Re : RARA-AVIS: French smoke

From: Fabienne soldini ( fabsoldini@yahoo.fr)
Date: 17 Feb 2008


I also agree: good sentiments and political correctness don't make a good crime novel. But it is not systemacally true. you can make a good crime novel with good intentions. I think about Patrick Bard novels: "La Fronti貥" and "l'attrapeur d'ombres". I don't know if there are translated in United-States. But both are very good crime novels, with a lot of suspense, the kind of novel you can't stop reading it. The Fonti貥 is a very hard denonciation about the women torurted, raped and mudered in the mexican border city of Cuidad Juares; it's based on reality. When he writed her novel, the murders were about 250. Now, few years later, it'a about 500 women killed. Nobody has an explanation. The novel denonciates that situation. but it'e not exactly political correct. L'attrapeur d'ombres is about about the war in Sarajevo during the civil war and after. The novel denonciates the money made with war, denonciates prostitution connexion, and things like that. It's very
 interresting and it's a good novel. But Patrick Bard before writing novel was a reporter. So he knows certain things..
  I also think about George P. Pelecanos who is one of my favorite author. For me he is one of the greasted. "Anacostia River blues" is not polically correct: her detective is an alcoolic, he's drunk, and go to Anacostia river to vomit and he see two man, a Black one and a White one, assassinting a young Black boy. Because he fet guylty to haven't react, too drunk for it, he decided to enquire. And the books of Pelecanos are very good, with a denonciation about the social condition of life of Black people, the discrimation, the exploitation of poverty... For instance, I didn't know there are appartements number 8; I leantn it reading "Soul circus".
  I think if the writer is talentuous he can make a good crime novel with good sentiments, but good sentiments never be substitued to the talent. Sometime good sentiments are just an alibi for the absence of writing talent.
  Best
   
  Fabienne
   
   andr頤ussolier < adussolier@yahoo.fr> a 飲it :
          Totally agree with Jean-Pierre Good sentiments and political correctness never made good crime books.

----- Message d'origine ---- De : jean-pierre jacquet < jacquet@optonline.net>
: rara-avis-l@yahoogroups.com Envoy頬e : Samedi, 16 F鶲ier 2008, 14h34mn 10s Objet : Re: RARA-AVIS: French smoke

This article is much more interesting than Fred Vargas' books, which I

find undigestable for the most part; she cites Proust and Hemingway

among her influences, fair enough, but seems to favour the former

rather than the latter when it comes to her writing style, heavy and

sleep-inducing. Not to mention fake sounding dialogues... I was about

to post something about her during the "female crime writers writing

from a male perspective" thread discussion, but gave up because I

don't really care for Commissaire Adamsberg from any perspective. As

for her political causes and crusading style, "vociferous" is indeed a

word that comes to mind, to which I could ad a number of epithets

ending in "ous".

jean-pierre jacquet

On Feb 16, 2008, at 5:40 AM, Steve Novak wrote:

> 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銼/EM>

> 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

>

> [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

>

>

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