Alan Glynn, meet Leonardo Sciascia

I don't like when reporters slip into the jargon of the beats they cover, even something as simple as politics writers calling the Justice Department "Justice" or education reporters calling charter schools "charters."  If a reporter talks like his sources he might identify with them, think like them, act like them.

I seethe at the evasive intent of "going forward," and my allergy extends to apparently harmless locutions such as "Thank you so much" or "reach out." Why the effusion? What is the speaker hiding?

So my heart beat faster at the following, near the beginning of The Moro Affair, by Leonardo Sciascia:

"He was obliged to express himself in a language of non-expression, to make himself understood by the same means he had sought and tested in order not to be understood."

"He" is Aldo Moro, an Italian politician kidnapped and murdered by the Red Brigades in 1978 with the apparent post-facto consent of leading figures in Italian society and, in the communications his kidnappers and killers allowed him with the outside world, forced to try to tell the truth without appearing to do so after a career of doing precisely the opposite. 

I can think of no writer of crime fiction (or, in this case, of true crime and cynical, deadly corruption) other than Alan Glynn who thinks so deeply in his writing about what words mean and what they conceal. Alan Glynn, if you read this, you should read Leonardo Sciascia.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Now, that's an opening

I wrote yesterday that the opening chapter of David Whish-Wilson's novel Line of Sight reminded me of Leonard Sciascia. Here's the passage from Sciascia I had in mind, the opening of Equal Danger:

“District Attorney Varga was conducting the prosecution in the Reis trial, which had been going on for almost a month and would have dragged on for at least two more, when, one mild May night, after ten and not later than twelve, according to various testimony and to the autopsy, they killed him.”

Read that sentence slowly and think how how Sciascia has laid out the story it tells. Then read the sentence that follows immediately, in the same paragraph:

“The testimony, in point of fact, did not strictly coincide with with results of the autopsy…”

Not a bad way to start a crime story, I'd say.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

When you Whish upon a star

Line of Sight, second novel by Australia's David Whish-Wilson, bears an epigraph from Leonardo Sciascia, and the tone of the novel's opening pages reminds me of that great Sicilian writer and social critic.

It also reminds me of Jean-Patrick Manchette, a bit of Dominique Manotti, and of Alan Glynn. That means the tone is deadpan. It also means there's no slowly dawning realization for the book's cop-against-the-cops protagonist that the world is set against him; we (and he) know that from the first. And that's a hell of a set-up for suspense. How will he get out of this?

Here's a sentence from the first chapter: "Before the news was days old the rumour was that Ruby Devine had been murdered by the police." Here's one from the second, as far as I've read so far: "It had been a long afternoon watching the fix come in."

Now, that makes me want to keep reading.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Giorgio Scerbanenco, dark maestro of Italian noir

I can't quite figure out whom Giorgio Scerbanenco reminds me of most. He can be as dark as Leonardo Sciascia, as deadpan realistic as Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, as probing in his observation of people as Simenon, as humane as Camilleri, as noir as Manchette, as hope-against-hopeful as David Goodis, but with a dark, dark humor all his own.

In short, the first-ever English translation of his 1966 novel A Private Venus (Venere Privata) has to be the year's biggest event yet for readers of translated crime fiction, and I hope its status as a new book in English makes it eligible for the big crime-fiction awards in the U.S. and U.K. next year.

Here's a passage that sums up the novel's intriguing mix of involvement, alienation, social observation and wry, dark self-awareness:

"Everything was going wrong, the only thing that worked was the air conditioning in those two rooms in the Hotel Cavour, cool without being damp and without smelling odd; everything was going badly wrong in a way that the confident, efficient Milanese who passed, sweating, along the Via Fatebenefratelli or through the Piazza Cavour couldn't begin to imagine, even though they read stories like this every day in the Corriere. For them, these stories belonged to a fourth dimension, devised by an Einstein of crime, who was even more incomprehensible than the Einstein of physics. What was real was going to the tobacconist to buy filter cigarettes, so that they didn't feel so bad about smoking ... "

***

Not much is available about Scerbanenco in English.  This edition of A Private Venus, from Hersilia Press, includes a short autobiography called "I, Vladimir Scerbanenko." This outline of Italian crime fiction includes a few remarks. If you read Italian, Wikipedia offers a detailed summary of the novel. The Italian Mysteries Website offers a brief discussion of Duca and the Milan Murders, a 1970 translation of Traditori di tutti, second of Scerbanenco's four novels about the defrocked Milan physician Duca Lamberti. (A Private Venus is the first.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

A Simple Story: The Leonardo (Sciascia) code

I'm about done with Bouchercon posts, and I have no more crime-fiction conventions until Thursday, so I can now return to my regular reading.

Leonardo Sciascia's novella (or long story) called A Simple Story, reissued by Hesperus Press in a new translation by Howard Curtis, begins with a one-two punch of sardonic observation and ends with irony just as sardonic. As the story opens, police in a small Sicilian town receive a phone call on the eve of a festival honoring St. Joseph the carpenter,

"who seemed to have inspired the bonfires of old furniture which were lit in the working-class neighborhoods almost as a promise to the few carpenters still in business that there would be no lack of work for them. The offices were almost deserted, even more so than on other evenings at that hour, but they were still lit, the way the offices of the police were usually kept lit in the evening and during the night, by tacit agreement, to give the townspeople the impression that the police were ever alert to the safety of the public."

Good god, an opening like that snaps the reader to attention. In such a world of deception, one must — readers included — be ready for anything, and the mental alertness that this demands is exhilarating. Sciascia's world is not one in which the police must solve a mystery, but rather one in which everything is a mystery.

Sciascia's skeptical wit also appeals, as perhaps all skeptical wit does, to the intellect, and I like this example especially:

"But as the commissioner's attitude had annoyed him, and as he was almost entirely devoid of what is usually called esprit de corps — which meant regarding the body to which he belonged as the most important thing of all, considering it infallible, or, if it was not infallible, untouchable, overwhelmingly right, especially when it was wrong — he had a mischievous idea."

Oh, man, that's what I want to be when I grow up.

***

Howard Curtis' previous crime-fiction translations include novels by Gianrico Carofiglio, Jean-Claude Izzo and Caryl Férey. He's built a nice niche translating gialli and polars that pack a punch.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Stripped down in Sicily

"(H)aving to write down the things he saw and the anxiety this caused him sharpened his ability to select, to pare down, to express things pithily, so that only what was sound and perceptive remained in the net of his writing. Such may be the case with Italian writers from the south, especially Sicilians — in spite of school, university and lots of reading."

That's from A Simple Story, a novella by the late, great Sicilian writer Leonardo Sciascia newly reissued by Hesperus Press, and I'm eager to see how the wittily self-reflective sentiment of the last sentence will play out in the story.

For now, the passage's meditation on the power of spare expression reminds me that stripped-down writing can induce shivers of recognition, a feeling that the author is onto something essential. Jean-Patrick Manchette does this and, based on my recent reading of the Continental Op stories, I'd say Dashiell Hammett does, too.

Who's your favorite creator of stripped-down prose? And is Sciascia's narrator right? Do Sicilian authors have a special talent for expressing the essential?

(Howard Curtis, who translates from French and Italian, has carved out a nice niche in hard-boiled and neo-noir. In addition to A Simple Story, his translations include Caryl Férey's Zulu, Jean-Claude Izzo's Marseilles trilogy, and works by Gianrico Carofiglio.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2010