malsperanza

Those of you interested in new media culture, the work of Henry Jenkins at MIT, and the intersection of popular genre fiction with literary experiment might enjoy this.

Today while I was cleaning the house, I listened to a brilliant talk by one of the authors of the novel "Q," one of my favorite historical novels, though not well known in the US. The book is a complicated story set during the Protestant Reformation, and weaving between Germany (Anabaptist proto-communist uprisings), Venice (trade, capitalism, and the edge of the Muslim world), and Rome (power, glory, and power). That may sound dry, but it's a wonderful adventure novel, full of mysteries and romance. One scarcely notices that it is also elaborately experimental. For example, one of the narrators is the mysterious enemy of one of the other narrators, and is known only as Q. Q as in Question, or Quo, or Quid, or any number of other unanswerable Queries.

On top of which, Q is written by 4 pseudonymous authors, working collectively under the name Luther Blissett. They were founders of a vast cultural experiment in Italy in the 1990s, called the Luther Blissett Project (google it). After their novel became a best-seller (published, btw, without copyright), they changed their collective name to Wu Ming and wrote a bunch more novels, most of which have not been translated into English. (And I have to say that the translation of Q is no more than adequate.)

This talk (about an hour long), was given at MIT a couple of months ago. Be patient with the first 15 minutes or so, which discusses a group of contemporary Italian writers not well known in English, or else known only for their light mystery novels.

The talk soon moves into a description of a kind of historical novel that mixes traditional genre, epic, romance, with experiments in language, layers of time, and complex narrative points of view, ultimately to make a strongly ethical point. I highly recommend it, even if you don't know the books and authors he refers to. ( Umberto Eco's "The Name of the Rose" is the most famous.)

One of the books he mentions is Roberto Saviano's "Gomorrah," the best book I've read this year, brilliant and disturbing, and wonderfully written. Wu Ming 1 calls it an Unidentified Narrative Object. Be warned: it's not a novel (though it's sometimes called one); it's a narrative exposé of the Neapolitan Camorra, the local mafia, told through a series of impressionistic stories, mixed with journalism, mixed with poetic passages of autobiography, a bit reminiscent of de Quincey. (I read it in Italian; I can't vouch for the translation, but this is an important book, and I urge youall to give it a try. A movie based on it just won the Grand Prix at Cannes, and hopefully will come to the US one of these days.)

Anyway, here's the link to the talk. You need Quicktime to listen to it:

http://www.wumingfoundation.com/suoni/cms-colloquium-2008-04-02-wu_ming_1.mp3

The authors in English who come closest to fitting this description are Neal Stephenson (mainly his more recent books, Cryptonomicon and The Baroque Trilogy), Dorothy Dunnett (who is often mistaken for a "mere" historical romancier), and -- less accessibly, more explicitly experimental -- Thomas Pynchon. What I like best about this talk is the way it bores down into why these authors are able to write popular, enjoyable, exciting books that draw upon the least respected genres of mass fiction -- murder mystery, scifi, romance, superhero story, comicbook, and -- yes -- children's fantasy tales -- while also wielding the most powerful weapons of high literature. He makes a good case for such works having a profoundly ethical purpose.