Chourmo

Europa Editions
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously.
Copyright © 1996 by Éditions Gallimard
First publication 2006 by Europa Editions
Translation by Howard Curtis
Original Title:
Chourmo
Translation copyright © 2006 by Europa Editions
Eulogy for Jean-Claude Izzo
© 2006 by Massimo Carlotto,
translation from the Italian by Michael Reynolds
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
This work has been published thanks to support from the French Ministry of Culture – Centre National du Livre
Ouvrage publié avec le concours du Ministère Français chargé de la Culture – Centre National du Livre
Cover Art by Emanuele Ragnisco
www.mekkanografici.com
Cover photo by Emanuele Ragnisco
ISBN 9781609453947

Jean-Claude Izzo

CHOURMO

Translated from the French
by Howard Curtis

“[This is] a terrific series of French noir novels, a Marseilles trilogy of sun-baked bad guys and beautiful women, smart cops and mean situations. Mr. Izzo was a marvelous food writer in addition to being a poet of violence and regret. His books are filled with winning descriptions of Provençal meals run through with the flavors of north Africa, Italy, Greece.”

—Sam Sifton,
The
New York Times

 

“Caught between pride and crime, racism and fraternity, tragedy and light, messy urbanization and generous beauty, the city is for Jean-Claude Izzo a Utopia, an ultimate port of call for exiles. There Montale, like Mr. Izzo himself perhaps, is torn between fatalism and revolt, despair and sensualism.”––
The Economist

 

“What makes Izzo's work haunting is his extraordinary ability to convey the tastes and smells of Marseilles, and the way memory and obligation dog every step his hero takes.”—
The New Yorker

 

“In Izzo's books . . . Marseilles is a ‘
ville selon nos coeurs
,' a city in tune with our hearts, as we can read in the penultimate sentence of
Total Chaos
. A cosmopolitan, maritime city, greedy, sensual and warm, but undermined by racism, hatred, money, mafia, and religious fundamentalism––and passive complicity in the face of these scourges.”––Michel Samson,
Slow Food

 

“Jean-Claude Izzo's Marseille trilogy . . . delve deep into the guts of multiracial Marseilles, a city that is at once a hopeful symbol of the Mediterranean's rich cultural past and an urban dystopia burdened by unemployment, racism and violence . . . Noir at its finest: compelling, sophisticated literature with a biting social edge.”—Hirsh Sawhney,
The
Times Literary Supplement

 

“Like all tragic noir heroes, Montale treads a dangerously narrow line between triumphant savior and doomed
avenger.”—The
Village Voice

“
Total Chaos
is undeniably literature . . . Part of this is due to Izzo's amazing characterization . . . Izzo takes a convention of noir—the lost soul who finds himself in vengeance—and packs it with enough realism to make it utterly lifelike . . .
Total Chaos
is a noir through and through, but it feels so real that it reminds us that the clichés of noir were originally drawn from real life.”—
The Quarterly Conversation

 

“A few years ago I was planning a trip to Madrid and Paris from Los Angeles. I was also deep into Jean-Claude Izzo's
Total Chaos
. . . By the time I finished the book, I had replaced the Paris leg of my trip with Marseilles. I'd found Lagavulin, the main character's scotch of choice. (Mine was always Laphroaig.) And a whole lot of interesting jazz . . . The story had leapt out from the book and into my life.”—Valla Vakili, CEO, Small Demons

 

“Like the best American practitioners in the genre, Izzo refrains from any sugarcoating of the city he depicts or the broken and imperfect men and women who people it.”—
Publishers Weekly

 

“Jean-Claude Izzo's
Total Chaos
is a marvelous noir novel in which passions and feelings are thrown into the narrative mix without reserve and without gratuitousness.”––
La Repubblica

 

“
Total Chaos
. . . draws from the deep, dark well of noir . . . Izzo's plot is labyrinthine, but his novel is rich, ambitious and passionate, and his sad, loving portrait of his native city is amazing.”—
The Washington Post

Total Chaos

Solea

The Lost Sailors

A Sun for the Dying

Living Tires

R
ecalling the work and the person of Jean-Claude Izzo will forever remain painful for those who knew him. Izzo was first and foremost a good person. It was impossible not to feel warmth for that slight man who always had an attentive, curious look in his eyes and a cigarette in his mouth. I met him in 1995, in Chambery, during the Festival du Premier Roman. Izzo was there to present
Total Chaos
(
Total Khéops
). I bought the book because its author stirred my interest: he seemed a little detached in many of those cultural gatherings, as if faintly annoyed by them, as he was most certainly annoyed by the quality of food and wine offered by the organizers. I read his book traveling between Chambery and Turin, where the Salone del Libro was underway. I found it a superb, innovative book, an exemplar in a genre that was finally starting to establish itself here in Italy. I recommended it to my publishers. And not long after Izzo arrived in Italy. A few sporadic meetings later, I went to Marseilles for a conference. Izzo was not there. He was in hospital. Everyone knew how serious his illness was. Marseilles was rooting for its noirist. Every bookshop in town filled its display windows with Izzo's books. Then, on January 26, Jean-Claude left us. He wasn't even fifty-five. He left us with many fond memories and several extraordinary novels that convincingly delineated the current now known as “Mediterranean Noir.”

Autodidact, son of immigrant parents, his father a barman from Naples, his mother a Spanish seamstress. After lengthy battles as a left-wing journalist, having already written for film and television, and author of numerous essays, Izzo decided to take a stab at noir, penning his Marseilles Trilogy,
Total Chaos
,
Chourmo
and
Solea
. The protagonist: Fabio Montale; a cop.

Montale, son of immigrant parents, like Izzo, and child of the interethnic mix that is Marseilles, defiantly stakes out his ground in the city that gave birth to the
Front National
.
1
In
Solea
, Izzo writes:

 

It was good to be in Hassan's bar. There were no barriers of age, sex, skin color, or class among the regulars. We were all friends. Whoever came there to drink a
pastis
sure as hell didn't vote for the
Front National
. And they never had, not once, not like some others I knew. Here, in this bar, every single one of us knew why we were from Marseilles and not some other place, why we lived in Marseilles and not some other place. Friendship mixed with the smell of anise and filled the place. We communicated our feelings for one another with a single look. A look that took in our fathers' exile. It was reassuring. We had nothing to lose. We had already lost everything.

 

Izzo's writing is political, in the tradition of the French neo-polar novels
2
, and the writing of Jean-Patrick Manchette. But compared with Manchette, who does not believe in direct political action inasmuch as he believes it is ineffective and doomed to failure, and who limits himself to using noir as an instrument with which to read reality, Izzo goes further. His use of the noir genre is not limited simply to description but penetrates deep into the heart of the incongruities, leaving room for sociological reflection and for a return to his generation's collective memory, and above all, gives sense to the present day. Via Montale's inner journey, Izzo declares his inexorable faith in the possibility of transformation, both individual and collective. The point that matters most to Izzo, politically speaking, that is, the point that cannot be abandoned, is the existence of a united culture. From the defeats of yesterday come the losers of today. From this perspective, Montale is an extraordinary figure. Son of marginalization, he joins the police so as to avoid the criminal margins. He abandons his group of childhood friends, a group that embodies multiple ethnic differences, but he will never forget his roots. This becomes a source for his feelings of guilt when faced with his role as cop in a society that is becoming increasingly intolerant. An internal gestation and growth obligates him to leave the police force and to become a loner in search of the justice that is not furnished by the courts. What gets him into trouble is the ethic of solidarity and the desire, common to culturally and ethnically mixed milieus, to find a place and a moment in which he can live peacefully.

 

On Mediterranean Noir

Solea
, the concluding installment in Izzo's Marseilles Trilogy, is flamenco music's backbone, but also a song by Miles Davis. Indeed, music is one of the author's passions. Particularly jazz and the mix of Mediterranean rhythms that characterize contemporary southern European and North African music. In Izzo's writing, however, music does not simply represent rhythm and a source of nostalgia, but also a key to understanding generational differences. Montale contemplates the merits of rap music. He doesn't like it much, but his reflections represent a kind of understanding as to its intrinsic worth:

 

I was floored by what it said. The rightness of the intentions behind it. The quality of the lyrics. They sang incessantly about the their friends' lives, whether at home or at the reform school.

 

With
Solea
, Jean-Claude Izzo gives substance to the political intuition that is the cornerstone of Mediterranean Noir. He understands that the sticking point the movement must face consists in the epochal revolutions that have transformed criminality. Babette Bellini's investigation
3
does not result in the typical affirmation of the Mafia's superiority and organized crime's collusion with higher powers. Izzo defines the outlines of Mediterranean Noir when he introduces into his novel the principal contradiction present in the crime-society dyad: the annual income of transnational criminal organizations worldwide is US$10,000 billion, a sum equal to the GDP of many single developing countries. The need to launder this mountain of dirty money is at the root of the dizzying increase in the corruption of institutions, of police forces. It is also the catalyst for strategic alliances between entrepreneurs, financial policing bodies, politics, and organized crime. The society in which we live is criminal inasmuch as it produces crime and “anti-crime,” resulting in an endless spiral in which legal and illegal economies merge in a single model. Call it, if you will, a socio-economic “locomotive,” as in the case of northeast Italy.

Mediterranean Noir, in this sense, departs from the existing conception of French Noir, and likewise from the modern police novel. The novel no longer recounts a single “noir” story in a given place at a given moment but begins with a precise analysis of organized crime.

Another of Izzo's intuitions was his having individuated the Mediterranean as the geographical centre of the universal criminal revolution. There is a rich fabric of alliances in this region between new illegal cultures emerging from the east and from Africa. These alliances are influenced by local realities, which they in turn absorb into themselves. As a result, they possess the means to pursue direct negotiations with established power structures.