Peace to Tunisia!

(Photo of Roman ruins at Dougga, Tunisia, by your humble blogkeeper)

Back in 2006 I visited Tunisia and wrote about it in one of my earliest posts.

A commenter on that post replied that

"In Algeria, they used to say: When Algeria is a man (a warrior), Tunisia is a woman (peaceful) ... "

I hope that pacific reputation survives the country's current political upheaval.

My adventures in Tunisia included a retired English archaeology professor breaking into a show tune from Oklahoma to help explain rivalries between herders and farmers in Punic and pre-Punic times.

An Eid Mubarak! (Blessed Eid!) uttered at the conclusion of any transaction went a long way toward generating good will, earning me smiles, at least one slap on the back, and accurate directions from a shopkeeper who led me out of his store and into the street so he could be sure of steering me right. And I saw a henna-haired woman in a sleeveless top, as slender and graceful as a cypress in the Mediterranean breeze, loading her shopping cart with booze in the liquor section of a supermarket in Tunis.

Peace and good wishes to the sane, hospitable nation of Tunisia!

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Patricia Highsmith's quasi-crime novel

"What the Vietnamese needed, Adams said in appallingly plain words, was the American kind of democracy."

"Several of Highsmith's works fall out from the mystery genre, and her crime novels often have more to do with psychology than conventional plotting, " according to one useful commentary. Someone else once said that when Highsmith, probably best known today for the Ripley novels, Strangers on a Train, and the movies based on them, wrote The Tremor of Forgery, she had almost entirely abandoned character for the political.

Both observations are pertinent to this novel, published in 1969 and set in 1967, at the time of racial unrest in the United States and the Six Day War in the Middle East. Highsmith's Howard Ingham is murkily aware of these events, a writer left to his own devices in Tunisia after a movie project falls through. Ingham finds a dead body late at night in a narrow Tunis street. The man's throat has been cut. Ingham fails to report his finding to police, and ... nothing happens. Ingham throws his typewriter at a man breaking into his room. The typewriter hits home, the man screams, the body disappears, and ... nothing happens.

Later, Ingham's sort-of fiancee arrives from New York. They patch up a misunderstanding born of betrayal. They drift apart. Ingham meets a Danish painter living in Tunisia, rejects his sexual advance, yet becomes the man's close companion. They, too, drift apart, Ingham accepting with enthusiasm then rejecting the man's invitation to accompany him back to Denmark for a visit. This Dane, having seemed to go thoroughly native, welcomes the opportunity to return to his homeland. Ingham stays behind.

Issues of morality and right social conduct arise, then melt away. The Dane, bitter over his treatment by some local residents, tells Ingham that his victim -- if, indeed, Ingham killed the intruder -- did not matter. Adams, the smug, Reader's Digest-reading American from the passage at the head of this post and possibly a spy, insists that Ingham tell the truth about the (possibly) fatal meeting with the burglar.

The Tremor of Forgery is a crime novel only indirectly. After the movie deal falls through, Ingham works on -- and eventually finishes writing -- a novel he at first calls The Tremor of Forgery about an embezzler who steals from his company, gives the money to people in need, and can never quite understand that he is a criminal. He is a man, in other words, without a clear identity, a kind of Ingham in action. "The tremor of forgery," Highsmith tells us, is the slight shake that even the most expert forger produces at the beginning and the end of his false signatures. But nothing is certain; nothing is resolved. Ingham changes his novel's title. In the end, there is no Tremor of Forgery in The Tremor of Forgery.

© Peter Rozovsky 2006

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Patricia Highsmith

Two set in Tunisia

This is too good to pass up. I've just returned from an archaeology tour of Tunisia, and I discovered Lyn Hamilton's The African Quest, about a series of murders on an archaeology tour of Tunisia. I hope to get some comments from my fellow travelers to Tunisia, none of whom has ever been party to a murder, as far as I know.

It took that vacation to get me reading Patricia Highsmith, though I'd long loved Alfred Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train, based on a Highsmith novel. The Tremor of Forgery is about a youngish writer left to his own devices in Tunisia when a movie project fails to materialize. It's a thrill to recognize the settings in the first chapter. Beyond that, the chapter is a superb piece of mood-setting for the strangeness that no doubt will follow.

© Peter Rozovsky 2006
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Patricia Highsmith

A no-crime zone -- Tunisia

Crime fiction has yet to make an impact in this land of splendid Roman mosaics, old mosques, Punic ruins, and fine couscous. One Tunisian of my acquaintance speculates that this may be due in part to the high cost of books relative to many Tunisians' wages. Whatever the reason, I found no crime fiction on visits to one bookshop in Tunis and another in Sousse.

On the other hand, my tour group did include an expatriate Australian now living in England who used to work with Peter Temple at the Sydney Morning Herald. She said she had no idea he had gone on to success as a crime novelist. She did say he was a generous colleague and ¨a fabulous writer."

(To the right is a Punic figure found on the Byrsa hill in Carthage that archaeologists believe may be the oldest known depiction of Sideshow Bob.)


© Peter Rozovsky 2006