|
 |
|
| |
From Athens to Vigata. The subtlety of compassion |
|
|
| |
| autore |
| Andrea Camilleri |
| Petros Markaris |
|
| by Giorgio Gosetti |
|
Twelve years separate them, a sea unites them. It would be easy to say they share the culture of the Magna Graecia, but in truth while Andrea Camilleri is from Porto Empedocle, Petros Markaris hails from Istanbul and thus the horizon of the Aegean opens onto the Mediterranean, from the shores of the Bosphorus to the plains of Agrigento. Together with Vasquez Montalban, they make up the ideal family of the Mediterranean crime novel, which in the 1970s (when Pepe Carvalho came onto the scene) seemed a heresy; in the 90s (when Salvo Montalbano became a successful commissioner) was an anomaly; and in the 2000s (when Kostas Charitos came on duty) finally received its blessing and started spreading like wildfire.
But we do not want to simply lump together two ways of writing crime stories and color them “noir.” Nor do we want to emphasize similarities in the harsh, oblique light that illuminates the Piraeus and the lesser-known parts of Sicily. Or create a family tree that – as both writers have admitted connects straight back to Commissioner Maigret and Georges Simenon’s unmistakable style. Here we have two men whom our Festival is bringing together directly for the first time, joint winners for their shared artistic, civic and human sensibilities; for their parallel histories, shared ideas, equally explicit stances on the world in which they live.
What is most striking about their similarities is the courage of their ideas translated into life experiences that often, over the years, has gotten both Camilleri and Markaris in trouble. They cost the former, at his debut, entrance into RAI, and the latter years of isolation during the Greek military junta. Their turning to novels, contagiously likeable characters and choice to reveal not the simple brutality of crime so much as the frailty of killers and victims and the weight of the society that crushes them are the best weapons for a social expose that is simultaneously a political stance.
Camilleri “grew up” in the shadow of an unmatched school, a model from which he knew to take his distance with intelligence and wit because writing about Sicily during and after Leonardo Sciascia seems, at first glance, an impossible undertaking. Yet Camilleri found success thanks to a style that is uniquely and inimitably his own, and which allows him to rifle through the drawers of History and the secrets of the individuals with the same smooth wit, a colloquial complicity that immediately renders the reader the first and most impassioned interlocutor of his novels. His writing is not difficult, yet each time it requires a kind of access key, a devotion to the page that translates into a community of ideas and choices.
Markaris in the beginning chose the cinema for expressing himself and found in Theo Angelopoulos the direct interlocutor with whom to share in his search for his artistic identity. It is no coincidence that his first screenplay – Days of 36, directed by Angelopoulos in 1972 – was a political noir, a historical reinterpretation that would be just as much at home in the filmography of Franco Rosi or Elio Petri or in Scascia’s bibliography. It would take years for that same vein to develop into autonomous stories that blend past and present Greece in the figure of the disenchanted Kostas Charitos. Markaris’ writing is also engaging, slow, seemingly without shocking twists and turns. Yet the grid of references, the meticulous topography that frames each of Charitos’ movements require an attention that bonds with the reader familiar with the places and as an expressive code for those who discover along with the writer Athens’ multi-faceted scene.
Whereas Montalbano’s adventures trace the profile, in one novel after another, of an almost “Leopard-esque” Sicily, never changing and always unknowable, the Charitos stories resemble a thermometer for measuring the present-day Greek fever. Page after page we find echoes of current affairs and shreds of civic indignation that the author cunningly places in the mouth of the reader before his characters even. Yet in both the dictatorship of truth and honest narrative prevail. Thus, Camilleri tells us much more than it would seem about our times, often drawing upon historical memory with his incursions beyond Montalbano’s world. Markaris, on the other hand, never lets himself get trapped in current events, an accomplice to the detachment and irony that he uses in spades.
Perhaps it precisely irony and a human “passion” for each other’s characters that best and most unites the writing of these two masters and the personalities of their best-known characters. These elements put readers at ease. They draw them away from the challenge of the obstacle course towards the solution; induce them to look around along with the narrator; place them in in an increasingly vaster microcosm that becomes an understanding of the world. We could even say that – as often happens in the best Mediterranean noir – the digression counts and attracts more than the plot itself and the invitation to the journey becomes a soft cradling, like the rhythm of Montalbano’s beloved sea, seen with that blend of attraction and distrust typical to the Greek Charitos.
We could borrow a title that unites Markaris and Angelopoulos, and say what we search for in his books (as well as in those of his Sicilian “cousin”) is the Ulysses’ Gaze: the journey is more important than the destination, the gaze is the key for deciphering the sense of the search, the protagonist’s heroism lies in his fragile everyday life exposed to the winds of history and human weakness. Because the crime and upheaval of established order lie precisely in the fear that each of us carries within, and that the infernal machine of society, with its wrong ideas, brutalities and injustices, triggers as an instinct of defense or revenge. The problem is that neither Camilleri nor Markaris believe in the order of things that civic consensus calls justice. They believe in the values that innervate it, in the principle of the law and of respect. But they are rebellious and transgressive like their protagonists because absolving a role we have taken on does not mean always marrying its logic. It is the calm curse of those who are “anti” and who use art to look beyond and assert that a different way is possible. Once again, Ulysses unfolds his sails to set off in search of a utopia that may be unattainable, yet is no less concrete and important.
In the family tree of the genre, Camilleri and Markaris reside squarely among the “white knights,” the nostalgic bards of a value system rejected by the anger and violence that capitalist society generates and nurtures. There is no doubt that both writers must acknowledge Raymond Chandler for his poetic consonance that translates into seeming disenchantment yet actually hides a romantic and solitary sense. The difference lies in the different awareness of the social machine in which they find themselves. Marlowe uses the modes of civility around him yet actually feels different, isolated, a loser who enjoys the daily gamble of delaying certain success. Montalbano and Charitos, on the other hand, reside within the system of the law; their marginality is interior, they perceive work as a moral duty for limiting the damage inflicted by others.
Being a police officer is to them a daily fatigue, neither one is by nature a maverick even though they drive their superiors crazy and manage to keep their jobs only because they’re both good. Imagining them at dinner with Marlowe and Carvalho conjures up a strange sensation of alienation. In talking about politics, at least one would feel like a fish out of water; forget talk of food; Charitos would struggle to hide his mistrust of foreigners, especially Americans. But they would certainly find a common interest soon enough: the curiosity towards human beings that leads them to break with – at least in part – their own code of ethics in order to lend a hand, even if they are part of the law, to those who cannot escape from the snare of errors that have brought them to the shores of crime. At the same time, they are relentless hunters of those who break the law out of arrogance or cruelty. Without fear of stepping on the toes of civil society, or of risking their reputations, paychecks or assignments.
Looked at from this angle, the two recipients of the 2011 Raymond Chandler Award share close family ties and could easily bond with other leading figures of the Mediterranean scene of recent years, from Alicia Gimenez Bartlett (who adores digressions as much as our heroes) to Gianrico Carofiglio (who takes you around his city better than any guide). Yet it is in their most obvious difference that their closest bond is established. Seemingly, Camilleri describes rural life and Markaris the city. The former listens to the cicadas outside his home the latter battles traffic jams and exhaust. Montalbano could be a commissioner now or 30 years ago, Charitos lies in and relates the historical present. Yet if we place them side by side we find that they are two side of the same coin. That a swarming Athens and the sleepy Vigata share a common language and give us the same image: of a chaotic universe in which the individual seeks logic and surrenders, perhaps with a smile, to the unpredictability of the human soul. And chooses sides.
“There can be no momentary exemptions from the law. The law represents the conscience, civil living. Feeling one’s self to be exonerated – or wanting to be exonerated for even one minute – to me implies the judgment that you do not belong to the society to which I belong.” “There is no single person who handles money that doesn't have enemies… Here we see those with money as immediately suspect, they probably stole it. This is what over half the people think.” At first glance it's hard to know to which of our two writers to attribute which sentence. Yet they could both say: “I don’t know how the wind blows when ministers and leaders take their morning coffee. I drink my coffee, made with the espresso machine, alone and I get pretty angry when someone or something ruins my first, and often only, pleasure of the day.”
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
