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From Berlin to India |
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| 11/12/2009 |
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“I’m not a writer of children’s books. But over time I realized that I have fun writing about young characters who have their whole life before them. I write books, then my editor decides what genre they belong to,” says Zoran Dvenkar, a writer of Serbo-Croatian descent who grew up in Germany and now lives just outside Berlin. “Berlin is a city I love a lot, but there are too many people, too much noise. That’s why I live in the countryside, in an old mill. This distance from the city helps me write about Berlin, a Berlin, however, that exists only in my head.”
In this somewhat imaginary Berlin live four friends, losers (“In the sense that they can’t do what they want,” explains the author) who start up an agency with a strange mission: to apologize in the name of the others. Such as companies who have laid off workers, managers who have wronged employees, old lovers. “I don’t think that in real life that kind of business could be successful. Big corporations don’t want to apologize to anyone. I’ve heard, however, that a similar agency was created in Japan. Maybe I should patent the idea.
The book, which will soon be a film as well, is entitled Sorry, and the agency is thriving, at least until the four find a crucified corpse. The situation will naturally turn their lives upside down, bringing them face to face with the great dramas of the past and present, including a case of pedophilia.
“I was very moved by the books of Andrew Vacchs [Chandler Award winner in 2000] on child abuse. He and a group of others founded therapy centers that cure victims of child abuse. Their base their work on the theory that these children should be cured before they turn 10, otherwise they risk living this experience as something positive, and seeing violence as a way to convey affection. When I read this, I was blocked. I couldn’t continue with this story and had to wait a year, in the meantime writing stories for children, before picking this book up again.”
Then there is the lighter, first case of Indian detective Vish Puri, created by English journalist-writer Tarquin Hall, who after having traveled most of the world lived in India for a number of years, before moving back to London. “I wanted to show the India of today,” he told Courmayeur audiences. “Not the stereotypical, postcard India, of British domination or Mahatma Gandhi. I thought that a detective would be the perfect guide to speak about contemporary India, with its contrasts and contradictions, its social and linguistic inequalities.”
The first book about this overweight and over-presumptuous private investigator, The Case of the Missing Servant, is a collection of stories that interweave arranged marriages, blackmail and jealousy. It will soon be followed by The Case of the Man Who Died Laughing, the second adventure of the detective who hates Sherlock Holmes and worships a guru named Chanakya, who lived in 300 AD and wrote a treatise on the art of investigation. |
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