazioni che per l’ampiezza dei registri (Alberosito).

Gabin e Maigret si sovrappongono e si annullano reciprocamente, dando vita a un personaggio completamente reinventato (Jacques Siclier).

Gabin-Maigret attraversa i film con il passo pesante e indolente del vecchio funzionario che ne ha viste talmente tante che nulla più può commuoverlo (Jean de Baroncelli).

Gabin si è impadronito di Maigret come Bogart di Marlowe (Manuel Vásquez Montalbán).

Non c’è niente di più godibile di un film di Gabin nei panni del commissario Maigret…
il film non è invecchiato, lo stile di recitazione tiene il passo coi tempi, l’atmosfera d’altri tempi regala al film quel qualcosa in più che fa venir voglia di rivederlo. Gabin è Maigret, per noi. Anche quando leggiamo i libri di Simenon, è a lui che pensiamo, figurandoci il commissario. Un classico (ilDavinotti).

scheda

premi e riconoscimenti

Ma perché lei continuava a guardarlo? Se non lo guardasse così il suo compito sarebbe facilitato; e invece se lo divora con gli occhi, e con tanta innocenza da metterlo ancora più in soggezione. ( pag. 51 )

Tanto peggio per Sissy. Non lo interessava più. Molte volte , in quegli ultimi tempi,pensando a lei aveva evocato l’immagine di quelle coppie che camminano per la strada fianco contro fianco, e i baci caldi e interminabili nei cantoni. Aveva sinceramente creduto che potesse essere esaltante . Un particolare fra gli altri l’aveva sempre sedotto: quel vapore umido che esce fra le labbra di due esseri quando , alla luce fioca di un lampione, si avvicinano per baciarsi. ( pag.58 )

Strano. Ci si fida e insieme non ci si fida. ( pag. 67 )

Le parole infondo non significano niente, servono soltanto per stabilire un contatto . ( pag. 88)

“ io ti amo Frank”

“Ed è una catastrofe?”

“Perché dici così ? “

“ Perché ne parli con aria tragica, come se fosse una catastrofe”

Lei ripete guardando dritto davanti a sé “Ti amo”

Lui avrebbe una gran voglia di risponderle “ E io no”

Si sarebbe detto che fosse indignato di essere stato abbandonato ( pag 120 )

Evitando di proposito di guardare le lenzuola ha rimesso a posto la coperta ( pag 120 )

Un malato non sente più il proprio male quando ha qualcuno più malato di lui da curare ( pag.121)

Sono rimasti calmi e composti tutti e due, sono divisi da una sorta di vuoto ( pag.142 )

Ha cercato il destino in tutti gli angoli, ma non era mai dove lui sospettava che fosse ( pag 153 )

….Ha lasciato cadere il mozzicone della sigaretta nella neve. ( pag 159 )

Le ha fatto varie domande e gli è sembrato, e gli sembra ancora, che le sue risposte non avessero alcun rapporto con ciò che lui le domandava. ( pag. 185 )

Il suo buon odore. Odore di terra, di cosa viva, che suda. Frank fa apposta a cacciare il naso nel punto che odora più forte, sotto le ascelle. Vorrebbe puzzare come dice la gente di fuori, puzzare come puzza la terra , perché la gente di fuori trova che la gente puzza, che la terra puzza. Sentire battere il proprio cuore, sentirlo dappertutto, alle tempie , ai polsi, alle dita dei piedi; sentire l’odore del proprio respiro … (pag 198)

E dire che gli uomini si immaginano di saper dormire ! Questo perché hanno troppe ore da dedicare al sonno, se lo desiderano. E’c’è chi ha il coraggio di lamentarsi di essere schiavo della sveglia, quando propri o lui l’ha regolata al momento di andare a letto e spesso gli accade di emergere dal dormiveglia per accertarsi d’aver tirato il pulsante della suoneria. Farsi svegliare da se stessi! E a sentirli si tratterebbe di schiavitù. Imparino dunque anzitutto a dormire sulla pancia, a dormire dappertutto, per terra, come i vermi o come insetti. E in mancanza dell’odore della terra imparino ad accontentarsi del loro stesso odore.

Il letto che sa di coppia… Lei non lo sa. Se lo sapesse, non metterebbe coperte e lenzuola a prendere aria alla finestra. Non aprirebbe nemmeno. Per fortuna di Frank lei appartiene al mondo di fuori. Al suo posto Frank chiuderebbe tutto, terrebbe tutto, non lascerebbe sfuggire niente della loro vita. ( pag. 202 )

Edizione Adelphi – Consigliato da Francesco , letto il 3 Giugno 1996 e successivi nell’aula di grafica Isa – Giudizio ****

Georges Simenòn su WiKi

PP readers may already know of my obsession with Erle Stanley Gardner, in particular his Perry Mason books. I really need to try out some other stuff like Raymond Chandler (who, was influenced by Erle Stanley Gardner as it happens) – I’ve had The High Window (1942) on my table for about six months – Elmore Leonard, and James Cain, et al, but I just keep buying more good-looking ESG titles and devouring them in approximately four hours.

It’s true that when I emerge from one of these mysteries, be it The Case of the Dangerous Dowager, or my first ESG, and still my favourite, The Case of the Moth-Eaten Mink, I would struggle to explain out-loud the exact plot details. This is usually because it all gets a bit silly towards the end, but also because I don’t concentrate that hard – the plot is not as important to me as the brilliance of the writing.

I know that’s slightly odd, as the plot is all in these things, and the reason you race towards the end is to find out what happened. But I’ve realised that essentially I really don’t care whodunit or whatever. It’s just the thrill of narrative chase, as it were, the thrill that ESG creates with the forward movement of the sentences and words, more than whether it was that dame or that disowned oil scion wot did it.

I found a quote on crime writer Duane Swierczynski’s cheerfully named blog: Secret Dead Blog on which he quotes the editor of Gallimard’s famous Série noire Marcel Duhamel’s advice to novelist Chester Himes:

Get an idea. Start with action, somebody does something – a man raches out a hand and opens a door, light shines in his eyes, a body lies on the floor, he turns, looks up and down the hall.. Always action in detail. Make pictures. Like motion pictures. Always the scenes are visible. No stream of consciousness at all. We don’t give a damn who’s thinking what – only what they’re doing. Always doing something. From one scene to another. Don’t worry about it making sense. That’s for the end. Give me 220 typed pages.

It couldn’t sound more like a Perry Mason novel if it tried. These are normally about 220 pages, or, in fact, a little shorter. Enter some vintage ESG and the to give an example, and to show how to get a plot moving in 3 pages from the opening of The Case of the Black-Eyed Blonde:

Perry Mason drew his secretary to one side. ‘A blonde with a black eye, Della, is intriguing to say the least – unless she’s the type who would have been in a brawl. Is she?’

‘Definitely not; but she’s frightened to death about something. I can’t quite make her out. Her voice is unusual – almost as though it had been trained.’

‘And you’ve put her in the law library?’

‘Yes. She’s waiting there.’

‘How’s she dressed?’

‘Black shoes, no stockings, a fur coat, and I caught a glimpse of something under the fur coat that I think may be a black house coat, or a robe of some sort, and I wouldn’t be too surprised if that was all she had on.’

‘And a black eye?’

‘A beauty.’

[…]

‘What’s her name?’

‘Diana Regis.’

‘Sounds phony.’

‘She insists it’s her real name. She’s terribly excited and nervous. Altogether, I’d say she was pretty unstrung.’

‘Been crying?’

‘I don’t think she has. She seems nervous and frightened, but isn’t doing any weeping.’

[…]

‘That,’ Mason said, ‘settles it. We’re going to see her, at least long enough to find out what it’s all about. Bring her in, Della.’

Those doling out advice to fiction-writing hopefuls often recommend reading other fiction and non-fiction that is very different from the ‘literary’ novel. To read as much and as diversely as possible is a common suggestion to struggling writers. And I think the advice from Duhamel could be applied to writing in general: if in doubt, don’t over-explain and analyse; drive the narrative forward with the language, rather than pontificating or speculating about character – action, by its very nature, can explain later, and by the constraints of the novel’s form, will normally be compelled to.

A recent BBC 4 documentary, The Rules of Film Noir, explored why the genre was so popular in the forties and then why the hardboiled style became unpopular in the following decade when colour and optimism was the chosen tonic, and the black and white shadowy and uncertain underworlds represented by noir were not the antidote to post-war life the cinemagoers were seeking.

When I was watching this programme I kept scribbling down quotes from the various aficionados and experts who were on the show as it seemed like the stuff of great short stories or novels. For a start the names of the books/films are brilliant: Stranger on the Third Floor; Murder My Sweet; Sunset Boulevard; Double Indemnity; Kiss Me Deadly.

Disconnection seems the most overpowering theme. The ‘American Dream’ is skewed and the characters tainted before they start – the dream is to get whatever you want without cost, the fall out is the bitter resentment when this is not achieved: ‘In rooms, bars, nightclubs – they’re trapped; they can’t get out. They’re trying to rip their way out, but they can’t’; ‘Don’t go to bed feeling comfortable, because there’s nothing to be comfortable about.’ Apologies, I can’t remember who said this stuff on the programme… but they were good whoever they were.]

It sounds like the subject matter of the domestic novel in a way: the sense of disquiet in apparently mundane settings. Yes, here possibly because someone’s holding a gun beneath that suspicious overcoat, but the sense of foreboding and of being unavoidably and inescapably trapped by location and circumstance is the stuff of many narratives.

Watching the programme also made me think I should go a little darker from the relatively clean and nicely sorted-out nature of Perry’s mysteries and investigations. I was reading an interview – and a very good one at that – with John Banville, again in the The Paris Review (which it is becoming clear I am also obsessed with!). He writes crime thrillers under the pseudonym Benjamin Black. I have to say I’ve never been a fan of Banville’s novels but he comes across as rather amusing and pleasingly arrogant in this interview from earlier this year.

He mentions a writer I have never heard of: ‘The impetus for Black came from my having begun to read Georges Simenon […] what he calls his romans dur, his hard novels: Dirty Snow, Monsiuer Monde Vanishes, Tropic Moon, The Man Who Watched Trains Go By. I think they are extraordinary, masterpieces of twentieth-century – I hesitate to use the word, but I will – existentialist literature.’

He even compares these works favourably to Camus and Satre, which is pretty extraordinary. I think perhaps these should be next on my list, ahead of old Chandler and Himes. But I like to hear someone praising noir as a serious literary form. I’m not sure ESG’s novels ever achieve the status of ‘art’, but Banville goes on to say that, ‘One can, with skill and perseverance, give a sense of life’s richness and complexity in noir fiction’, and that ‘High art can happen in any medium.’ And I think that’s worth remembering.

***

And just briefly… the reason I enjoyed Banville’s interview so much was due to his directness and unexpected dry wit. In particular his answer to the question: ‘Do you have sympathy for the characters you create?’ because it always annoys me, and I think it’s become the thing to say, when writers talk about the character ‘taking over’ and the author having no idea what’s coming next. Yes, it is Banville’s style not to be as concerned with character as other novelists, but I still love Banville’s reposte to this:

‘I suppose it’s possible that a writer would have feeling for his characters, but I can’t see how, because writing is such a meticulous, intricate, technical business. I wish I could say that I love my characters and that frequently they take over the book and run away with the plot and so on. But they don’t exist. They’re manikins made of words and they carry my rhythms. They have no autonomous life – surely that’s obvious? I distrust writers who claim to have feeling for their characters. They’re liars or fools.’

“Now, don’t ask me to arrest X. Because you’ll agree, Monsieur le Maire, that anyone in this town–especially someone who knows the principal characters involved in this business and, in particular, the regular customers at the Admiral cafe–could be that X.”

The Yellow Dog is my first investigation with Inspector Maigret, about whom Georges Simenon wrote over seventy mysteries. They are slim volumes (150 pages here), but often praised for their dark realism.

Late one night in the small seaside town of Concarneau, M. Mostaguen is shot at from an abandoned building. There is no provocation and little evidence save the appearance of an unknown yellow dog. The mayor calls in Maigret, and soon incidents happen to other members of the group that frequents the Admiral. Who is committing all the these crimes, and how are they linked?

This French story was written and set in 1931, as you can probably tell by the evocative art deco cover. I love this Penguin edition-it’s a small book, almost square, and fits comfortably in your hand.

I must agree with the “dark realism” attributed to Simenon. He captures extremely well the effects of these crimes on the small town–fear of an unknown assailant, concern about reputation, morbid curiosity, and the invasion of outside reporters. I could feel it myself, wondering what the next strike would be. He also deftly parallels the stewing situation with the weather–the stormy and overcast days give a restless unease to a town usually occupied by fishing, while the blue sky prevailing means the end is in sight. This gesture could easily have become cliche, but here it just helped contribute to the overall atmosphere. Though dark in that they realistically portray crimes the events of the story are neither bleak nor unsavory, sometimes even tinged with pathos.

I will have to read more in the series before I can form an opinion about Maigret himself. He is a good foil to his brethren Holmes and Poirot. He scorns deduction and hard evidence as jumping to conclusions but also doesn’t display any little grey cells. Instead he seems to rely on primarily intuition, letting the drama play out within reason  as he considers the situation and rules out possibilities. As an additional contrast, his young assistant Inspector Leroy would much prefer to rely on hard evidence. This is an interesting concept, and successful here despite the impatience of others. It gives Simenon the opportunity to focus primarily on atmosphere, but also the leeway to not quite play fair with readers. Since Maigret seems to rely primarily on hunches the details of the case are not brought to light until the final scene–I really believe he didn’t know them beforehand, and there is certainly no way the reader could have figured it out.

Maigret also doesn’t seem as idiosyncratic as other detectives like Holmes, Poirot, or even Nero Wolfe. His one concession to this convention seems to be continually smoking his pipe. He is impatient with those who would interfere or rush him, like the mayor, and usually withdrawn. At the same time he has a good heart, acting almost parental towards Leroy, and also solicitous to the waitress Emma (who was a little confusing for me, having just read about a different Emma.)

As this was translated from French by Linda Asher,  it’s my fourth book for the Lost in Translation Challenge. Two more to go!

Lo scrittore belga Georges Simenon (1903-89) è famoso soprattutto per la fortunatissima saga del commissario Maigret, da cui, fra l’altro, sono stati tratti, nel corso degli anni, parecchi film e serial televisivi di successo. A mio parere, però, ricordarlo solo per il pur ottimo Maigret ne sminuisce il valore: Simenon non è stato un semplice “giallista”, ma un autore completo, dal grande valore letterario e dall’innata capacità di creare atmosfere di un certo tipo, che avvolgono in pieno il lettore.

Fra le sue opere extra-Maigret vorrei ricordare Le finestre di fronte (uscito per la prima volta nel 1933), La casa sul canale (dello stesso anno), Colpo di luna (ancora del 1933!), La camera azzurra (del 1963). Tutti romanzi straordinari, dal fortissimo pathos, che tengono il lettore costantemente incollato alle pagine, facendolo riflettere sui tanti contraddittori aspetti della natura umana.

Lo stile di Simenon è asciutto, privo di troppi fronzoli, e, anche se talora l’azione tende a latitare, le sue pagine risultano comunque sempre profondamente coinvolgenti. La capacità introspettiva è straordinaria: con poche curatissime parole, Simenon riesce a far entrare a fondo nella psicologia di un personaggio, regalando forti emozioni. Consiglio di leggere ognuna delle sue opere con calma, senza la fretta spasmodica di arrivare alla fine, per meglio assaporarne le atmosfere.

Due anziani in una stanza d’ospedale di Liegi: una donna di  91 anni e un figlio più che settantenne, che non è un uomo qualunque, ma Georges Simenon, il fecondissimo scrittore non solo di gialli,  richiamato al letto della madre morente, per assisterla nell’ultima settimana di vita.

E tre anni e mezzo dopo la morte della madre Simenon ha sentito il bisogno di scrivere e pubblicare sotto forma di lettera un breve testo di circa un centinaio di pagine in cui  svela che solo allora ha avuto la sensazione di scoprire e conoscere chi fosse sua madre.

A 19 anni  ti ho lasciata, sono partito per Parigi, eri ancora un’estranea, per me.

La lettera ( 18 aprile 1974 ) inizia con Cara mamma, in un altro punto usa anche il termine mammina, ma Simenon confessa “mai ti ho chiamata mamma, ti chiamavo madre “e madre continua a chiamarla nel corso della lettera.

Il loro incontro inizia con una domanda sorprendente da parte della madre:” Perché sei venuto Georges?”parole che più tardi pesarono sul  cuore del figlio, proprio per la non frequenza dei loro incontri.

E qui comincia- come si dice nella quarta di copertina- un ultimo duello, silenzioso e immobile tra madre e figlio. E quasi sempre in silenzio in quella camera d’ospedale  davanti alla madre. “Sembra di essere in una chiesa. Una chiesa di cui tu sei il centro,ove la tua immobilità assume dimensioni straordinarie”. Ed ora che è morta scrive una lettera, una delle rare lettere inviate in 50 anni di lontananza.

Guarda ancora intensamente la  madre, ritrova i suoi occhi , pensa, ricorda per “ricostruire una vita di novantun anni, …riempire di parole una bocca stretta, che non dice nulla”. “Ripercorre la vita di lei, prima e dopo il matrimonio, lei ultima di 13 figli, rimasta orfana di padre a 5 anni,. La vita di una donna che “subiva la vita non la viveva“.
Henriette, una donna che “ tutta la vita ha sgambettato come un topino” che le sorelle chiamavano “uccellino per il gatto”, ma che è anche “ una palla di nervi…testarda”… con una volontà di ferro”…che forse si burlava della vita”…che aveva l’orgoglio dell’umiltà…fiera di essere povera e di non chiedere nulla a nessuno”.

Madre e figlio hanno qualcosa in comune: la madre “ha sempre voluto appartenere al mondo della piccola gente”;  il figlio invece, diventato  uomo di successo e  ricchissimo,  ha continuato a tenere d’occhio quel mondo da cui  ha evocato gli infiniti personaggi dei suoi più che 400 romanzi.

Ti stupirebbe molto sapere che anch’io, alla mia età, mi sento sempre più vicino a questa gente perché è il mondo a cui appartengo, un mondo di cose vere”.

Ed ecco che ora, dopo tanti anni, vecchi tutti e due, ci ritroviamo faccia a faccia in quest’ospedale, con questi personaggi di cera intorno a noi. Esistono tre miliardi di uomini sulla terra. Non so la cifra esatta. Sono allergico alle statistiche, alle cifre in generale.
Quanti uomini sono vissuti, dalla preistoria sino ad oggi? Nessuno lo sa. Si può tuttavia supporre che, come oggi, si siano sempre combattuti tra loro, si siano uccisi, abbiano dovuto lottare contro i loro vicini, contro i grandi cataclismi naturali, contro le epidemie.
E tuttavia non hanno mai smesso di porsi una domanda:  “Che cos’è l’uomo? Chi è il mio vicino? Oggi l’etnografia cerca le tracce degli uomini di un tempo, i nostri antenati: la biologia, nei laboratori di tutto il mondo, si sforza di conoscere l’uomo attuale. Però non conosciamo le persone della porta accanto, quelle che incrociamo tutti i giorni per la strada, al cui fianco lavoriamo. 
Madre, siamo noi due qui a guardarci. Tu mi hai messo al mondo, io sono uscito dal tuo ventre, m’hai dato il primo latte, tuttavia non ti conosco, come tu non conosci me.   In questa stanza d’ospedale, siamo due stranieri che non parlano la stessa lingua,.. e che diffidano   l’uno dell’altro…è per cancellare l’idea falsa che ho potuto farmi di te, per penetrare nella verità del tuo essere, per amarti che riunisco briciole di ricordi, che rifletto.

Questa Lettera alla madre è la prima opera di Simenon pubblicata da Adelphi.

Ho snobbato per tanti anni uno scrittore come Simenon, semplicemente, perché il genere giallo non è il mio preferito, ma ora che ho scoperto il Simenon, al di là di Maigret, mi incuriosisce molto, mi affascinano  la naturalezza della sua scrittura, le atmosfere che sa creare, la varietà dei tipi umani, la nuova Comedie humaine che sa costruire.

E ho trovato interessante andare al di là dei romanzi e cercare di scoprire anche l’uomo Simenon, non particolarmente simpatico per diverse vicende della sua vita privata (v. l’incallito Don Giovanni!), ma forse qualcosa di più ci potrebbero dire alcuni suoi testi autobiografici, come Memorie intime del 1981, scritto dopo aver deciso dal 72 di non scrivere più.  Ma a farlo tornare alla scrittura è stata la morte della figlia venticinquenne suicida, Marie-Jo: era necessario ricordarla e placare i sensi  di colpa. Memorie intime è un’opera voluminosa , sempre pubblicata da Adelphi, che contiene anche numerosi scritti della figlia, aspirante scrittrice.

Qualcuno di voi conosce questa autobiografia e magari anche Pedigrie un romanzo a sfondo autobiografico, in cui è presente la figura della madre?

Concludo ricordando che il figlio John Simenon, attuale curatore della immensa opera del padre, era alla Fiera del libro di Torino a conversare con Luca Crovi e a raccontare con dovizia di particolari e notevole senso dell’humour della vita privata di Georges.

Georges Simenon, Lettera a mia madre, Adelphi,1974/1985, pp.96

Nu m-am omorat dupa “Pisica”,in general pentru ca nu prea ma intereseaza personajele batrane,bolnave si ciudate(nu prea au legatura cu mine decat atunci cand rostesc celebra exclamare “Tineretu’ din ziua de azi!!”).Deci povestea a doi batrani care nu-si vorbesc decat prin biletele pentru ca ea i-a omorat pisica,dupa care el i-a jupuit(in mod sadic) papagalul.Mi se pare amuzanta fraza precedenta.Mosu’ se crede inca in putere si se muta la o proprietara de bar/restaurant (nu mai stiu) care era pe post de tarfa.Baba moare de dorul lui si il cheama inapoi.Haide vino inapoi/Sa fim iar amandoi/Vino la mine/Vreau sa fiu iar cu tine[:))]Mosu’ se intoarce…baba moare.Happy end.
Casa de pe canal mi-a placut mai mult.Erau tinere personajele.
Iarasi deci,o tipa ramasa recent orfana se muta la unchiul ei,unde da peste niste verisori bolnaviciosi,cu fete ciudate,adica nu aveau armonie pe chip,intelegeti voi.Adica Fred,Jef,Mia.Si domnisoara asta Edmee,e cam rea,afurisita,ipocrita(asa mi s-a parut mie).Adica isi cam bate joc de Jef,se preface a fi ofensata de avansurile unora cand ea le provoaca tralala.Odata,ea iese la plimbare constienta ca e urmarita de Fred,se opreste pe o buturuga.Fred o ajunge din urma si incepe sa o pipaie.Tralalala.Da’ apare un plod de prin tufis,Fred fuge la el sa nu zica nimic despre asta,plodu’ rade isteric pentru ca Edmee rade isteric,refuza sa nu zica,Fred il cam omoara.Apare salvatoru’ Jef care il ingroapa pe plod in noroi pe undeva prin canal.Frumos.Apoi,ipocrita aia se preface ca e bolnava si sta in frig,se spala cu apa rece ca sa fie din ce in ce mai bolnava.Apoi,de afurisita se da la Fred cat se poate de evident.Jef spune ca il omoara daca se casatoreste cu ea.Fred o cere in casatorie.Ea accepta.Se muta amandoi undeva.Dupa cateva zile,Edmee e gasita moarta.Jef e arestat pentru viol si crima,la care Jef foarte normal spune “Dar dumneavoastra ce ati fi facut?”.Deci,finalul e bestial.Happy end.

***

Pe langa drum,toti aia care joaca in Gossip Girl si-au intalnit iubirea pe platou?Ce am gasit:
Blake Lively&Penn Badley
Ea o interpreteaza pe Serena si el pe Dan in “GG”.Desi relatia de pe micile ecrane…ei sunt mult mai linistiti.Si alte blablablauri.
Leighton Meester si Sebastian Stan
Adica Blair si Carter.Cine era Carter?
Si numaru’ 3 la care am ramas :|:|
JessicaSzhor si Ed Westwick
Adica Chuck si Vanessa.Chuck?Chuck?Really?
Cei doi au luni bune de cand sunt impreuna si nu dau semne ca s-ar plictisi(ce pacat!).Ea a renuntat din dragoste pentru el sa mai fie vegetariana,mai ales ca el gateste dumnezeieste.Si tot impreuna mergi la meciuri,dar si la cumparaturi.
1.Il cheama Ed Westwick?
Ramane Chuck.
2.Ce EMOtionant!
3.Imi placea Chuck si inca imi place pentru ca era rau.Pentru ca isi bate joc.Da’ nu-mi place deloc Ed Westwick.Gateste dumnezeieste?:))

Rusine sa-ti fie!

***
Pe langa gard,reclama aia de la Gusto ma enerveaza la culme.Reporteru’ are o fata de retardat si cand spune “Cum s-a intamplat?” imi vine sa-l plesnesc.
Mergeam pe strada cand am auzit “Fata de caine!”.Pai,boule,adica draga caine,ai fata de caine!
Apoi,sotia lui sau fata sau nuj ce e aia care se falfaie pe langa el.
Si in sfarsit,cameramanu’ asiatic cocotat pe un scaun.
Nu sunteti normali???
Nu.
Da’ cand faceti o reclama,tre’ sa stiti ca trebuie sa incante publicu’.Eu schimb programu’ cand il vad pe reporter.Eu nu o sa mananc niciodata Gusto.Never.La fel cum nu o sa beau Cola din cauza reclamei scarboase cu limba si ochiu’ pe care nici acum nu o inteleg.Ma rog,si din cauza ca nu prea imi place Cola.
Am zis tot ce se putea spune.Stop.

Hayao Miyazaki’s brilliant animated film Spirited Away, viewed as “a nightmare of capitalist Japan.” Considering that the story is set in a class stratified resort for the gods where even spirits are turned into consumers, under a greedy owner who steals the identities of her employees and turns anyone without a job into an animal, I’d say the analysis is at the very least arguable. (The fact that whiny Chihiro, the heroine, becomes a better and more resourceful person while maneuvering under Yubaba’s thumb deserves consideration as well.) Meanwhile, I’m eager for the U.S. release of Miyazaki’s latest film, Ponyo, on August 14.

The new issue of The Biographer’s Craft is up.

Luc Sante thinks Georges Simenon was an odd bird. Tell me about it.

Funny how the Scandinavian countries, with the most peaceful and happy people on Earth, produce so much bloodcurdling crime fiction.

James Baldwin’s years in Istanbul.

Chris Hannan lists the ten best books about the American frontier. Hannan’s rundown omits Butcher’s Crossing, Lord Grizzly, Flashman and the Redskins and Lonesome Dove, but he includes Roughing It, so what the hell.

Michael Chabon on the wilderness of childhood. Terrible Yellow Eyes offers works inspired by Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are. Click here to order the “fur edition” of the storybook for the upcoming film version.

Beck Hansen: Hey, I wanted to ask you about being from Los Angeles. You grew up there . . . Tom Waits: Yeah, Whittier, La Habra, Downey, that whole area. Yeah, Los Lobos, they’re from Whittier. So is Nixon. I remember Nixon’s market. He had his own family market. BH: He was? For some reason I thought he was from the Midwest. TW: No, California, and we used to get a visit every year from the Oscar Meyer wiener mobile, which was an enormous vehicle shaped like a hot dog. The driver was a Dwarf, and the wiener mobile would broadcast music while he sang the song “I wish I was an Oscar Meyer wiener.” He drew quite a crowd. Pretty exciting for a shopping center.

A love poem in an appropriate shape.

Poets describe the words that make them wince.

African album covers influenced by Michael Jackson’s covers.

Vladimir Nabokov vs. Alain Robbe-Grillet vs. Vladimir Nabokov vs. Alain Robbe-Grillet vs. Vladimir Nabokov vs. Alain Robbe-Grillet. . .

“Once experienced, it is hard to let Heart of Darkness go. A masterpiece of surprise, of expression and psychological nuance, of fury at colonial expansion and of how men make the least of life, the novella is like a poem, endlessly readable and worthy of rereading. Academics need write nothing more about it for another century. It should be handed back to readers simply to read, mark, learn and inwardly digest. Conrad composed a book where we see ourselves, darkly. Its relevance echoes forever, fizzing with understanding us then and there, and here and now, written for us all to live with today, whenever ‘today’ will be.”

La casa editrice Adelphi continua a pubblicare l’opera omnia di George Simenon e in questo 2009, a 30 anni dalla morte,  Le Campane di Bicetre, scritto in realtà nel lontano 1963.

Non è un giallo, ma appartiene ai  “romanzi psicologici o del destino”, anzi ai cd. ROMANS DURS, come lo stesso autore li ha definiti,quando dopo il 1941 mette al bando”il sentimentale e ignobile Maigret“.

La fama di Simenon  con i suoi ( pare) 400 romanzi, scritti anche con pseudonimi diversi, è legata soprattutto ai gialli di Maigret, ma i riconoscimenti arrivati tardi  dalla critica sono proprio a partire da romanzi come” Le campane di Bicetre”. Lo stesso Simenon  lo considerava importante tanto da avergli dedicato più tempo nella scrittura ed è l’unico a cui abbia premesso  una introduzione.

Non c’è l’ispettore Maigret che indaga per scoprire delitti, ma un personaggio che indaga se stesso, entrando in contatto con la propria coscienza che la frenesia della vita condotta fino a quel momento ha oscurato.

Significativa la dedica”A tutti coloro- professori, medici, infermieri e infermiere- che negli ospedali e non solo, cercano di comprendere e di soccorrere l’essere più sconcertante al mondo: l’uomo ammalato.”

E’ la storia di RENE’ MAUGRAS, un uomo arrivato, direttore di importanti quotidiani a Parigi, che dopo una vita frenetica alla conquista del successo, del prestigio sociale, si ritrova immobile, semiparalizzato e afasico nell’ospedale di Bicetre, un sobborgo di Parigi.

Ritrovato quasi senza vita nel bagno di un famoso ristorante, dove una volta al mese era solito incontrare gli amici, uomini di successo come lui. Si sveglia e subito non  ricorda nulla, poi in quegli otto giorni di ospedale recupera non solo il corpo e l’uso della parola, ma  anche il proprio passato che è scadagliato impietosamente. Fa un bilancio della propria esistenza e il famoso e stimato giornalista si toglie la maschera, si denuda e, a 54 anni, cerca di dare un senso alla propria esistenza, al  correre dietro al successo suo e degli amici “arrivati “come lui. E’ René che si interroga, ma anche ciascuno di noi con le nostre debolezze e paure: è facile riconscerci in chi nel frenetico mondo di oggi insegue falsi valori, mettendo da parte la propria umanità.

Non è la propria salute quel che interessa Renè per il momento. Sono gli altri, di cui sente il bisogno di raschiar via la superficie, convinto, se ci riesce, di arrivare, di vedere più chiaro in se stesso. Ma è possibile?

La malattia, l’immobilità forzata fa vedere un mondo a rovescio, in cui imperversa  il perbenismo borhese, l’ipocrisia, la vanità, l’ambiguità, l’affanno di una vita di lavoro senza tregua, per perseguire con ostinazione un successo poi solo apparente e caduco.

Le campane che si sentono e scandiscono il tempo nell’ospedale di Bicetre richiamano altre campane, quelle della sua infanzia, quelle di Fecamp, una cittadina di provincia di un porticciolo della Normandia, dove suo padre svolgeva un umile lavoro. Il titolo francese usa ANNEAUX e non CLOCHES, cioè non campane, ma ANELLI, quegli anelli che nell’espandersi in anelli concentrici si fanno portatori di memorie passate.

Non cerca più il senso delle cose, le registra o le tira fuori dal fondo della memoria, ci gioca un momento e le ributta via

E così il giornalista “con il suo famoso fiuto capace di individuare il fatto di cronaca che susciterà emozione e il titolo che farà presa” è lì immobile  in una stanza d’ospedale” smarrito, sradicato tra due esistenze a rivedere il mondo dalla finestra”, dove per la prima volta nella sua vita a primavera vede le gemme gonfiarsi sugli alberi del cortile. Eccolo con i suoi pensieri” a volte  sfilacciati a volte concentrati” a fare i conti con la figlia sgraziata con una scarpa ortopedica, con cui ” non ha mai avuto niente da dire” o con le due mogli, Marcella e Lina, soprattutto con la seconda, Lina, che ama ma con cui ha un rapporto di indifferenza. C’è amarezza, ma anche tenerezza; ed eccolo domandarsi:perchè non è al sicuro con lui? Perchè non riesce a renderla felice? Lina che dà sfogo alla sua nevrosi con l’alcol, “Lina disposta a morire per lui, ma non a vivere per lui”.

La malattia gli fa scoprire il valore della normalità. Anche le campane sono il tramite verso la realtà. Eccolo ripercorrere”pagine bianche…come la vita di prima senza importanza, senza sapore, senza odore” e tenere un DIARIO, in cui annotare brevemente ciò che accade in quei giorni, perchè” sente il bisogno di dar forma con una parola a certe impressioni, a certe intuizioni improvvise che ha avuto”.

La lettura di questo romanzo con una trama molto semplice, con la sua scorrevolezza, con la sua prosa asciutta, con il suo stile piacevolmente sobrio, con il suo incipit accattivante  e soprattutto per  la  capacità di scandagliare l’animo umano, mi  ha subito conquistata.

Per questo vi invito a leggerlo e a confrontarci.

GEORGE SIMENON, LE CAMPANE DI BICETRE ADELPHI, 2009, pp 261

Cuando salió publicado El otro nombre de Laura (Alfaguara), mi librero me dijo que ojalá John Banville se dedicara siempre al género negro, ese que saca a pasear bajo su seudónimo Benjamin Black. John Banville ganó el Booker por El mar (Anagrama), pero desde entonces sólo ha escrito, como Black, novelas negras: El secreto de Christine, El otro nombre de Laura y, hace un par de meses, El lémur (todas en Alfaguara).

Rodrigo Fresán, el ubicuo escritor (ya menos), crítico, prologador y entrevistador estrella, ha viajado a Irlanda para entrevistar a Banville sobre Black. El texto, esclarecedor como siempre que Fresán habla con escritores que le gustan, aparecía este fin de semana en el suplemento Radar Libros de diario argentino Página 12.

Me gusta esto que dice Banville:

[..] Pero también es cierto que Black nació a partir de mi lectura de los romans durs –no los protagonizados por Maigret– de Simenon, a quien siempre consideré un maestro más que merecedor del Nobel.

De esos romans durs, a mí me gusta especialmente La habitación azul (en bolsillo en Quinteto), y después Los hermanos Rico. Pero un enorme respeto también para Maigret, por supuesto.

Il commissario Maigret è stato, fin dagli anni trenta, protagonista di quattordici pellicole cinematografiche, tratte da tredici romanzi e due racconti brevi.

Simenon ha spesso espresso i suoi giudizi sui diversi attori che hanno interpretato il ruolo di Maigret: secondo l’autore belga, tra i francesi, i migliori sono stati Pierre Renoir, perché ha saputo interpretare il commissario nel suo ruolo principale di servitore civico, Michel Simon, nonostante abbia interpretato il personaggio in una sola occasione e Jean Gabin, nonostante l’aspetto trasandato del suo Maigret.

Ma tra le incarnazioni più riuscite del commissario Maigret, spicca un orgoglio italiano: l’attore Gino Cervi (noto anche per le celebri avventure che condivideva sul grande schermo con Don Camillo), che vestiva alla perfezione i panni di Maigret.

Gino Cervi veste i panni di Maigret dal 1964 al 1972, interpretando la serie poliziesca ‘Le inchieste del commissario Maigret’, ispirata ai romanzi di Simenon. L’attore, al fianco della storica compagna d’arte Andreina Pagnani, tratteggia con arguzia e bonarietà il celeberrimo personaggio di commissario transalpino dal fiuto infallibile, amante della casa e della buona cucina.

La serie ottiene un successo strepitoso, le puntate del Maigret televisivo con Gino Cervi sono state più volte replicate nei canali della RAI anche dopo la morte dell’attore, e poste in vendita in dvd e vhs fino anche in tempi piuttosto recenti.

Nel 1972 Cervi si ritira dalle scene, per spegnersi serenamente due anni dopo, all’età di settantadue anni.

Ecco la sigla iniziale della serie tv italiana:

Va segnalato che la canzone ascoltata nei titoli di testa è la versione francese di ‘Un giorno dopo l’altro’, capolavoro scritto da Luigi Tenco.

Una curiosità: in un caso il film è uscito nelle sale prima che il romanzo da cui era tratto fosse pubblicato: Signé Picpus infatti è stato scritto nel 1941, il film Picpus uscito nel 1943, e solo nel 1944 il romanzo è stato pubblicato per la prima volta in Francia dall’editore Gallimard.

KEEP YOUR MONEY. THERE’S NOTHING FOR SALE.

One object I love is a Hard Case Crime paperback. Hard-boiled crime, noir nihilism.

Hard Case Crime paperbacks are small. 115 by 170mm. They’re so light you feel almost nothing when you balance them in your hand. Their covers are printed on glossy paper; the book feels smooth and pliant. You grip it.

Hard Case Crime paperbacks have a yellow ribbon on top of the spine. The ribbon’s repeated on the top left of every cover. There’s a motif on the ribbon; a crown, and a black revolver with blue piping on it.

A whole row of yellow ribbons on a bookshelf makes for a fine, completist sight. A whole row of fun to get your teeth into. Then again, just one or two yellow ribbons amongst other books looks good, too. Like these sharp entertainments have snuck in among austere and po-faced company.

Hard Case Crime paperbacks have original pulp art on their covers. Sex, desperation and saturated colour. Just looking at them, you feel a sense of impending agony. Someone else’s. This sadism is matched, paradoxically, by the beauty of Hard Case Crime books as objects. Even so, the redhead on the cover of Cornell Woolrich’s ‘Fright’, set in 1915, looks like no Edwardian I’ve ever seen.

It’s up to you if you want to preserve these pretty objects. If you want your Hard Case Crimes to last, you can balance them in one hand while you read, and never see a crease. But it’s a paperback. It isn’t expensive. If you want to destroy it, destroy it. Go on, bend the fucker, twist it around. Reading hard-boiled fiction is always cleansing and salutary, and these stories that teach self-reliance and how not to fuck up your life come as self-reliant, unbreakable objects. Rip them, tear them, leave them under the bed for years. They won’t break.

The yellow ribbon and the pulp art reminds me of the hundreds of detective paperbacks that lie around in piles at French flea markets. A house style for a hard-boiled attitude, and a way of life. These hundreds of romans noirs for sale, full of blood and ingenious plotting and wracked protagonists, somehow make me feel sad. All that exertion, all those words of brute force. Who wrote them? Who read them? When? Are they any good? And is everybody who wrote or read them dead now?

The point is that these discarded French paperbacks, sold on stalls in dusty squares, are among the finest printed objects ever made.

Hard Case Crime paperbacks have the same qualities. You get that sensation that for a few coins you’ve picked up a lot of fun for not much money. You get a longer experience than a CD or a film or a TV show. A repeatable, self-directed experience, too. Maybe you’ll read a line you’ll remember for the rest of your life. Maybe you’ll read a paragraph that makes you want to write it down, and that paragraph’ll see you or a friend through a break-up one day. Maybe you’ll laugh.

(One of the best paperback covers I ever saw was in one of those French flea markets, in the Languedoc. Middle of nowhere. An edition of ‘The Brothers Rico’ by Georges Simenon. It showed an armed man in a suit and hat running through a bolt of lightning. Typography as brutal as a call-up poster. And down Bethaniesstraat in Amsterdam, edge of the red light district, there’s a ground-floor  window with a whole display of Simenon paperbacks. You walk past the smell of skunk and fish and the puke on the pavement and the pissed-off smiles of prostitutes and there it is. A different kind of sleaze; a load of Simenons displayed on boxes behind a filthy window. It isn’t a shop or anything.)

Hard Case Crime books have that kind of impact. They can be carried in a pocket. Or confidently in the hand. You look good if you’re holding one when running for a train, or jumping off a tram. In railway carriages, potential partners love seeing you whip out a small book. No pissing about with wires and buttons. Then they see you’re reading something involving double-cross, murder, the impossibility of love. This makes you seem more attractive than you will ever understand.

Hard Case Crime publishes original books by Allan Guthrie, Cornell Woolrich, David Goodis, Ed McBain, Lawrence Block. There’s also several by Jason Starr, a stunning and unique writer. Of the above-mentioned ‘Brothers Rico’, Georges Simenon once said, “I tried to write it simply, simply. Cut adjectives, adverbs, every word that’s there just to make an effect. You have a beautiful sentence- cut it. And there’s not a single “literary” sentence there, you know? It’s written as if by a child.”  Jason Starr has that kind of bullet-proof conviction in spades. In his novels there’s nothing trying to show he’s a great writer, or even somebody trying to write a great book. Which is to say, he’s honest and his stories have credibility and a kind of anonymous power.

Credibility and power. Get hold of some Hard Case Crime and feel the pleasure. Cheap. Recyclable. Silent. Reusable. Yours.

Could you have an equally successful version with churails and djinns? Perhaps, but Grahame-Smith’s success is also because of the public fascination with zombies, vampires and werewolves. Werewolves come from the Old Norse vargulf, and were feared as actual threats several centuries ago. Zombies originated in Haiti, but the idea of revenants—the walking dead—was very much part of Old English folklore. Vampires, especially the Transylvanian kind, reached the peak of their popularity in the 18th century.

True zombies, vampires and werewolves have not been feared for at least two centuries. But their place in the popular imagination has been maintained by horror movies and novels as well as several generations of gamers. Stephenie Meyers’ Twilight series elevated the classic vampire love story to interspecies romance, with a werewolf vying for the hand of the beautiful Bella. (via Nilanjana S Roy: Zombies versus churails).

Why are Indians so bad at horror films …

Why does the largest film production culture, i.e. India not produce Jaws, Jurassic Park (animals as malevolent monsters; justifying the extermination of huge swathes of wild life, “good that we have exterminated them”). Where is the Indian Dracula or Frankenstein? In all its 25 major languages and more than 500 plus dialects, Indians don’t have a national ‘monster’ culture? The writer of this column writes, almost complainingly, how

But few have carried on the legacy of Rabindranath Tagore, who wrote some of the most chilling ghost stories of all time—Khudito Pashan (The Hungry Stones) being perhaps the best of them. It’s not for lack of talent—for instance, Tarun Tejpal and Ravi Shankar Etteth have both played around with the ghost story. Ravi Shankar wrote at least one classic, featuring a busload of highly unusual passengers in war-ravaged Kashmir. In 1914, a Mr S Mukerji compiled a set of Indian ghost stories

The Ramsay family tried keeping the ‘horror’ flag flying. But most of their ‘horror’ films finally turned out to be romantic comedies – with a token presence of the ‘horror’ element.

The Indic spread

Other Indian themes have crossed languages, geographies, cultures – and spread all over the world. Witness the spread of Ramayana or how Sanskrit defined most languages of the world. After more than 1000 years of aggression, the Desert Bloc has only half the world as its adherents – though they have 80% of the world’s geography. The Indic belief systems still accounts for half the world’s population.

Why indeed does India have a scarcity of ‘monsters’. Even Indian asuras are not really monsters or devils! This columnist speculates that

perhaps something of the belief that ghost stories are for the masses, not for the purveyors of high literature, has rubbed off on to our authors. That, given India’s rich heritage of dakinis, betaals, nishibhoots and other things that go bump in the night, is a sad mistake.

To understand this better, let us look at the world’s most fertile ground for ‘monsters’ …

Medieval – Renaissance Europe

16th century Europe – specifically, Spain and Portugal. The last of the Moors had been driven out of Spain. The Christian standard was flying high. The Papal Bull divided the Earth (for the Europeans) between Spain and Portugal. White Christian rulers of Spain, Isabella and Ferdinand, set historic standards in persecution and extortion. More than a million Jews were killed, crucified, burnt alive; their properties confiscated and distributed. Columbus returned to enslave the American Natives – and subsequently, work them to death.

New chapters in bloodshed were being written by conquistadors like Vasco Nunez De Balboa, Francisco Pizarro, Juan Ponce de Leon, Hernando de Soto, Hernando Cortez, et al. Not to forget the search for El Dorado led by, “above all, that prince of monsters Lope de Aquirre, colour the pages with the darkest hues of bloody emprise.” In South American memory, Francisco de Carvajal, the “demon of the Andes” remains alive. These real-life monsters set new standards in brutality, slavery and genocide.

Europe in the sixteenth century was “obsessed with questions of language, and especially so in Spain and its recently conquered American Empire“ (emphasis mine). This was driven by

what Marshal McLuhan called “the hypertrophy of the unconscious,” a phenomenon he associated with periods of revolution in media technology: the advent of print in the 16th century created a great need for sensational materials to be broadcast, and this need caused ideas that formerly had been only lurking in the dark recesses of men’s minds to come floating to the surface.

One of the great bestsellers of the 16th century was the Histoires prodigieuses of Pierre Boaistuau (Paris, 1560), a sort of Renaissance Ripley’s Believe-it-or-not containing marvelous tales on everything … Seventeen of the Histoires forty tales are about monsters, a fact that may explain why the book was republished anywhere from ten to twenty two times and translated into Dutch, Spanish and English. (from Popular culture in the Middle Ages By Josie P. Campbell).

Spanish literature of the Renaissance

From this hotbed of ferment, a representative of this period was Calderon de la Barca (1600-1681), the Spanish writer. Growing up in a Spain, a 100 years after the Conquistadors, benefiting from the twin advantages of fresh memory and hindsight - “a century of Janus, facing backward, towards the rise of the Spanish Empire … and forward, toward its decline.” His more than a 100 plays and writings represent 17th century Spain, significantly – and even Europe.

There is probably no word that is more characteristic of Calderon de la Barca’s art than monstruo, “monster.” Rare is the play in which the word does not appear several times … (from Celestina’s brood By Roberto González Echevarría).

Calderon’s play about Semiramis, the Assyrian Empire builder, showed her in a monster mode – her hybrid character the most masculine modes and the most feminine, a monster of destruction and creation”. And Calderon was not alone. The fertile growth of monsters gave birth to a new study – teratology, the study of monsters.

“Monster lore truly becomes “popular culture” only with the Renaissance … Fresh works on the subject of teratology are written by Italians, Germans, and Frenchmen. The foreruuner of the modern newspaper, the broadside were bought at street corners and at fairs by the barely literate masses. The great reformers Luther and Melanchthon used the broadside medium to popularize their propagandistic and anti-Catholic versions of two of the most famous monsters of the Renaissance, the Monk-calf of Freiburg and the Pope-ass of Rome. (from Popular culture in the Middle Ages By Josie P. Campbell).

Some of Calderon’s plays dealt with the proselytization of the Native Americans – like his play, La Aurora En Copacabana (Dawn in the Copacabana), described as a play about “the conquest and conversion of the Indians in Peru”

The success of the conquest, therefore, is attributed to (Christian) faith which is valued as mans greatest gift to the world … Thus (Christian) conquest becomes a form of colonisation with the purpose of imposing religion and culture on a land “que habitan inhumanos” (512) and is in need of redemption and education. Finally, the play tries to harmonise irreconcilable contradictions which lie at the bottom of colonial discourse. (texts in brackets and italics mine).

With this idea, must be seen something important. That is the important element of “the escape of the monster.” In the … Monster Theory, Joel Cohen has remarked that the monster always escapes. Now combine the three elements – the newly acquired colonies of America, the proselytization (or otheriwse, the genocide) and the escape of the monster. These were the ‘monsters’ of colonialism.

A very interesting play by Calderon was La vida es sueño (Life is a dream). It tells the story of Segismundo, the Prince Of Poland, who was destined to be a monster. To forestall the prophecy, Segismundo was imprisoned by his father from the time of his birth. In adulthood, released from prison to test the prediction, Segismundo fulfills the prophecy. As a analyst of Calderon’s work summarizes,

Affirming a “better reality,” Segismundo’s message speaks as well to all of Europe: the “new European man” is the real monster. (from The subject in question By C. Christopher Soufas).

200 years after Calderon, HG Wells, in the The Island of Doctor Moreau, foretold Joseph Menegle’s experiments rather well.

Onshore genocide – The Roma Gypsies

Apart from the Jewish persecution, less known is the the persecution of the Roma Gypsy, which continues till date. In Europe, kidnapping children was considered legal for most of 1500AD-1750AD. On one condition – you had to kidnap Roma Gypsy children! More than 25,000 children kidnapped. No problem. Everybody sleeps peacefully at night. Switzerland was doing this till 1973!

Roughly, between 1500 to 1750, it was legal in Europe to hunt human beings. Yes! Just like hunting for deer in India, or hunting buffalo in Africa or fox-hunting in Britain. Yes! You could hunt human beings. As long as the humans you hunted were Roma Gypsies. In Europe you could be hung to death if you committed the crime of being born – between 1500AD-1750AD! Born as a Roma Gypsy!

Europeans, in the their age of Enlightenment and Renaissance, (1500-1750) could just pick up human slaves – yes, own them like cattle and furniture, if you found one! As long as they were Roma Gypsies. Later you could also sell them for profit!

Ship owners and captains in Europe’s Golden age, (1500-1750) could arrange galley slaves for free. No wages, no salary. You just had to feed them. Use them, abuse them, flog them, kill them, drown them. You could do anything – as long as they were Roma Gypsies.

What set off the Roma Gypsy Genocide

In 1420, a 60 year old man, blind in one eye took charge – and took on the might of the Roman Church and Roman Emperors.

Jan Zizka.

Over the next 12 months, he became completely blind. In the next 15 years, Zizka (and other Czech generals) defeated, many times, the combined armies of Germany, The Roman Church and others. His military strategy was studied for the next 500 years. Thereafter, the myth of military might of the Church was broken forever.

Jan Zizka allied himself with the Taborites (the radical Hussite wing). Zizka made Tábor in Bohemia into an armored and mobile fortress – the Wagenburgs.

Interestingly, a 100 years after the Hussite Wars, the European persecution of the Roma Gypsies began in full earnest. And during WW2, the Vatican joined with the Nazi collaborators, the Ustashe,  to extort gold and the genocide against the Roma Gyspises.

Military success

Zizka ranks with the great military innovators of all time. Zizka’s army was made up of untrained peasants and burghers (townspeople). He did not have the time or resources to train these fighters in armament and tactics of the time. Instead they used weapons like iron-tipped pikes and flails, armored farm wagons, mounted with small, howitzer type cannons.

His armored wagons, led by the Taborites, in offensive movements, broke through the enemy lines, firing as they rolled, cutting superior forces into pieces. For defense, the wagons were arranged into a tight, impregnable barrier surrounding the foot soldiers – the Wagenburg (the wagon fort), as they came to be known. The wagons also served to transport his men. Zizka thus fully initiated modern tank warfare. Zizka’s experience under various commanders was useful. At the Battle of Tannenberg (1410), Zizka fought on the Polish side , in which the famed German Teutonic Knights were defeated.

Roma Gypsy Wagon Caravan

Coming back …

Who were the major users of the wagons in Europe then (and now?) Answer – The Roma Gypsies.

Who were the people who could pose spiritual and ecclesiastical questions to the Vatican? Answer – The Gypsies, with their Indian heritage, were not not new to spiritual dialectics (contests, discourse and debates). For instance, Mani, and his adherents, an Indic teacher of Buddhist thought, known to Christians as Manichean thought, were the nightmare for Christianity till the 15th century. When Mani called for overthrow of slavery, the Vatican at the Council of Gangra, re-affirmed its faith in slavery. European minds were occupied with the questions raised by the Hussite reformers.

Some think they (the Waldensians) had held them for centuries; some think they had learned them recently from the Taborites. If scholars insist on this latter view, we are forced back on the further question: Where did the Taborites get their advanced opinions? If the Taborites taught the Waldenses, who taught the Taborites?

Who were the people who could help the persecuted Waldensians, the Bogomils, the Cathars to escape persecution and spread out across the Europe? Answer – The Roma Gypsies – in their wagons. The same Gypsies, had earlier pioneered the Troubadour culture in the Provence Region, which provoked the Albigensian Crusade by the Vatican.

Prokop Coat Of Arms

And who was the King of the Taborites? Answer – An entire clan of leaders who called themselves as Prokop (The Shaven /Bald; The Little and The Great) were the military leaders of the Taborites.

The word and name Prokop have no meaning in any European language – except in Sanskrit, where it means vengeance, retribution, violent justice.

Mythology as History

Jan Hus initiated the Reformation in the Vatican Church. It was Jan Zizka who broke the back of Papal authority. On the back of these Czech successes, was laid the foundation of 95 Theses by Martin Luther in 1517. The British break (1533-34) with the Holy Roman Church happened due to favors by the Papal office to the Iberian Empires – in matters of trade and colonial expansion, and the impediments to divorce of Henry-VIII at the behest of the Spanish rulers.

Today, the Germans and the British are loath to be reminded about the Czech Church Reform initiatives and the defeats at the hands of the Poles and Czechs. Western historiography about the Enlightenment and Renaissance, in Britain, France and Germany, leading to the reformation is ‘mythology as history’.

Of course, the role of the Greek Orthodox Church, the Byzantine Empire in the entire Czech saga is also worth re-examining. Were the Hussite Wars, a proxy war waged by the Eastern Church against the Vatican?

Dracula, Frankenstein, Dr Jekyll and Mr.Hyde

In the 19th century came the monster story was dubbed as Gothic – and this form of story-telling matured as a craft.

A significant array of Gothic writers emerged from Ireland (from Charles Maturin, Sheridan Le Fanu, Bram Stoker, and Oscar Wilde to the contemporary writer Patrick McGrath), in a colonial situation where a Protestant minority was the colonial occupier. (from Late Victorian Gothic tales By Roger Luckhurst)

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797–1851), wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley started writing Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus, at the age of 18, and completed it one year later. First published in London, anonymously, in 1818 by small London publishing house of Harding, Mavor & Jones – after previous rejections by bigger publishers like Charles Ollier (Percy Bysshe Shelley’s publisher), and John Murray (by Byron’s publisher). The writer’s name started appearing from the second edition of 1823 onwards. The interesting aspect, lost in popular usge, is that the monster is not named – and Frankenstein was the scientist, who brought the monster to life.

In 1886, Robert Louis Stevenson’s book, The Strange Case of Dr.Jekyll and Mr.Hyde was first published. This explored how ‘normal’ (Dr.Jekyll) human beings could become ‘evil’ (Mr.Hyde).

And in 1887, Bram Stoker, an Irish writer published his Dracula. The character of Dracula is based on Emperor Sigismund and his Order of the Dragon, who waged war against the Hussites – led by Jan Zizka. Infamous for his betrayal of Jan Hus, he sparked of the Hussite Wars, in which the Taborites (the Roma Gypsies) used wagons and gun powder for the first time in Europe. He founded a secret sect,  the “Dracul” called the Order of the Dragon.

Of course, these three are the most famous – but not the only ones. Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1871 “Carmilla“, about a lesbian vampire was another monster book of its time. An associate of Mary Shelley, John Polidori created the character of the “The Vampyre” in 1819 – on which possibly Dracula was based.

Most significantly, in 1896, was HG Well’s The Island of Doctor Moreau, which presaged Joseph Mengele – when Joseph Mengele had not even started on his higher education. A good 50 years before Joseph Mengele’s experiments were discovered by a shocked world.

The wellspring of these works is H.G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau. In this 1896 novel, a vivisectionist attempts to transform animals into men until the misshapen creatures revert and kill him, the forces of nature overcoming man’s civilizing artifices. From The Boys From Brazil (Auschwitz doctor Josef Mengele, alive and well and cloning Hitlers at a secret lab in the Brazilian Amazon) to Jurassic Park (Richard Attenborough alive and well and cloning velociraptors), Wells’ basic formula has become familiar: an island; a Frankensteinian experiment; a Faustian scientist; something gone terribly, terribly wrong. (from Requiem for the Mad Scientist By Arthur Allen, in Slate).

From the 1700-1800, while Spain was in decline, for about a 100 years, Western literary field did not see too much action on the monster front. The main action was in Haiti, where zombies, the ex-murderers, the living dead became a part of the voodoo cult.

The late Victorian era was one of the most expansive phases of the empire. Britain annexed some thirty-nine separate areas around the world between 1870-1900, in competition with newly aggressive America in the Pacific or the European powers in the so-called ‘Scramble for Africa’ after the continent was divided up at the Berlin conference of 1885. (from Late Victorian Gothic tales By Roger Luckhurst)

The last of the true great monster in popular culture came from the East. Soon after WW2, as tales of Japanese atrocities started coming out and as American atrocities in Vietnam started, Godzilla came out of Japan. But a different pressure head was building up, which gave rise to a new genre – detective fiction.

Euro-Pessimism

Between 1800-1950, Western powers killed (directly or otherwise) more than 50 million people in America (the Native Americans), Africa (the Native Africans), Asia (Indians, Chinese, Arabs). This led to a situation that every other person in the West had participated in murder or massacre – unlike the few Conquistadors. Western ambiguity towards Soviet Russia on one side, Hitler on the other was itself a concern. To that add, Gandhiji’s resolute opposition to colonialism and you have a inflammable moral situation.

The deluge of blood and murder caused moral anxiety and was a matter of ethical dilemma amongst common folks. The pressure valve for this was popular fiction. Identifying murderers became a form of proxy, vicarious entertainment for ordinary folks. Enter the super detectives, who pick out the murderer from a room full of ordinary people. Enter detectives like Auguste Dupin, of ‘The Purloined Letter‘ fame, who “investigates an apparently motiveless and unsolvable double murder in the Rue Morgue.”

Murder in Popular Image

The 'racist' imagery in Tintin.

A trend started by Edgar Allan Poe, whose first detective novel, Murders In Rue Morgue (1841) soon became an avalanche. Writers like Agatha Christie (Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple solving murders happening by the second), Georges Simenon (and his Inspector Maigret investigating brutal crimes), Ngaio Marsh (Roderick Alleyn), GK Chesterton (Father Brown), Raymond Chandler (Sam Spade and Phillip Marlowe) dealt with murder. Alfred Hitchcock made horror thrillers in similar themes.

In 1887, Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock series made its debut. Many of Conan Doyle’s characters came from the colonies. Many victims lived in isolated communities. Past (mis)deeds caught up. Crime, murder and malevolence hung in the air like thick smoke. Some of the stories addressed the colour prejudice. The status of England as a super-power was apparent. The intrigue and bloodshed in the India was palpable in stories like the The Sign of Four at the Pondicherry Lodge.

Tintin in Congo

Agatha Christie’s book, filmed as Ten Little Indians, based on the book, initially released (the book) in Britain as Ten Little Niggers (later renamed as Then There None) gives the game away. Agatha Christie probably unconsciously verbalized the White desire to ensure that there should be none of the Red Indians left to tell the tale. The overt racism in Herge’s ‘Tintin in Congo’ made the world sit-up and note the pervasiveness of racism in detective fiction.

Media and academia

Jerome Delamater, Ruth Prigozy, in an essay compilation, ‘Theory and Practice of Classic Detective Fiction’, observe that Jane Marple, along with Hercule “Poirot becomes an equal opportunity detective who really believes that anyone might commit murder”. Dismissing the jaundiced view of human nature,” the writers of this book, while commenting about the detective fiction genre, do not mention slavery at all – and mention colonialism and racism once each.

One writer, Franco Moretti did half the job in book Signs Taken for Wonders: On the Sociology of Literary Forms By Franco Moretti. He writes,

“The perfect crime – the nightmare of detective fiction – is the feature-less, deindividualized crime that anyone could have committed because at this point everyone is the same.” He further writes,“Yet, if we turn to Agatha Christie, the situation is reversed.Her hundred-odd books have only one message: the criminal can be anyone …”

In his entire book he does not use the words like slavery, racism, genocide, bigotry even once. The 19th century, which was based on Western bigotry, White racism, African slavery, and assorted genocides is unrecognised in Moretti’s books.

Running or hiding? Or it a case of feeling squeamish? Perhaps, a case of queasy stomach, Franco?

Another book, The Detective as Historian: History and Art in Historical Crime Fiction, by Ray Broadus Browne, Lawrence A. Kreiser does a better job. This book examines, the detective fiction genre, with some references to slavery and child prostitution.

How was this explained away

As the monsters increased, both in real life and literature, rationalizations were required. A person no less than Immanuel Kant, was pressed into service to deconstruct the ‘monster’, re-invent it and give it a positive spin.

The monster taken up by Kant in an aesthetic sense to refer to those things that exceed representation considers that the monstrous describes an entity whose life force is greater than the matter in which in which it is contained. Thus rather than something that malfunctions during the course of its production, monstrosity is associated during romanticism with “over-exuberant living matter” that extends itself beyond its natural borders in order to affect a much wider sphere. ((from The subject in question By C. Christopher Soufas).

In the twentieth century, Kant’s hypothesis finds an echo when Lord Randolph William Churchill, the ‘Bulldog’ declared

“I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race has come in and taken their place. (from Minorities, peoples, and self-determination By Nazila Ghanea-Hercock, Nazila Ghanea, Alexandra Xanthaki, Patrick Thornberry)

In another instance, Churchill wrote how ‘superior’ Arabs, imposed on the ‘inferior’ negroes.

The stronger race imposed its customs and language on the negroes. The vigour of their blood sensibly altered the facial appearance … (from The River War By Winston Churchill).

The Mystery of the Dying Detective

After de-colonisation, as mass murder went underground, the detective-murder mystery books genre faded. This category was replaced by a new theme – the axis of Corporation-Government-International Conspiracy.

The new category of popular fiction are represented by Ian Fleming, Arthur Hailey, Frederick Forsyth, Irving Wallace, Robert Ludlum, Graham Greene, John Le Carre, et al. More and more contrived, each conspiracy theory writer has been ‘inspired’ by real life incidents.

While Ludlum’s international-conspiracy-plot-CIA-FBI-KGB series have worn thin, the spookiness of Le Carre’s Absolute Friends and Constant Gardner still work as novels representing the West.

Western Twins – Anxiety and Paranoia

To develop this understanding further, there are two classes of films that I wish to draw attention to.

Malignant Nature

Jaws (the shark that eats humans), Jurassic Park (mad scientists, conspiring technicians let loose man eating dinos) Gremlins and Poltergiest (things that go bump in the night). This paranoid fear of nature (and natural laws) seems to be a result of the subterranean knowledge of the way in which ecological damage and pollution is happening. These films produced /directed by Steven Spielberg (who is incomparable because as Time Magazine says, “No one else has put together a more popular body of work”)

Vindictive Humans

The other is the thinly disguised hate and prejudice films against the poor and the victimised. ‘Aliens’ needs just one small change for the films idea to become clear. Instead of LV-426, Nostromo the space ship, receives a distress call from some country in South America or Africa (or India, if you prefer). The meaning is clear when you see the movie while conscious of the fact that alien is is the word the US Government uses for people from other countries.

As for the Indian churails …

Coming to India, a writer notes how

Francesca Orsini identifies the detective  novel as one of the genres that ‘was brought into India ‘ready-made’ without the intellectual and historical substratus that had generated it in Europe’ This total lack of any indigenous roots, one could argue, makes detective  fiction a colonial imposition, and its adoption by Indian writers, clearly a case of copy-cat reproduction wherein ‘black-pens’ write ‘white-texts’ that have no identity of their own. (from Postcolonial postmortems – crime fiction from a transcultural perspective By Christine Matzke, Susanne Muehleisen, page 88).

How very true!

Ms.Christine and Susanne, you have hit the nail right in the centre of head! Your aim is truer than you imagine. Whatta shot! Though I dont know if you have hit the nail deep enough – deep into the heart of the darkness, which gave rise to these genres of Western ‘literature’.

The Indian churail (or pisach or djinni) faces similar problems as the Scandinavian myling or the Er Gui of China: they don’t translate well outside of their culture.

India may have had local incidents, where an oppressive zamindar may have created a market for horror stories and monsters – but without genocide, slavery and massacres to fall back on, popular imagination simply does not have the fodder to create ghouls and monsters.

And that is reason for Indian churails being rare – not lack of literary ability in Indians.

http://foth-malerei.com/

2009 uppmärksammar vi bl.a. följande spänningsförfattares födsel:

Eric Ambler, 1909
Freeman Wills Crofts, 1879
Len Deighton, 1929
Arthur Conan Doyle, 1859
Mignon G. Eberhart, 1899
Ken Follett, 1949
Erle Stanley Gardner, 1889
Elizabeth George, 1949
Jack Higgins, 1929
Ira Levin, 1929
Julius Regis, 1889
Minette Walters, 1949

… och minnet av
Charlotte Armstrong, 1905-1969
Raymond Chandler, 1888-1959
Wilkie Collins, 1824-1889
Mario Puzo, 1920-1999
Sax Rohmer, 1883-1959
Georges Simenon, 1903-1989

… samt naturligtvis “dubbelnian”
Edgar Allan Poe, 1809-1849

Ho aggiornato la mia libreria su Anobii. Avevo accumulato libri letti tra la scrivania e il comodino. Dovevo un po’ riordinare non solo il casotto degli ultimi tempi, ma anche le idee delle ultime letture. Di Stephen King ne ho già parlato, quindi non mi ripeto. Invece voglio riportare qualche breve impressione su alcune letture. La prima è  Esercizi di stile di Raymond Queneau dove, va sottolineato, c’è lo zampino di Umberto Eco nella traduzione italiana. Se cercate il connubio tra linguistica e narrativa, questo libro fa al caso vostro. Se volete provare l’esperienza di osservare da diversi punti di vista lo stesso episodio (e scoprire che, da un’unica storia, a seconda di chi e come la si racconta, ne nascono un numero infinito), allora questo libro fa sempre al caso vostro. Nota interessante: gli esperimenti di Queneau sono stati riproposti in chiave fumettistica.
Non mi ha fatto impazzire I sotterranei del Majestic di Georges Simenon. Per carità, non sono qui a mettere in dubbio il talento dello scrittore ma, non me ne vogliano gli appassionati dell’ispettore Maigret, personalmente non sono riuscito a trovare quell’empatia con la storia, con le atmosfere, tanto meno con il personaggio. Eppure Luci della notte, altro romanzo di Simenon che non fa parte della serie dell’ispettore francese, mi aveva lasciato senza fiato. De gustibus.
Proprio ieri sera ho finito di leggere Domu di Otomo, fumettista giapponese, in Europa e Stati Uniti conosciuto soprattutto per il capolavoro di animazione Akira. L’avevo letto parecchio tempo fa, ma i ricordi della prima lettura erano sbiaditi e disordinati, rileggendolo ho confermato la mia personale stima per questo maestro del manga. Domu è un fumetto ricco di minuzie tecniche, espresse sia a livello grafico, sia a livello narrativo. La storia potrebbe essere collocata sotto al voce “surreale”, ma c’è poi una estrema ricerca del perfezionismo mostrato dalla realtà, espresso a volte in tavole che assomigliano più a dei progetti architettonici, o dalla storia stessa fatta di azioni, voci e suoni. In più, un aspetto che amo di Otomo, è l’uso che fa dei silenzi, nel caso del fumetto questo si esprime in pagine dove le sole figure (a volte accompagnate dai suoni) raccontano più delle parole.