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    Garlic, Mint, & Sweet Basil: Essays on Marseilles, Mediterranean Cuisine, and Noir Fiction
    Garlic, Mint, & Sweet Basil: Essays on Marseilles, Mediterranean Cuisine, and Noir Fiction
    Garlic, Mint, & Sweet Basil: Essays on Marseilles, Mediterranean Cuisine, and Noir Fiction
    Ebook62 pages1 hour

    Garlic, Mint, & Sweet Basil: Essays on Marseilles, Mediterranean Cuisine, and Noir Fiction

    By Jean-Claude Izzo and Howard Curtis

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    “Evocative . . . A paean to the life, cities and food of the Mediterranean . . . His essays . . . reveal a man of deep feeling and humanity” (The Guardian).

    A short sublime book on the three things dearest to Jean-Claude Izzo’s heart: his native Marseilles, the sea in all its splendor, and Mediterranean noir—the literary genre his books helped to found. This collection of writings shows Izzo, author of the acclaimed Marseilles trilogy, at his most contemplative and insightful. His native city, with its food, its flavors, its passionate inhabitants, and its long, long history of commerce and conviviality, constitute the lifeblood that runs through all of Izzo’s work.

    Reminiscent of Henry Miller’s The Colossus of Maroussi and the lyrical essays of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and Albert Camus, as uplifting and touching as Daniel Klein’s Travels with Epicurus, this slender volume will appeal equally to gourmets who delight in the strong flavors of Mediterranean cuisine, to those travelling on the Riviera (or arm-chair travelers who wish they could), and, naturally, to aficionados of noir fiction.

    Praise for Jean-Claude Izzo

    “Mr. Izzo was a marvelous food writer . . . His books are filled with winning descriptions of Provencal meals run through with the flavors of north Africa, Italy, Greece.” —The New York Times

    “Just as Raymond Chandler and James Ellroy made Los Angeles their very own, so Mr. Izzo has made Marseilles so much more than just another geographical setting.” —The Economist

    “In Izzo’s books . . . Marseilles is a ‘ville selon nos coeur,’ a city in tune with our heart . . . A cosmopolitan, maritime city, greedy, sensual and warm.” —Slow Food
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateMay 7, 2013
    ISBN9781609451752
    Author

    Jean-Claude Izzo

    Jean-Claude Izzo was born in Marseilles, France in 1945. Best known for the Marseilles trilogy (Total Chaos, Chourmo, Solea), Izzo is also the author of The Lost Sailors, A Sun for the Dying, and one collection of short stories, Living Tires. Izzo is widely credited with being the founder of the modern Mediterranean noir novel. He died in 2000 at the age of fifty-five.

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      Book preview

      Garlic, Mint, & Sweet Basil - Jean-Claude Izzo

      INTRODUCTION

      MEDITERRANEAN NOIR:

      IN PRAISE OF JEAN-CLAUDE IZZO

      by Massimo Carlotto

      Translated by Michael Reynolds

      Recalling 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 Chambéry, during the Festival du Premier Roman. Izzo was there to present Total Chaos. 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 Chambéry 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 Marseille trilogy, Total Chaos, Chourmo and Solea. The protagonist: Fabio Montale, a cop.

      Montale, son of immigrant parents, like Izzo, and child of the inter-ethnic mix that is Marseille, defiantly stakes out his ground in the city that gave birth to the National Front. In Solea, Izzo writes: "It felt good to be in Hassan’s bar. There were no barriers of age, sex, color or class among the regulars there. We were all friends. You could be sure no one who came there for a pastis voted for the National Front, or ever had. Not even once, unlike some people I knew. Everyone in this bar knew why they were from Marseilles and not somewhere else, why they lived in Marseilles and not somewhere else. Friendship hung in the air, along with the fumes of anise. We only had to exchange glances to know we were all the children of exiles. There was something reassuring about that. We had nothing to lose, because we’d already lost everything."

      Izzo’s writing is political, in the tradition of the French neo-polar novels, and the writings 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

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