From the Guardian UK....this interesting interview of
Vargas... Steve Novak
Cinefrog@comcast.net
Crime writer Fred Vargas - also a renowned archaeologist and
vociferous political campaigner - is not only a bestseller in
her native France, but a hit across the English-speaking
world
Nicholas Wroe Saturday February 16, 2008 The Guardian
About a third of the way through French crime writer Fred
Vargas's new policier, This Night's Foul Work, the sometimes
infuriating, sometimes inspirational hero, Commissaire
Adamsberg, stands over a grave he has ordered to be opened.
Adamsberg is a man who values intuition as much as logic, and
while there seems to be nothing suspicious in the disinterred
plot, his nagging hunch that foul play has occurred - the
menacing sense of
"shade" that haunts him - is not unfounded. Turning to a
subordinate, he explains: Article continues
"If there's a sound to be heard, and we're not hearing it, it
means we're deaf. The earth isn't dumb, but we are not
skilled enough. We need a specialist, an interpreter, someone
who can hear the sound of the earth."
"What do you call one of those?" asked Justin,
anxiously.
"An archaeologist," said Adamsberg, taking out his telephone.
"Or a shit-stirrer, if you prefer."
It is not a bad description of Vargas herself. She is a
distinguished archaeologist who has written important works
on medieval social structures and on the epidemiology of the
plague. She is also a vociferous and persistent critic of the
French political and judicial systems as a prominent
supporter of the fugitive Italian writer Cesare Battisti,
exiled from France and currently in custody in Brazil, who is
accused of committing terrorist offences in Italy in the
1970s.
But Vargas is now best known as a crime writer. Her stories
of Adamsberg negotiating his rural Pyrenees roots with his
job in a Parisian murder squad
- in the latest novel, he places a pebble from a village
stream on the desks of his wearily perplexed staff after a
trip home - have not only topped the French bestseller lists,
but stormed the English-speaking world. Her 1999 novel
L'Homme ࠬ'envers, published in English as Seeking Whom He May
Devour in 2004, was shortlisted for the Crime Writers'
Association Gold Dagger. In 2006, she picked up the
International Dagger for The Three Evangelists
(Debout les morts), and last year she repeated the triumph -
an unprecedented double - with Wash This Blood Clean from my
Hand (Sous les vents de Neptune)
Speaking in the offices of her French publisher in a
courtyard just off the Place de la Bastille in Paris, Vargas
exudes the focused intensity of the proselytising political
activist. But she says her roles as scientist, campaigner and
novelist are essentially separate. "I don't think the
detective story is there to change social reality. As a
historian, I know that decisive victories in social and
political problems are not made by authors. ɭile Zola did it
with J'accuse, but that wasn't a novel. The novel serves
other purposes, which are just as important and deep in their
own way, but they are different to politics."
Vargas sees the novel, and the detective story in particular,
as fulfilling some of the same functions as Greek tragedy. In
This Night's Foul Work, Adamsberg travels out to a Normandy
village where the locals' caustic observations on his
investigation resemble nothing so much as a Greek chorus. "I
like to use these people from villages. Theirs are the voices
that never move and never change." She makes a low humming
noise. "I think of the story like an orchestra with the
violins and the brass at the front taking forward the action.
But at the back are basses" - more low humming -
"making a noise that comes from eternity. I know the Normans
very well because my mother's family is from there. But for
me they represent all village people, and by extension some
sense of elemental humanity."
Fred Vargas was born Fr餩rique Audouin-Rouzeau in Paris in
1957. Both she and her twin sister Jo, a painter, adopted the
name Vargas from the Ava Gardner character - the Spanish
dancer Maria Vargas - in The Barefoot Contessa. Their father
was a prominent surrealist who wrote studies of Andr銊Breton
and other leading figures in the movement, but he made his
living working for an insurance company. "He never talked
about his job," she recalls. "Apart from saying 'I am going
to the box.'"
Vargas says her father was a brilliant but intimidating
presence who seemed to know about everything except science.
He forbade television, and from the
"thousands" of books in the house he would "authorise" what
the children could read - mostly myths, folk tales and
17th-century baroque poetry. "Can you imagine it? Having
books that were 'authorised'! And many of them were too old
for children, although I did love the myths. And our house
was also full of primitive arts and masks and this surrealist
fascination with death and decay. Thank God my mother was a
chemist who helped us keep our heads on our shoulders,
because a surrealist atmosphere is really not so good for
children."
It's no surprise that the children eventually rebelled in
interesting ways. Vargas's elder brother, St鰨ane, is a
leading historian of the first world war. "My father
absolutely hated war and thought it was disgusting. So my
brother did history - as father would have liked - but
another type of history. My father was a wonderful
cartoonist, but my sister's art is very different. I went
into science and then writing. He was a wonderful writer, but
thought that detective stories were the silliest thing
imaginable."
Although her father wrote many books about surrealism, he
never published
"anything personal", Vargas explains. "I once asked him why
and he told me that, when he was 17, he had said to himself
he will be 'Rimbaud or nothing'. That is a bit sad." Vargas
began to write when her father was ill at the end of his
life, and he died before she was published. "But of course I
would have shown it to him and I know what he would have
said: 'Fred, this is shit from A to Z' . And he would have
been right, and I would have stopped writing, so it is
strange how it worked out."
It was while on an archaeological dig in the Midi when she
was 28 that Vargas began writing "for fun. I'd tried the
accordion and was terrible." She loved her job, but when she
looked at her older colleagues, she knew she had to have
"something else" in her life "apart from this rather austere
science".
Her first book, Les Jeux de l'amour et de la mort (Games of
Love and Death), won a competition for unpublished
manuscripts. The prize was publication, but she says "it was
a very bad book. My ambition was to find some music in the
language, but I made the mistake of thinking the plot had no
importance. Now I hope I also put in a good story, but I
still believe even the best story is nothing without having
music in the writing."
The music she was seeking to emulate came from Rousseau,
Proust and Hemingway. "Rousseau was my first love when I was
15. He was so criticised at the time when compared to
Voltaire, whom I never liked. But in the French language, his
writing achieved the most beautiful music." Since the 1970s,
Vargas argues, serious literature has regarded stories as
"slightly silly", forcing them to become "refugees" in the
crime novel. "It has been a literature of narcissism about
'me and my family', 'me and my problems', 'me and my lover'.
I'm sick of it, especially as Proust did this perfectly all
those years ago. But when he spoke of himself, he spoke of
the whole world. Most writers today just speak of themselves.
And Hemingway's language is precisely the opposite of Proust
in that it feels rougher, and while Proust could deal with
the infinite smallness of life, Hemingway has the infinite
hugeness of it."
Despite her own disappointment with her first novel, Vargas
took to writing as she "did to smoking - it was an addictive
habit". She began to write the first drafts of new books
during her three-week summer holidays, and followed this
routine until four years ago when she took a break from
archaeology. "I had completed two big projects and needed a
rest. I had always been interested in the economic story of
the Middle Ages, the Roman times and the 16th and 17th
centuries. I wanted to paint a picture of economic life, but
also cultural life, involving hunting and eating habits. Show
me what someone eats, and I will show you who they were." She
ended up with a comparative research project that included
over a thousand archaeological sites from different periods.
"I then continued with another interest I had about the rat
and the transmission of the plague - it had never been
resolved to my satisfaction - and that took six years."
With her books selling well enough for her to support herself
and her son, she took a year off. "It was wonderful. I had
all this time in front of me to work on another book. Three
weeks later, it was finished. The problem never was me having
to work in this way, the problem was me. I take time to
correct and change the books, but my first drafts still take
three weeks."
By the time she was due to return to work, she had become
involved in the campaign to exonerate Battisti - who denies
the 1970s terrorist charges against him - and she put her
research skills to use in the Italian legal archives to try
to clear his name. "I told them not to wait for me. Something
more urgent had come up." The campaign continues, and Vargas
has written a book explaining why her friend is innocent. She
has also found time for a dispute with the French ministry of
health about her suggestions for dealing with a potential
avian flu epidemic - "it is 90% certain to happen" - based on
her research into the plague.
"I'm involved in many fights, which can be quite dangerous
sometimes. And I will continue to shout that there is
something rotten in the state of France and Italy and
everywhere in Europe. But I do this with reality. With facts
and with interviews and with protest. When I write about
archaeology, I use science. My novels are something else
again."
She says she has a theory of art, into which the crime novel
fits, that goes back to Neolithic times. "I think art emerged
as a sort of medicine to deal with the fact that we are
afraid, alone, small and weak in a dangerous world. But we
are not like all the other animals and cannot live with just
a pragmatic and realistic life. So we invent a second
reality, similar but not identical to ours, into which we
escape to confront these perils."
Her work is defiantly not realistic in that Adamsberg drives
just a car, not, say, a Renault, and we don't know what he
eats or wears or listens to.
"In real life, I love clothes and labels and shops. But not
in my novels. It becomes too precise." She unexpectedly cites
Agatha Christie as a model.
"Holmes is rightly thought to be brilliant, and people now
laugh at Christie. But I see links between her and the
mythology I read when I was young, and I think she was
conscious of it, too. Like her, I want to tell a story that
identifies and deals with the dangers we face. It's no longer
wild animals, but the fears are just as real, so I make a
journey with the reader, confront the horror of humanity, and
deliver them safely home. Instinctively we feel better and
can sleep soundly. Then, in the morning when the sun comes
up, we can again face the world and move forward."
Inspirations
Marcel Proust Jean-Jacques Rousseau Ernest Hemingway Agatha
Christie Arthur Conan Doyle
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2008
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