Charles Lambert

Cakes and literary references

2011-10-23T11:05:00.000+01:00

Today's my birthday and this is the cake that Michelle McGrane has made to celebrate it. I'm beyond touched.

(And if you don't pick up the literary reference, click here. You know the next step.)

In Context

2011-10-05T08:47:00.000+01:00

Rob Redman, founder of The Fiction Desk, has been asked to guest edit this month's blog for Context Travel, a 'network of architects, historians, art historians, and other specialists who organize over 300 different walks in 15 cities around the world', including Rome. He's exploring the relationship between travel and literature and he asked me if I'd like to talk about my experiences as an expatriate author. I was delighted. You can see what I said here.

The Pantheon (illustrated left) isn't mentioned in the article and doesn't feature in any of my fiction either. Which is odd, because it's my favourite building.

CSI Perugia (not)

2011-10-04T13:47:00.000+01:00

Well, it's all over, for a while at least. Amanda Knox is back in Seattle, Raffaele Sollecito is at his family home near Bari, Rudy Guedé is in jail and Meredith Kercher is dead. The screaming mob outside the courthouse in Perugia yesterday evening will no doubt be looking forward to reading the reasoning behind the appeal court's decision to absolve Amanda and Raffaele of the crime. No, I don't think so either. That isn't, after all, how screaming mobs work. According to Italy's Sky News, 61% of its viewers continue to believe in their guilt, despite the fairly robust dismantling of the original verdict and the so-called evidence, forensic and otherwise, on which it was based. I don't have any particular wisdom to impart on the case, other than to say that no conviction built on such wobbly foundations should be allowed to imprison two young people for most of their adult lives, regardless of their actual guilt or innocence. I know that if I were Amanda or Raffaele and innocent, I would be looking into ways of taking legal action against the shoddy and wholly inadequate work of the people who investigated, or failed to investigate, the crime scene, not only for having deprived me of four years of freedom but also, and primarily, for having made it impossible for me to prove my innocence in a clear-cut and effective manner. I'd find that hard to forgive.

What's struck me most is the reaction to the verdict here in Italy. I'm talking anecdotally here (and I'd include the Sky News poll in this), but the innocentisti certainly seem to be outnumbered, and significantly so, by the colpevolisti. (And if you can think of a decent translation for these words, I'd be grateful.) The latter fall into several categories. The most populated is the one that thinks Amanda is evil, based on her cartwheel in jail and the the fact that she did some shopping the day after the murder. Oh yes, and unsubstantiated but highly memorable accusations of witchcraft and a general whiff of diabolic sexiness about her that I, frankly, don't seem to be able to pick up on. But it's the second category that interests me most. It's composed of people who smell a rat (the Italian word for them - also untranslatable - is dietrologisti). In this case the rats are various. Some people think they've been acquitted because they're rich (not that surprising in a country where the richest citizen is so blatantly above the law). Others think they're free because Amanda's American and Italy has been trained to adopt a supine position the moment Uncle Sam clicks his fingers (vide, other recent events I can't be fagged to google). Others, curiously, claim that the fact that both defence lawyers have been connected at some point with the PDL (Berlusconi's party) means that the acquittal has some sort of political valency, and is yet another sign of the politicisation of the judicial system. (This is nonsense; apart from anything else, Bongiorno is one of the most notable defectors from the PDL in the past year). What they all have in common is the conviction that the system - any system - is a sham, and that the motives that govern its actions will never be revealed unless we prod and poke about to see what's underneath. It's comforting, I suppose, to imagine that there is a truth, even if it's hidden. The flag on the moon that doesn't move despite all that lunar wind must give someone, somewhere, a reassuring sense that what we see is never what we get. And perhaps this is to be expected in a country where so many murders and acts of terror remain unsolved, so many crime scenes are utterly contaminated through, at best, incompetence and, at worst, intent, and so many convictions are finally overturned, for lack of evidence or sand in the hourglass of legal time. But when we're talking about individual lives, and the possibility of horribly miscarried justice, it's sad that people can't allow for a little more wriggle room in their own convictions, a little more generosity towards two people, who may be rich, and foreign (or southern), and who may be unsympathetic, or cold, or inappropriately energetic, but who do not, for all these qualities, necessarily have blood on their hands.

The memory of water, the power of words

2011-09-29T18:16:00.000+01:00

These small white pills are homoeopathic remedies for back-ache. Anyone who follows this blog will know that I'm not a fan of alternative medicines, but this doesn't mean that the various metaphors of homoeopathy aren't as potent as the remedies themselves are ineffective and, in the wrong hands and contexts, criminal. Still, I'm not here to talk about homoeopathy in Africa, or talking to plants, or over-priced oatcakes or any other of Prince Charles's contributions to modern thought. I'm here to direct you towards my review of an intriguing new novel, whose central character is a practising homoeopath, and whose procedures, among other things, explore the metaphorical riches of the ideas behind it. Memory, energy, guilt, repression, love. Powerful stuff, and grippingly told. The novel is called Out of Sight, its author is Isabelle Grey and my review is here.

Lists

2011-09-26T11:15:00.001+01:00

A couple of days ago a site called listaouting published the first of a series of promised lists. The list contains the names of ten Italian politicians who have voted consistently in favour of anti-gay legislation, despite being, according to the people who've put the list together, gay themselves. The idea behind the list is that the ten politicians deserve to be outed not as gays, which is nobody's business but theirs, but as hypocrites. It's not a difficult concept to grasp. When a bunch of right-wing politicians here in Italy organised an event called Family Day, with the aim of defending the traditional family (sic) against the destructive and disordered forces of civil unions, a number of journalists published the marital escapades of the event's promoters - most of whom had been divorced at least once, and many of whom were currently living with their partners, unmarried or in sin, as we used to say, in blithe indifference to the rules of the Catholic church to which they all, at least nominally, belonged. They weren't being exposed as divorcees or adulterers but, once again, as hypocrites. Nobody seemed to feel that this offended their human rights. People who say one thing and do another, in that case at least, were seen quite rightly as fair game. No magistrate investigated the publication of their names or suggested that some heinous crime had been committed. Nobody talked about defamation, or presumed that the journalists in question suffered some form of mental illness. Nobody talked about media lynching or the need to protect individual privacy. These men, with their talk of the sanctity of the family and their strings of ex-wives and illegitimate children, were politicians. Being exposed as phonies was one of the risks that went with the job. The church, to which all paid lip-service, didn't seem to mind, after all. So why should they?

So it's interesting to see how differently people have reacted to the publication of this list. It should be said at once that the list offers names, but no proof, but that's hardly surprising. What would constitute proof of gayness, other than a statement from the person in question or a compromising photograph? (Or a wire-tapped conversation? In the land of tapping, I live in hope.) The former ain't going to happen; the latter is likelier, and would certainly be more fun. So we can ignore the whole business or take the list on trust. Certainly, the reaction of the blogosphere seems to confirm the claims. Maurizio Gasparri, Berlusconi henchman and not the sharpest knife in the box, appears to be known as Culetto d'Oro (Golden Botty!). Roberto Formigoni, governor of Lombardy and leader of the cattolicissimo Comunione e Liberazione, an organisation that has sewn up more tenders for its members than I've had hot dinners, is rumoured to have had a quickie with George Clooney. Lucky Roberto. Gianni Letta, the power behind Berlusconi's throne, if that isn't too dignified a term for it, has had so many face-lifts he makes his boss look rugged. Roberto Calderoli, the charmer in the photograph and Minister for Simplification - something he does whenever he opens his lovely mouth - is the kind of man who keeps wild animals in his garden and wears T-shirts with Viva la Gnocca (Long Live Cunt!) written on them. If further proof is needed, it can, apparently, be provided. Paolo Bonaiuti, Berlusconi's well-oiled spokesman, is also on the list, as is Ferdinando Adornato, who started out as a left-wing intellectual and is now neither left-wing nor intellectual. Then there's Luca Volontè, also cattolicissimo and fetchingly jug-eared, who has stated that 'the founders of modern psychology describe homosexuality as a clinical pathology'. On the grounds that the lady doth protest too much, along with a whiff of the 'no smoke without fire' defence, I rest my case.

And, in one sense, the fact that they're gay or not is irrelevant. Because what's shocked me about the whole business is not the reaction of the people on the list. They've been lying (or refusing to answer questions deemed embarrassing ) for decades - why on earth should we believe them now? It's the reaction of others that worries me. Mara Carfagna, ex calendar girl and now government minister (and an old favourite of this blog), has talked about a 'defamatory attack'. Defamatory? In whose eyes? It's good to know that Ms Carfagna, whose mandate is to ensure equality of opportunity, considers an 'accusation' of homosexuality to be defaming. She isn't the only one. If I could have a quickie with George Clooney (just saying, Roberto) for all the people - on the left and right of the spectrum - who've talked about unwarranted invasion of privacy and the need to separate the political and the personal, and all this hogwash that's being used to swill away the central point - that the political actions of these men interferes directly and constantly with the private lives of others - well, George and I would be pretty much fucked out by now. Good night, George.

The worst offenders are, guess who? That's right, Italy's gay organisations. I won't list them here - they aren't worth it - but to hear them talk about the outing of homophobic legislators as though children were being thrown to the lions is the most sickening thing of all. Whose rights are they supposed to be protecting? The rights of men who deprive me of my rights? Of course people have a right not to come out, if they think it might harm them, sad though this is - I'd be the last person, for example, to defend a list of gay footballers (much as I'd like to see it). But that right simply doesn't exist when those same people, for the lowest and most squalid of of motives, use their power to cancel the basic human rights of others. The squirming sanctimonious behaviour of Italy's gay spokespersons as they fall over themselves to defend the hypocrisy of their masters is further proof that Italy remains a profoundly authoritarian country, terrified of raising its voice against the powerful, constantly in search of a crumb from the table, grubbing for scraps of advancement, ultimately behaving itself because it's only through submission to the dominant culture that privileges can be won. It's a lickspittle reaction and the people who represent the public face of gay Italy should be ashamed of themselves.

There are, thank God, exceptions. For those of you read Italian, here's a piece by Aldo Busi.

Not an advertisement for Walker's crisps

2011-09-19T10:27:00.000+01:00

This is Tim Parks, one of my favourite writers, looking rather like a wiser, crisp-free version of Gary Lineker. You can find out more about him on his own website here. If you'd like to know what I think about him and why he's been an influence on me and on my work, you can click here. And if you'd like to know more about the South Tyrol - believe me, there is a reason for this - you can click here.

That should keep you busy for a little while.

A regular subscriber

2011-09-11T13:39:00.001+01:00

Every fortnight, from June 2010 to June 2011, a copy of the London Review of Books fell onto the stone floor of my house in Italy. It lay there until the person who fed the cats took it upstairs with the rest of the post and left it on an ever-growing pile on the kitchen table. I was in England. I could have changed my address but I had no idea how long I'd be away from home and it seemed an unnecessary fuss. Besides, I liked the notion that my copies were arriving, as they were intended to do, in my own house, as though their presence, in some odd way, represented me, and my normal life, which had been disrupted. I've been subscribing to the LRB since 1997 and, for the first seven years, my parents would give me, as part of my Christmas present, one of the rather solemn dark blue binders the LRB produces to put them in. I can't remember why this practice stopped and, in one way, I'm sad they did. The librarian in me, the part of me that wishes the binders had a space to write the year on the spine, would have liked to see the years add up in such a formal, discreet and ordered way. Since then, back numbers have been allowed to accumulate on the bottom shelf of a bookcase and have now reached the height of a milking stool. Before my stay in England, I would unwrap my copy as soon as it arrived and look through it quickly, to see what might benefit from being read at once and what might wait, and to admire Peter Campbell's cover illustration, one of the principal and most reliable joys of the review. What's extraordinary about Campbell's work is how, despite its almost infinite variety, it's so obviously his; whether the colours are bold, as they are in the one I've chosen here, or tenuous, whether the image is abstract or figurative, his hand is unmistakeable. One of the reasons I think I will find it very hard to throw away old copies, assuming I ever do, will be the loss of these covers, something no online archive can ever replace.

Now, as I work through the backlog in chronological order, a year late more or less to the day, I'm enjoying a sort of double vision of the past twelve, indeed, fifteen months. The actual reviews are pretty much untouched by this. After all, it often seems to take the LRB a year, if not longer, to get round to looking at a book (which means I live in the, albeit fading, hope that, one day, one day soon, Any Human Face will be given a page or two - Jeremy Harding, are you there?) My favourite contributors - Diski, Castle, Kermode, Campbell (again) - don't suffer in the least from being read twelve months late. It's the current affairs pieces that are both here and now, and there and then. There and then because the writers are talking about the future and the predictions that articles of this type routinely and necessarily make can now be checked off against events, and found, reassuringly often, to be spot on. But also here and now, because what they have are insights I didn't have, or don't remember having, that continue to inform and deepen my understanding of the present and beyond. It's worrying, but also perversely comforting, to see how often the direst forecasts have already turned out to be true. (I'm thinking Lib Dems and painting oneself into corners here.) To provide a little balance, of course, there are also several assertions about the future made with an assurance that would silence anyone and yet are so totally off-the-wall as things have turned out that their authors must be writhing with embarrassment and wishing what's written could be erased forever. (I won't go into detail here...) And, of course, there are massive gaps (although I may just not have reached the relevant issue). The imminent collapse of the Euro. The Arab spring. But whether what is written turns out to have been accurate or not, there's a lovely sense of eavesdropping on a conversation you've only just missed - if that were possible - or can't quite join, that illusion of depth that tricks of perspective inevitably provide. What I want to do now is slowly, slowly close the gap between then there and here, between then and now, as the year away is slowly absorbed, and made sense of in ways that not even the LRB can finally help with.

Paris - Delhi - Bombay

2011-08-20T14:49:00.002+01:00

We went to see the temporary exhibition at the Beaubourg yesterday. It's called Paris - Delhi - Bombay and contains the work of around 50 artists, divided more or less equally between France and India. It's a fascinating exhibition for many reasons, not the least being that it's small enough to deal with in half a day or less and not feel that the crux of it has been lost. India's relationship with France is very different to its relationship with Britain and it would be interesting to see what kind of tensions a similarly themed show might have if Paris were replaced by London (and, for the sake of correctness, Bombay by Mumbai). Here, the tensions of colonialism and its aftermath, which might have darkened, and enlivened, such a show or, for that matter, one that examined the cross-cultured visions of artists in France and, say, Indo-China, are attenuated to the point of invisibility. The mood of the show can sometimes be respectful to the point of discomfort, particularly so in the work of the French artists. The tone is established by a large piece at the entrance, a flag made of sequins that combines the flags of the two countries and is animated by a fan. It shimmers and twinkles and is altogether a thing of great decorative charm, the last thing one might expect from its creator, Orlan, but it's also an acknowledgement that the kind of equality such a melding represents can only be decorative, and a nod de haut en bas from a culture that doesn't do decoration in the same colourful, glittering way.

This sounds more critical than I intend, because I'm not quite sure exactly what line should have been taken, other than Orlan's, and the show, in one sense, is riddled with doubts about stance and appropriacy. The opening image to this post is of the exhibition's centrepiece, a massive female head by Ravinder Reddy. It's the kind of thing, on a smaller scale, that can be found in Indian villages. This size, it's both Koons-like and not. It's monumental kitsch to us, but that might be because we have no sense of what it might otherwise be if it were small. Kitsch runs through the show in one way or another, with its masters Pierre and Gilles occupying an attractively camp corner with their usual stuff, as though Bollywood were something they'd thought of first (and perhaps it was).

But there's western kitsch, which is necessarily deliberate at this level of high culture, and perceived kitsch, which may not be. Tejal Shah has a series of elaborately set-up photographs designed to express the dream lives of India's transgender community (and here the word may be appropriate), the hijra; one of them (on the left) is entitled You Too Can Touch the Moon; another has a glamorously undressed hijra lying on a sort of raft, being punted along by a young man naked except for a gilded loincloth complete with impressively large prosthetic penis. It's contrasted with the adjoining installation, also by Shah, which depicts a hijra lying bleeding on the ground after having been beaten up and raped by a urinating policeman. What we can't know, finally, is how much the first image itself establishes a sort of fond, but also cynical and knowing, distance between the dream fantasy and some more genuine and complex freedom, as yet unimaginable, in which prostitution and the violence it appears to provoke are no longer the only option. Another example of what must surely be unintentional kitsch, in my eyes at least, is a large piece by Riyas Komu, composed of eleven pairs of footballer's legs supporting a hollow tube bearing the words God is Great in Arabic. Hmm. It's one of those pieces that does what it says on the tin so blatantly that, once looked at, the work comes to an abrupt end. Which is sad, because the legs themselves are rather splendid.

Tejal Shah isn't the only person to worry about sex, and it's interesting to see how Indian artists take advantage of this dialogue with France to talk about who and how we fuck, and what the whole business entails. Like Shah, Kader Attia looks at the fate of transgender people in a bracing and often touching video of three transsexuals, in India, France and Algeria, while Sunil Gupta produces a kind of fotoromanzo, as they say in Italy, of an Indian gay man in Paris, who enjoys the freedom to display his relationship with an older man, while betraying him by night in one of Paris's most popular gay saunas, Sun City, itself a kitsch recreation of India and its iconography. There's a lot going on in this work, but also not very much, as though the freedom of the artist to deal with his issues were as unsatisfactory and superficial as the freedom his protagonist enjoys to both live life openly with an (extremely good-looking) lover and then shag all kinds in an ersatz dark room. But maybe, as we say, I'm projecting here.

Talking about heterosexuality and the social constraints imposed on women - a major theme of the show - one of my favourite works was that by Atul Dodiya, Devi and the Sink (shown here), which uses quotation and montage to talk about women's lives and the ways in which they are represented and conditioned. The neatly reproduced Leger in the top left-hand corner, where the slab of colour applied to the woman's face is both abstract and a sort of blindfold, is a particularly successful correlative to the central figure, whose ability to speak - or express anything other than bewilderment - has been suddenly removed by the no doubt affectionate attentions of her partner. Horns, it should be noticed, are also forbidden. A darker work by the same artist shows a store-front shutter bearing the image of the goddess Mahalakshami, bearer of prosperity, half rolled up to reveal an image of the suicide of three sisters whose parents were too poor to provide them with a dowry. It's not the most subtle work in the exhibition but that's no bad thing when one of the roles of a show like this is didactic, as the rather textbook-like introduction to the catalogue makes plain, and one of its strengths is the way it finds two contrasting, and antipathetic, pictorial languages to make its point: the brightly coloured icon of the god and the neutral, almost crude depiction of the suicide, like something from a Victorian penny-dreadful.

Two of the works that most impressed me were by women and they confirm my feeling that for sheer edginess and emotional discomfort women artists these days are streets ahead of their male counterparts. (Bourgeois and Messeger are obvious examples.) Anita Dube, who lives and works in New Delhi, takes human bones she has 'found' (as the catalogue chillingly states) and covers them in red velvet, sequins, lace and pearls, transforming them into objects that might be necklaces or household ornaments, musical instruments or fans, except that, of course, they aren't. The ability of art to transform and the limits of that ability are being interrogated here, to unnerving effect. Sheela Gowda is also drawn to red. She has made heart-shaped patties from cow-dung (holy shit...), covered them in vermilion, and strung them up to hang like those strings of embroidered elephants or birds you find in charity shops in the west. Another artist, a man this time, to use red is Sunil Gawde, in a piece called Virtually Untouchable - III (see left), composed of garlands of painted razor-blades. Red is the colour of blood, but it's also the colour worn by Hindu women on their wedding days and I wonder if the catalogue's gloss on this work, that its subject is the assassinations of three members of the Gandhi family, is what the work might actually be saying, or whether it might not have more in common with the other two pieces that use vermilion so effectively. One of the best things about a well-curated exhibition, as this certainly is, is the way disparate materials, in this case bones, cow-dung and razor blades, can be united in conversation.

There's much more to be said about this show. The take of some of its contributors on consumerism, for example, with works like Krishnaraj Chonat's wall of waste computer products, manufactured in the developing world and dumped back there as soon as they're no longer fit for purpose, which reminded me of one of my favourite works, a wall of battered suitcases by the Italian artist, Fabio Mauri, or the more ambiguous and thought-provoking bazaar of stainless steel kitchen goods, an emporium of cooking utensils of the kind used in every Indian home and a gleaming, highly reflective reminder that what counts is not the pot but what it contains, which is often, as we all know, very little. But my favourite comment on recycling is the work shown here, two vertical panels made of recycled waste and reproducing in hallucinatory detail a part of Mumbai called Dharavi, the largest slum in Asia, and also constructed in its entirety of materials no one else has any use for. The work, entitled Think Left, Think Right, Think Low, Think Tight, is an indictment of the living conditions within the slum, the verticality and narrowness creating a sense of oppression, as the catalogue rightly says. But it's also a massively ingenious and detailed monument to the human ingenuity of what it represents and for something that represents life at the lowest economic level imaginable, the kind of life most of us can't even contemplate, it's a work of extraordinary vitality and, even, optimism in the face of endurance, like those African toys, and coffins, so elaborately fashioned from discarded beer and petrol cans. As such, it goes dramatically beyond its creator's intentions, as good art should.

A final thought. Most of the work that impressed and provoked me was made by Indian artists, perhaps because they were telling me something I didn't know, or didn't know I knew, or didn't know I had the right to know. Perhaps if France's relationship with India had been more conflictual, or explicitly compromised by history, the work produced by its artists would have had more bite to it. As it was, the two artists who seemed to me to have dealt most successfully with the challenge the show offered were Stéphane Calais, who preferred to stay at home and use Indian ink to cover large sheets of paper with flowers and abstract designs on the principle that his 'Orientalism was as mutant as flu' and thus required isolation, and Leandro Erlich (interestingly, an Argentine artist who lives and works between his country of origin and Paris, and is thus neither French nor Indian), who has given us an installation of a typical Parisian bedroom (designed, incidentally, by Jacques Grange, who lives in the apartment that once belonged to Colette), through one window of which can be seen filmed images of a street in Bombay. They're fascinating to watch, as of course they would be; they're elsewhere and their otherness is reinforced by the frame of the window, which is both a limit and an aperture. As metaphors go, Erlich's installation, entitled, almost too neatly, Le Regard, is as apposite as they come.

A roof over one's head

2011-07-09T15:23:00.000+01:00

Lovely, isn't it? It's the courthouse of Terracina, a small town on the Italian coast about 70 miles south of Rome. I first saw the building a few years ago, when I was sued for non-payment of an absurdly inflated bill by a structural engineer who ran his business from behind a pull-down shutter. I won that case, paying my lawyer slightly more than the original bill would have been; a Pyrrhic victory, but a victory nonetheless. I was back there again yesterday, dealing with a febrile but tenacious offshoot from the original sequoia-sized sin, committed more than ten years ago, of trying to put a roof on my house . This involved a small but necessary structural addition to the walls of the house, a narrow reinforced strip between wall and roof known as a cordolo that graces nine out of ten of the surrounding buildings. But things happened, as things will, and the top floor of the house was seized and sealed off - in the legal sense - before the new roof could be put on. For eight months we lived with rain, layers of flimsy plastic that lifted off in the slightest wind and almost suffocated a passing widow, a last-ditch attempt to transform 120 square metres of house into a terrace-cum-swimming pool (honestly!) before covering the house with temporary sheets of corrugated black material that, like so many temporary solutions in Italy, remain in place a decade later.

The original crime, that of constructing the cordolo, has long since been expunged by time. The second, that of violating the entirely virtual seals designed to keep the house roofless, should have met the same fate, but has been kept alive by the mendacity of a local policeman (vigile urbano), piqued that I didn't respond to his willingness to accept a bribe, who filed a report suggesting that the temporary roof was a much more recent addition and couldn't therefore benefit from the statute of limitations. So far, so clear? I thought not. The generous option would have been to spare you explanation, but the nature of the story requires a little confusion and the self-doubt and generalised sense of anxiety that confusion can produce. I should say that violating seals (and yes, I'm fully aware of the double entendre) is a penal offence in Italy, punishable by a spell in jail. Another source of anxiety.

We appealed against this report as soon as it was written, producing two witnesses to testify that the temporary covering had been added well before the date provided by the vigile urbano, who, incidentally, had already been found guilty of corruption in another context. Years passed. The rain continued to fall on an increasingly shabby would-be roof and, in places, the floor below. Heat continued to rise from the house all winter with an extravagance that doesn't bear thinking about. People were born and, alas, died. I was in England when I heard about the first hearing, in March this year. Not from my lawyer; that would be too much to expect from someone who's already earned at least twice what the original roof would have cost, to little effect. One of my two witnesses phoned me in a panic the evening before to say that she'd just received aletter telling her to appear in court and couldn't possibly go to Terracina the following day. I phoned the second witness, who'd not been notified at all. I phoned my lawyer, who said that I shouldn't worry and that the hearing would probably be rescheduled in any case. Was I needed? Apparently not. Which was a relief.

The hearing, as predicted, was rescheduled, but not before the vigile urbano had admitted, on oath, that the date he'd provided had no basis in fact but was simply a presumption on his part. Without this presumption, no crime had been committed within the times recognised by the Italian legal system. I was, to borrow a term used constantly and with similar inaccuracy by Berlusconi, 'innocent'. Unfortunately this wasn't enough to avoid the second hearing yesterday. We arrived at nine o'clock. We left, almost seven hours later, at quarter to four. The inside of the building is as hostile as its exterior, concrete and more concrete; with temperatures in the low 30s, as they were yesterday, and no air conditioning outside the actual courtroom, it's no place to pass the best part of a day. We acquired squatters' rights to a row of four chairs just outside the courtroom, taking it in turns to press our nose against the glass that allowed us to watch, but not hear, the proceedings. We only realised later that we could have gone in and followed each hearing live; we'd assumed, in our ingenuous privacy-respecting way, that the people drifting in and out of the place were connected to the trial, rather than people like me, who were simply obliged to be in the building and within earshot of an eventual summons. And lawyers,of course, distinguishable by a dress code that imposed vertiginously high heels and hemlines for the women, regardless of age, and strangely shrunken jackets in silky materials for the younger men. As though the cast of Ally McBeal had been outfitted by Victoria's Secret.

We started our wait with a certain optimism. The list of cases to be heard was pinned up on a noticeboard outside the court. Lambert + 1 was scheduled for 10.00. After an hour or so, we understood that the list wasn't simply inaccurate in terms of the time it had allotted to each case. Its order bore not even the slightest resemblance to what was going on. Case No. 17 was given immediate precedence. In Italy, 17 is an unlucky number; on this occasion, it's hard to say whose luck was worst. We gathered scraps of information about the case as people wandered in and out. It involved a man already jailed for attempted murder, an electric saw, a stalked grandmother, a locked cupboard filled with rifles, domestic violence in all its ugliness. More to the point, it involved 36 witnesses, each of whom - it became apparent -would be called to take the chair (there is no box). We watched them wait their turn to be questioned, all 36 of them. One young woman was cross-examined for more than half an hour; a man, who might have been her brother, even longer. People came and went, and came back again. Witnesses conferred outside the courtroom, where the judge, a slim, rather frail-looking woman who couldn't have been much more than thirty, listened and scribbled and sought clarity, and a man in a grey suit copied down, by hand, each single word that was said, because the only record that has legal value in Italy is produced by hand and therefore unalterable. There was much gnashing of teeth and wailing, principally among those whose cases, as the day wore on, were increasingly unlikely to be heard.

One young man was particularly incensed. He'd been arrested for possession of a single marijuana plant some seven months ago and kept under house arrest ever since. If his case didn't come up, this could easily become a year or longer. He wandered, wild-eyed, around the echoing humid foyer at the building's heart. He was still there when we left; his lawyer had promised him that some deal with the judge had been struck to ensure his case be heard. I hope, for his sake, this was true. We had our brief moment of glory, when our witnesses were asked to stand up to be seen, an act that appears to carry some mysterious inexpressible judicial value, and the judge, who'd eaten a sorry looking sandwich within feet of us only half an hour before, rescheduled the hearing for February 2012, ten years to the month since the seals, which have never existed except on paper, were actually violated. It's a good thing none of us had anything better to do with our time. Except that, of course, we did. We could have worked out a system, for example, that took into account the time a hearing was likely to take on the basis of the number of witnesses called. It wouldn't have been that difficult. Anyone with half a brain could have done it. Perhaps one day, when the ministry of justice is less concerned with rendering the prime minister immune from the judicial system of the country he's been elected to govern, someone will have a go. If they need any help, they only have to ask.

PS. I don't know when this photograph was taken but the dead tree outside the courthouse is still there. Still dead.

Secret embroidery

2011-06-04T15:31:00.001+01:00

It's been asserted recently - we needn't dwell on by whom - that women's writing can be distinguished from men's after reading a single paragraph. This certainly isn't the case for me, and, as the author of a novel whose first-person narrator is a woman, I hope other readers are equally gender-blind. But there is a case, I think, for suggesting that certain kinds of art are, if not the prerogative, at least the favoured preserve of women, and that seems to me to have to do with the choice of materials. Fabrics, quilts, clothes, media that aren't just humble but pliable, soft to the touch. Oldenburg did his soft sculptures, I know, but they strike me as detumescent rather than enveloping, irremediably male in their anguish about a lost rigidity. Women artists, on the other hand, use softness in a myriad of ways, often as disturbing as the stuff they use is domestic and reassuring. Bourgeois, Messager (pictured), in the UK Lucas and Emin: these woman and others have used the scraps of fabric that surround us, from nurseries and kitchens and wardrobes and turned them into the stuff of dream, and of nightmare. There's a character in Siri Hustvedt's new novel, The Summer without Men, who does something similar. You can read my review of it here.

Hangmen and Cities of Happiness

2011-05-30T10:38:00.000+01:00

These are David Mitchell and Enid Blyton. If you'd like to know what links them, click here.

Identity bracelets...

2011-05-11T10:52:00.000+01:00

...and the Antipodes. Confused? You needn't be. Just click here.

We do it for the villa in the Bahamas...

2011-05-09T10:51:00.000+01:00

...obviously...

Cheat death...

2011-04-26T10:56:00.000+01:00

Or not...

Manners maketh man...

2011-04-20T16:44:00.000+01:00

... so where do allotments fit in? Find out here.

I love you past speech

2011-04-04T09:14:00.000+01:00

This is Eros, the god of love. If you'd like to know where he hangs out, click here.

Low Moon

2011-04-02T15:35:00.000+01:00

This is an image of a low moon. If you'd like to know what it has to do with poetry and ghosts, click here.

Sixty Two

2011-03-04T11:55:00.000+01:00

Somebody likes The Scent of Cinnamon very much indeed. Want to know who? Click here.

Evil, the banality of

2011-02-19T16:38:00.003+01:00

Not the most attractive looking man you'll ever see, but there's nothing that distinguishes him from a thousand other petty bureaucrats, the kind of people you see in offices throughout Italy, helping or hindering their fellow citizens, as the case may be. His name is Massimo Sensini and he's the elected (Northern League) mayor of a small town called Fossalta di Piave, 40 miles north of Venice and the place where Ernest Hemingway was injured during the First World War. Among its 4000 inhabitants is a four year old girl of African origin,whose father, after years of working in the local industry, was recently made redundant and is now working in Belgium, sending home what he can to support his wife and four children in Italy. The little girl goes to the local school, called 'Il Flauto Magico'. It's an all-day school and the children have their lunch there, paying a certain amount for the privilege. The little girl's mother asks for help from the local authorities to pay for her daughter's lunches (she's already paying 50 euros a month for the teaching and other services provided). But the council can't help.

The teachers at the school - there are five of them, all women - decide to forego their own lunch in turns and give it to the girl. Everything's fine until the mayor hears about it from the social services. He summons the school principal, a certain Simonetta Murri, to condemn the 'gross irregularity' of the situation and accuse the teachers, effectively, of stealing council property through their 'misuse' of lunches assigned to them, an act that incurs 'a loss of revenue for the municipality'. The principal agrees. The teachers are told that if they continue to deprive the education system of five lunches a week, they will be disciplined. The little girl now does only half a day at school, going home for lunch and staying there for the afternoon, deprived of 50 percent of an education that she, more than anyone, needs if she is to belong to the country she lives in and to which her father has contributed as a worker and tax-payer in the past.

Needless to day, according to Sensini and Murri, this has nothing to do with racism. For Sensini, the lunches are part of the teachers' salary and it is illegal to auto-reduce one's salary. For Murri, all children are equal and what would she do if all her pupils wanted free lunches? Has anyone else asked for a free lunch? Well, no, not yet. The speciousness of these arguments is self-evident, but what strikes me most about them is that these two people, insignificant in themselves yet given the kind of responsibility over others that can make lives worth living or not, are behaving in the same way as other people, in other places and at other times, whose small, considered acts of brutality, sustained by an indifferent or conniving structure of power, have led to their fellow citizens being seen as less than human. Food's such a basic need, and the act of offering it such a basic human act, enshrined in all cultures as hospitality. How ironic that notions of law and principle and equality should to be used to rip an offered plate from the small hands of a hungry child.

Dark times, dark tales

2011-02-19T11:26:00.000+01:00

Fancy something a bit creepy for the weekend? Need some advice? Click here.

words, words, wordle

2011-02-15T15:01:00.000+01:00

Want to see what I've been up to recently? Well, here it is.

Ouch!

2011-02-12T23:41:00.001+01:00

If you want to know what this instrument of torture has to do with Any Human Face, click here.

Transformations

2011-02-10T10:37:00.001+01:00

Girls made out of flowers, brothers becoming beasts and breeding, David Beckham an object of blind irrational worship. What is the world coming to? Find out here.

And if you want to see some seriously demented whimsy, google for images of Blodeuwedd...

Shockheaded Peter

2011-01-26T13:39:00.000+01:00

Want to know more about the man who wrote Struwwelpeter? Click here.

Never Let Me Go

2011-01-22T17:43:00.000+01:00

I've just posted a review of Ishiguro's novel (not the film, which I haven't seen, and probably won't see) over at my other blog - the serious one I save for talk about books... You can find it here. And if you haven't read the book, or seen the film, try not to think too hard about the implications of the picture on this post. I wouldn't want to spoil it for you.

Burn book burn

2011-01-20T13:01:00.000+01:00

The woman on the left of this photograph - the one who looks as though she's just heard someone fart - is called Elena Donazzan. She's a ferventissimo Catholic and member of Berlusconi's Freedom Party (no, that's the political party, not the ones with 14 overpaid whores dressed as nurses and a gaggle of septuagenarian cronies who ought to know better). This is a contradiction in terms that ought to exclude her a priori from holding any sort of public office, but it appears to have become a criterion for it in some parts of Italy, as though hypocrisy were no longer an inconvenient truth of politics but its essential nature. She's responsible for education in the Veneto region, a Northern League stronghold. The Northern League isn't too fond of Roberto Saviano, internationally respected author of Gomorra, possibly because he's suggested that the north, and its politicians, is not only not immune to Mafia activity but is up to its neck in it, something the south-hating trolls of the Lega would rather not hear. So it's no surprise that Saviano's work should have been removed from the library shelves of the region. After all, what are libraries for if not to propagate the dominant viewpoint?

Now Donazzan, inspired no doubt by the invigorating scent of burning paper, has issued an edict to the region's schools announcing a further round of censorship. This time it's the turn of all those authors who signed a petition in 2004 against the extradition from Brazil of Cesare Battisti, an ex-terrorist convicted in absentia and on rather dodgy grounds of terrorist activity conducted in the 1970s. These authors are referred to, with audible distaste, as intellettuali, perhaps the dirtiest word in the Lega lexicon. What's odd though is that no one has seen fit to say who these blood-stained intellectuals actually are, neither Donazzan nor the newspapers, like Repubblica, that, while deploring the edict, exercise their own inadvertent censorship. So, in case you're interested, the list includes Daniel Pennac, Luther Blissett (now Wu Ming), Massimo Carlotto and Pino Cacucci. You can find a more complete list here.

Hello Goodbye Hello

2010-11-06T13:56:00.000+01:00

If you visit this blog on a regular basis, you'll have had a disappointing few months, and I apologise. I've been in the UK for personal reasons that I haven't really wanted to talk about here, and the various things that so preoccupied me seem to have lost their immediate relevance. My two black beasts - Berlusconi and Ratzinger - feel far away, despite the latter's attempt to beard me in my lair this summer, and the ongoing farce of Italian politics is, well, precisely that. To my shame, I can't even summon up a more than ordinary outrage at homophobia, perhaps the result of watching programmes like Strictly Come Dancing and X Factor, where being gay sometimes seems the rule rather than exception. I've also come to hate the look of this blog, and don't like the new templates being offered (this is technical stuff - fellow bloggers will understand). SO... I'm up and off to Wordpress, where I will apply the old formula: a change is as good as a rest, and see what happens. I'll be taking all the old stuff with me, so don't despair, you'll still be able to see what I thought about Maria Vittoria Brambilla (don't care? Don't worry, you're not alone..). I've packed. I'm ready to go. From today, you'll find me here.

Words

2010-11-03T20:07:00.004+01:00

If I had a thousand pounds for every time I've heard people complain that the use of the word 'gay' to describe what these same people tend to refer to as the 'homosexual life style' had deprived them of the only word available in the English language to talk about the really important things in life, like, oh I don't know, party lights, streamers, summer dresses, just general joy and loveliness, I still wouldn't have enough money to wrest the term 'tea party' back from the misinformed bigots who seriously believe their pathological state of unreason to be 'political'. This thought came to me as I sliced into a rather good cake earlier today and wished that I had a few good friends with me to share it. A tea party, I thought, how nice. How nice that would be.

Fusion, Wolverhampton style

2010-09-16T11:38:00.002+01:00

Seven day wonder

2010-09-15T15:39:00.011+01:00

I'd often been intrigued in the past by an ad in the LRB inviting me to spend some time in a large old country house near Girona, in Catalonia, with the author Charles Pallisser, working on the art of fiction-writing. How pleasant it must be, I used to think, to be able to sit around in the sun with like-minded people and a writer who was not only published but had actually written a book I much admired (The Quincunx), not to speak of cooling off body and brain in a convenient swimming-pool, eating local foodstuffs and drinking local wine. It was the stuff of dreams.

And then I published my own first book, and then my second and I began to wonder if it wouldn't be even more fun to go as the writer, and sit around in the sun, etc. This year, to my joy, that's exactly what happened when the ad, in a sense (and through Sandra - thank you, Sandra!), got in touch with me to tell me that Lee Pennington, a man of many and considerable talents, and the brains and heart behind the operation, had invited me to be one of the guest authors on his Seven Day Wonder book-lovers' week in early September. When I heard from an earlier guest that she'd had a great time, I was even keener.

I wasn't disappointed. I was one of four people to be invited. Clare Dudman was the first, to talk about her most recent novel, A Place of Meadows and Tall Trees. It's a fine book, honest and beautifully written, and I'm sorry I missed her. Next up was Adam Nevill, currently reinvigorating British horror with Apartment 16. He was there when I turned up late from Girona airport, to be greeted by pasta, wine and general conviviality, and seemed far too sunny and simpatico a man to have conceived such a dark and disturbing work. Someone once asked me how I managed to live with my imagination, and I may have asked Adam that same question.

The final author to be invited, Ann Cleeves, arrived while I was talking to the group and stayed, as I did, until the end. It was a joy to have time to talk a little shop, and discover, among other things, a shared admiration for Fred Vargas. You can see me here on the left, momentarily distracted by the view from the latest and possibly last of Ann's gripping Shetland novels, Blue Lightning.

Events like these may be built around books, but they live or die by the energy and good will of all those who take part. I have everyone to thank for the welcome we received. Lee, Debbie and Rob, who made sure that the food played as central a role as the reading, and to all of the book-lovers, whose interest and enthusiasm, and discretion, made it a pleasure to be read, and discussed, and finally, with the softest of kid gloves, given the literary equivalent of the third degree. They couldn't have been kinder, or more generous. Now all I have to do is write another book in time to get invited back...

48 hours in Barcelona

2010-09-15T13:36:00.002+01:00

I spent most of last week in Catalonia, the first few days rather wonderfully in the country near Banyoles (about which I’ll be writing very soon) and the last two in Barcelona. I don’t know how large the real city of Barcelona is, the city where people live and work and conduct their daily business, but the part of it that gets visited - the old city, the area to each side of La Rambla, the Boqueria, the Picasso museum, the port - is soon covered. Indeed, although this may seem parochial and Anglocentric, we found ourselves returning, over and over again, in what began to feel like wilful homage, to Placa de George Orwell, a neatly paved area slipped in among the streets of the old city, lined like everywhere else with bars and various other eating opportunities, from traditional three-course meals to macrobiotic platters, with the usual range of bocadillos de jamon and tapas in between. The square, which is actually a triangle, hosts at its entrance – if you’re coming from La Rambla – a large modernistic sculpture, a twist of iron rising high above the heads of passers-by, at the apex of which is threaded a massive wooden ball, a nicely dialectic interplay of what the world has to offer, as both material and form, and, unlike much modern sub-Serra sculpture, not even an eyesore. It’s a triangle that seems to attract more than its fair share of dropouts, people who, at what must be considerable cost, have turned their backs on the rest of us, with our mobiles and guidebooks, and take their comfort from the company of large, scuffed, infinitely patient dogs and, to a lesser degree, from one another until a scuffle breaks out. Orwell, if he felt at home anywhere, would surely never have felt at home here, among this colony of winos and worse, with their elaborate skin-obliterating ‘tribal’ tattoos and white-boy dreadlocks. Down and out was for Paris and London; Catalonia was, or should have been, for sterner homage-worthy stuff. In fact, much as I like the city and enjoy what it has to offer, not least the best sandwich in the world (Café Viena, La Rambla del Estudis 115), there’s something about the Barcelona that’s on show that leaves me unconvinced, in the same way that Covent Garden and parts of Trastevere do; as though the transgression that ought to stand for creativity doesn’t go much beyond the litany of living statues along the main tourist drag, which briefly startle, and then amuse, and then seem tawdry and dispiriting, part of a world in which work can be reduced to stifling immobility on the off-chance of a handful of coins in a hat. I started this year in Madrid, a city that struck me as being more or less what a city should be, busily about the infinite variety of its own affairs, absorbing the transient rest of us without much fuss. The part of Barcelona that’s available to tourists has a different feel to it, like a naughtily disrespectful child on the look-out for attention. It’s no surprise that the artists this side of the city seems most proud of – or most eager to transform into souvenirs - are Gaudi and Dali, masters of the unfinished and the showy.

Futile preoccupations...?

2010-08-26T13:52:00.002+01:00

A few weeks ago Rob at the Fiction Desk reviewed Any Human Face and, with great generosity, gave away ten free copies of the novel. One of the copies went to the man behind the book blog His Futile Preoccupations... You can see the impression the novel made here. Here's a bit to be going on with:

I had a bit of luck recently when I won a book give-away held by The Fiction Desk. The book, Any Human Face by Charles Lambert arrived and I almost immediately picked it up. I planned to read the back cover and perhaps a page or two as I had another book I intended to get to first. I ended up devouring this book in two separate readings over the course of a twenty-four hour period. The blurb on the front of the novel promises: A dark, fast-paced story of love, sex, abduction and murder, and the book certainly lives up to all those qualities.

Snail-keeping and Sunday salons

2010-08-15T13:32:00.004+01:00

Clare Dudman, author of A Place of Meadows and Tall Trees (which I'm currently reading and wholeheartedly recommend - but more of that later), has interviewed me for her Sunday Salon on her literary blog, Keeper of the Snails. We talk about Any Human Face, life-changing moments and pride (with a small 'p'). You can read the interview here.

The Slaughteryard

2010-08-13T17:27:00.007+01:00

Assuming you know nothing of the work of the nineteenth century Argentine writer Esteban Echeverria, you can approach this book, one of the Friday Project’s Library of Lost Books, in two ways. The first is to cut to the chase and read the beating and rather bloody heart of it, the long short story, entitled The Slaughteryard, a vivid, in many ways chilling, account of a cattle butchering and its disturbing aftermath in one of the four slaughter yards of Buenos Aires during the first decades of the nineteenth century. It’s a powerful, and memorable, tale, packed with information and colour, observation and, above all, political indictment. Translated with enormous vigour by erstwhile Borges collaborator and translator, Norman Thomas Di Giovanni, and Susan Ashe, it provides an insight into a world that’s both recognisably modern and tantalisingly ‘other’, which is just what you’d expect from a classic ‘lost book’.

If you stop at the story, you’ll already have had value for money. If you decide to read the rest of the book as well, you’ll come away not only wiser, but also irresistibly entertained. It’s packed with gems: historical details about slaughtering methods, the use of the lasso, and, more worryingly, the mazorca (you’ll have to read the glossary to find out why this should be worrying, but Edward II might provide a hint), the practice known as the slippery dance, the other, less musical meaning of the violin y violon; and, underlying all this, the tragic oppression of one faction by another, in a Swiftian parody of political schism and reversal that, as these things tend to do, resulted in the deaths and torture of thousands. On top of this, you’ll have contemporary accounts of butchery in Buenos Aires by the famous, such as Darwin, and other less well-known travellers, such as a certain Major Alexander Gillespie, according to whom “negroes [...] have generally a predilection for food very salt, and even tainted”.

The book as a whole, in other words, not only introduces and contextualises one of South America's greatest stories, but delights on its own terms. I recommend it.

Yin yang? Hmm

2010-08-11T15:27:00.001+01:00

Is it just me or are the two people with Barbara Cartland in this photograph Peter Mandelson and Paul McCartney in drag?

Image

2010-08-07T13:58:00.006+01:00

According to an article in today's Independent, Maria Vittoria Brambilla, the Italian minister for tourism (seen here discussing policy with her employer), has announced that the Palio di Siena, the traditional horse races that occupy the city's main square for much of the summer, should be banned, along with all other public spectacles involving cruelty to animals. Not because of their intrinsic violence towards dumb beasts, with whom Brambilla ought to feel, at the very least, a nuance of sympathy, nor because they provide a substantial source of revenue for the Mafia, but because they damage Italy's image abroad.

In the same newspaper, Christina Patterson has this to say about David Cameron and his putative political encounter with Silvio Berlusconi this week:

How do you solve a problem like Berlusconi?
David Cameron has clearly been having a lovely time visiting his foreign counterparts, offering a little lecture here, a little pat on the back there and generally revelling in being one of the Most Important People in the World. If some of them can't quite match his background, well, one wouldn't want to make them feel awkward, and some of them – Obama, actually – have other qualities that make up for it.
But Berlusconi. Oh dear, Berlusconi. How the hell do you conduct a meeting with the biggest joke in international politics, a man so surgically enhanced that he now looks like a ventriloquist's dummy? How do you talk to a man who can't even have a snack without a bevy of luscious lovelies? How do you do that and retain a micro-molecule of dignity?
Cameron's solution to a challenge that might defy Debrett's lacked his usual lightness of touch. He turned up late. Almost an hour late. He skipped the planned talks and went straight to the dinner, and skipped a press conference, too. In the photos, Cameron weirdly managed to look like Berlusconi's taller, plastic twin. He also managed to look something he's rarely looked before: deeply, excruciatingly embarrassed.

Maybe someone should take Ms Brambilla to one side and explain that the odd dead horse - however lamentable - does far less damage to Italy's international 'image' than the raddled old nag to whom she owes her brilliant, and probably bareback, career.

Will this pleasure never end?

2010-08-06T19:30:00.004+01:00

If any of you are lucky, or clever, enough to be able to read Arabic you can now enjoy The Scent of Cinnamon in translation, in the Albawtaqa Review.

For more information, click here.

Strage

2010-08-02T09:46:00.009+01:00

Thirty years ago today I was teaching English at a summer school in Malvern. The students, aged between 12 and 16, were mostly from Europe and the largest group came from Italy. They rarely watched the television - I don't remember now if they were discouraged from doing so or simply preferred to do other things; there are few things less interesting, after all, than watching TV in a language you barely understand, and most of the students there spoke very little English. But on the evening of 2 August the television room was packed with Italian students because a bomb had destroyed Bologna station. Some of the students came from the area; two or three of them had relatives who were starting their holidays that day and might easily have been involved. When the first images of the station, parts of which had been reduced to rubble, appeared on the screen, the room fell silent, and remained silent until one of the older girls began to cry, which set the other kids off. I wasn't the only teacher there who spoke some Italian, and we were kept busy translating the news as it came in. There were no satellite dishes then, no Sky; all we had was the BBC. Mrs Smith, the person in charge of the school and herself Italian, was also busy, comforting the younger children, organising sandwiches and coffee, phoning people who might know more. I'd been through Bologna - one of the busiest stations in the country - but never stopped there. I didn't know then that I'd be living only thirty miles away two months later, in what was still the aftermath of the event, an aftermath that continues to echo. Around 80 people, many of them children, died in the explosion; others were wounded, or blinded, or permanently crippled. Not to speak of the collateral effect of this kind of tragedy, friends lost and families destroyed. To begin with, the assumption was that there had been an accident, but that assumption didn't last. No one claimed responsibility for the attack, which was attributed to right-wing terrorists, on the grounds that left-wing terrorism was more selective. In the thirty years that have passed since then, people have been accused and convicted of the crime, and in some cases have completed their sentences and are now free. But no one genuinely believes that the perpetrators of the crime have been punished, or even identified. It's hard for me to read about the bombing without remembering the faces of those children - one of whom actually lost a cousin in the attack - stranded so far from their homes, frustrated by distance and language; children who might just as easily have been blown to shreds themselves. There's a commemoration of the event each year, organised by the families of the victims, and presumably this will continue as long as these families survive. Most years, whichever government is in power sends a representative or two, and the reaction of the crowd is a useful indication of public perceptions of guilt and the complicity of certain elements within the Italian power structure, or palazzo, as Pasolini called it. Few people doubt such complicity. This year, with a contempt that's hard to stomach, the government is totally absent from the commemoration - not even a deputy minister has been sent off to take the flak and express at least formal condemnation of the massacre. If proof were required of the continuity of responsibility - moral, if nothing else - that links Berlusconi and his gang to the people that murdered 85 innocent travellers and wounded a further 2000 thirty years ago, we need look no further.

Two people, one bleeding

2010-07-23T16:31:00.003+01:00

And here's another review of Any Human Face, from The Fiction Desk this time. It's typically perceptive and I particularly enjoyed this sentence:

The character interactions are driven by Lambert’s interest in the way people react to power and vulnerability in themselves and in each other; it’s tempting to say that the archetypal Charles Lambert scene is one in which two people are in a room, and one of them is bleeding.

Fascinating, though I'm not sure how true this is. Any ideas?

Little Monsters returns!

2010-07-13T17:59:00.004+01:00

This is getting better and better. Bookeywookey (subtitle: LITERATURE GOOD AND BAD, THEATER,AND NEUROSCIENCE....NO REALLY), who wrote the excellent review of Any Human Face mentioned in the previous post, has turned his critical eye on Little Monsters. To flattering effect. Here's a preview:

Lambert writes of the pain of existential longing with a knowing heart and a sure, forceful pen. He knows, as one character says to another in Little Monsters, that 'people are not simple,' and that's why I loved this beautiful novel. I feel I've discovered a deep well in Lambert. Sometimes his work evokes Hermann Hesse for me, although he is less of an innocent.

If I needed any encouragement to work on my next novel (though I don't), this would certainly provide it. Thank you, Ted.

Any Human Face review

2010-07-04T19:07:00.004+01:00

And I found this review of Any Human Face waiting for me when I turned on my laptop this afternoon... Here's a taste of it.

This is an unusual book in that it has everything - love, suspense, moral conflict, social criticism, psychological acuity, and crack writing - but none of it is expected.

As Giuseppe would say, not bad.

Any Human Face launch

2010-07-04T18:48:00.004+01:00

Any Human Face had its official UK launch yesterday evening in the Travel Bookshop, a place I wholeheartedly recommend for all your reading needs should you be in or near Notting Hill, and probably worth a specific trip for. (It is a travel bookshop, after all.) I was accompanied by Simon Barraclough, who pulled some fine Italian-focused work from his poetic hat, and introduced by my friend and agent, the poet Isobel Dixon, so I couldn't have been happier. I also had the chance not only to see some old friends - including one I haven't seen for 33 years (hello, Sara!) - some newer ones (hello, Katy!) and some very new ones ( hello Essie!), but also to cement some previously virtual ones (hello Rob! hello Anne!).

You can see more photos of the event here.

UK launch

2010-06-18T21:57:00.003+01:00

I'll be reading from Any Human Face on Saturday, 3 July, at The Travel Bookshop in Notting Hill, London. Even better, I'll be accompanied by Forward shortlisted poet Simon Barraclough, for an Italian-themed evening. This is the cover of Simon's fine collection. I haven't added mine because I'm sure you're all more than familiar with it by now.

We'll be starting at 7 pm. There will be wine, possibly Italian, and snacks...

You can find all the info here.

Readings of Genet (mine)

2010-06-17T18:25:00.004+01:00

Forgive my absence. If this blog were a different kind of open book from the one it is, I'd have a lot to tell, but, post-Diana, and unfashionably, I've opted for discretion. Which means that all I'm using it for at the moment is the most fleeting self-promotion. For anyone who'd like to see some translations of the poetry of Jean Genet that I committed, with adolescent hubris, many years ago, I recommend the third number of the always-excellent Cambridge Literary Review, just out, and worth considerably more than the cover price. You can find out more about it here.

Surveillance

2010-06-02T11:37:00.002+01:00

I've just discovered that Amazon knows - and registers - whenever Kindle users highlight a passage on their Kindles, and it reminded me of something I saw many years when John Wilkinson and I were on a walking (actually, hitch-hiking) tour of western Scotland and the Hebrides. We were holed up in the north-westernmost youth hostel of the British Isles, a stone's throw from Cape Wrath. Among the other hostellers was a fierce-browed woman with a copy of Edgar Allen Poe's collected stories. She was reading the book with a red pen in her hand and, every now and again, with a stifled grunt, she'd ring something in the text. When she left the room, presumably to pee, I couldn't resist. I sneaked a look to see what she'd been marking.

I dropped the book immediately, as though scalded. The word she'd ringed, over and over, with a heavy hand, was BLOOD.

Orlovsky RIP

2010-06-01T22:21:00.001+01:00

Bourgeois RIP

2010-06-01T11:28:00.004+01:00

I can't be the only person who remembers that wonderful, exhilarating, fuck-you-all moment from a documentary on Louise Bourgeois when the interviewer, appalled, watches the artist smash a sculpture he'd, inappropriately in her opinion, praised. I've just found out about her death from Baroque in Hackney's typically astute post. I hope to find some time before too long to add a few words myself.

Disturbing...

2010-05-30T13:16:00.004+01:00

Rob Spence reviews Any Human Face on Topsyturvydom, his highly recommended blog. It's a great thrill when someone whose opinion you respect gets it, and Rob certainly gets it here. This is a taste of the review:

This novel is, in concept, an excellent, disturbing, stylish thriller, but one with aspirations beyond the working out of a criminal act. It uses most of the thriller conventions, but goes well beyond them, to offer a story which deals with universal themes, particularly of man's inhumanity to man, and the dark heart of loneliness at the centre of many lives.

You can read the rest of the review here.

Powerful...

2010-05-30T10:51:00.003+01:00

An excellent review of Any Human Face in The American in Italia. This is the best bit:

Andrew's solitary life suddenly becomes a thriller in itself, as Lambert takes the wraps off dangerous and age-old Italian conspiracies. Yet the larger tale belongs to Andrew himself. Through colloquial, reflective prose, "Any Human Face" drags the reader into intimate contact with Andrew and his loneliness, while slaughter and a long-secret kidnapping conspiracy keep the plot racing.
Lambert's novel provides powerful insight into the sinister nature of Italian power, and into human solitude.

You can read the whole review here.

Rome launch

2010-05-28T10:57:00.004+01:00

Well, Any Human Face is now officially launched in its home city of Rome, in the Trastevere studio of Paola Casalino, just round the corner from the setting of the first chapter and a five minute walk from Andrew Caruso's first cold-water garret. I had a wonderful time and I hope everyone else did. You can see some photos of the event, taken by my friend Maika, here. I'll be posting a short film very soon...

A field near Derby at 7 am

2010-05-26T08:55:00.001+01:00

Sophisticated, awesome...

2010-05-22T09:45:00.004+01:00

The first broadsheet review of Any Human Face, in the Guardian. And it's a good one. Phew.

Though not as good as this one on Amazon.

Rome launch

2010-05-16T23:01:00.005+01:00

If you're anywhere near Vicolo dell'Atleta, Trastevere, at 6.30 on 27 May, come along to the Rome launch of Any Human Face. I'll be there!

Not your average thriller

2010-05-16T19:04:00.002+01:00

Nik Perring, author of Not so Perfect, was kind enough to ask me some rather challenging questions about Any Human Face. You can find those questions, and my answers, here.

Absolutely

2010-05-14T21:06:00.002+01:00

The estimable Scott Pack of Me and My Big Mouth has this to say about Any Human Face:

Lambert is really very good indeed.
Will I read on? Absolutely.

If you want to find out why, click here.

It's out!

2010-05-07T09:52:00.002+01:00

Any Human Face goes on sale today. You know what to do. (Pushy, right?) If you're in the UK and don't have a good independent bookseller within reach, then Amazon is probably your best bet. Outside the UK, try Book Depository or CDWoW, where it appears to be temporarily out of stock due to high demand (hmm). And if you're in Rome and can't wait until the launch on 27 May (more details later), pop in to the Almost Corner Bookshop, Via del Moro, Trastevere... Go on, make my day. (Perhaps inappropriate, Ed.)

Death by Zamboni

2010-05-02T15:03:00.000+01:00

Death by Zamboni by David David Katzman

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Exhaustively - and often exhaustingly - funny, this novel uses every comico-literary trick in the book: mixed metaphors, wildly over-extended metaphors ("You can't see the metaphorest for the trees"), parody, surrealist riffs on just about anything that pops into the author's head: they're all there. (A technical note: I love the ongoing game with speech verbs and, at one point and to great comic effect, their absence.) Genre-hopping from hard-boiled-private-eye-meets-dark-lady to mad-scientist-saves-the-world-by-destroying-humanity, with the unexpected casting of a group of mimes as the baddies, the book is finally almost too overjoyed by its own weirdness to sustain itself as, well, a book. But if you like the idea of a post-modern Groucho Marx crossed with an off-the-wall pop Oulipiste (and, let's face it, who doesn't?), you'll love this. Looking forward to the next one, D2!

View all my reviews >>

The Elephant Keeper

2010-04-30T09:27:00.000+01:00

The Elephant Keeper by Christopher Nicholson

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is a wonderful book. It's an account by Tom Page, the elephant keeper of the title, of his relationship with two elephants in 18th century England, and it manages, with no apparent effort, to talk about the nature of love, power structures and their effect on human relationships, notions of the afterlife, landscape gardening and a host of other things. It does so with grace, humour, depth and, above all - perhaps unexpectedly, given that the core of the book describes the love and respect a man can have for an animal - humanity. In an age of taxonomists and dictionary-makers, of professional hermits and travelling menageries, the book gives value to similarity above difference, to care above indifference. Tom Page is a wonderfully conceived character: courageous, touching, stubborn, but with a streak of anti-heroic realism that keeps the reader on tenterhooks. He can also be very funny. I don't think I've used the word unputdownable before. I must have been saving it for this novel. I recommend it to everyone.

View all my reviews >>

Book-loving in Catalonia

2010-04-25T11:22:00.006+01:00

No, I'm not dead, in case you were wondering, and I haven't been resting either, in the Thespian sense or otherwise. As we say here in Italy, when struck by wistful longing, magari (to the latter, obviously: I mean, not death, of which I've had already had more than enough these past few months). To be honest, it's been a period of unrelenting distress and confusion and now we're getting the builders in for three weeks just to finish us off completely. I say three weeks. I must be mad.

Which means that I'm looking forward even more to spending a few days in northern Spain this summer in the company of people who write books and people who love them, and possibly write them too. I've been invited by an organisation called 7 Day Wonder to take part in their book-lovers' holiday near Girona, from 3 to 10 September. The other authors will be Ann Cleeves, Claire Dudman and Adam Nevill, so it's a pretty varied and exciting line-up. Plus, I've been told, the food is fantastic, so you'd be crazy not to sign up this very minute.

Girona, too, is a wonderful place to visit. We went there years before Ryanair started pretending it was a suburb of Barcelona, and loved the high sunlit square in front of the cathedral, the balconies dripping spider plants, the river weirdly packed with fish and some rather interesting chicken rissoley things we ate in a bar. We were travelling with a very complete guidebook, which even told us where the town's red-light district used to be. But we still weren't prepared for the sight of a middle-aged woman in a doorway, black beret tipped teasingly to one side, slit skirt and lightly swinging handbag, looking for all the world like a provincial Marlene Dietrich.

Recycling

2010-04-13T16:32:00.005+01:00

The town I live in, Fondi, has a brand new town council. Well, not quite brand new. The freshly elected mayor (with over 55% of the vote) is a Mr De Meo - you may remember him from the election material I posted some time ago; he's the one with the unnaturally blue eyes, bald head and air of enthusiastic idiocy, as though he'd like to take your children's toys and smash them to bits with a hammer. This might be his first shot at mayoralty, but he's not exactly unused to the corridors of Fondano power: he was responsible for town planning under the previous council, the one that resigned before the government got round to dismissing it for mafia infiltration. De Meo, not surprisingly, appears as a suspect in the accusatory documents - town planning is mafia shorthand for one of those magical pots of gold - you know the kind: the more you take out of them the more there's left to take. He's not alone either. Eleven of the new department chiefs in the new council, responsible for all kinds of ~~lucrative~~ civil activities, have simply been recycled from the previous one, as though re-election had the same kind of cleansing qualities as full confession (and, who knows, perhaps it does). The photograph above is of my local bins, which also preach recycling but don't seem to know quite how it's done.

Foot and mouth disease

2010-04-13T13:19:00.003+01:00

I've been on the point of writing something about the whole paedophile scandal for a couple of weeks now, but really, why bother? The Vatican is doing such a good job of shooting itself in the foot - yes, that's right, the one it's managed to jam into its own mouth - that additional comment from me seems superfluous. Let them get on with it, say I. Ratzinger and his gang of frocked deniers have managed to anger just about everyone and mollify no one so far, something I'd never have dreamed of achieving with my own humble sniping from my own very small rooftop 100 miles away from Ground Control by the Tiber.

So I'm not even going to comment on the latest nonsense from a certain Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone (seen here with friends), who claims that a clear link has been found between paedophilia and homosexuality but not between paedophilia and celibacy (except perhaps to point out that if you're celibate, darling, you're not having sex with anyone). In fact, the only clear link I can find in this whole sad business is the one between a bunch of frightened old men whose authority is being challenged and the spouting of malicious bullshit.

And that's not a comment. That's science.

Lech Kaczynski dies in plane crash

2010-04-10T11:03:00.006+01:00

One dwarfish homophobe less in the world (calm down - I'm talking about the one on the left). Of the evil Polish ex-child stars, Lech is the straight twin; his even more repulsive brother, Jaroslav, is the one rumoured to be gay. He's still alive.

Still, as the Tesco ads always say: Every little helps.

Take your partners

2010-04-09T18:10:00.010+01:00

The nearest I got to any seriously engaged reading during my three years at Cambridge was probably every Thursday when NME came out and, in the company of friends and a pinch or so of grass, we gathered in my room in South Court and subjected each article to the sort of analysis we should have been applying to Samuel Richardson or the Paris commune. It's hard to imagine now, but NME in the early and mid-1970s was a pretty cutting-edge publication, on the look out for music that would meet its journalists' (and readers') intellectual needs and more than fed up with the bombastic, overweening, cod-classical trash - Yes, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, (shudder) Queen - available at the time. So all our ears pricked up when news filtered through of a band, except we didn't refer to them as a band, called the Sex Pistols. Long before they'd recorded anything we followed their antics and the antics of their manager, Malcolm McLaren, including his attempt to resurrect the New York Dolls, an act of such majestic awfulness they could neither survive nor be allowed to die. I never heard the Sex Pistols live - their first gig was a few months after I'd graduated - but I saw Johnny Rotten once, thrillingly, outside a pub in Charlotte Street and I managed to acquire a tee-shirt from Sex, with a hardcore gay orgy silk-screened on the front - a tee-shirt I still have but, unsurprisingly, no longer wear.

A couple of years later I was visiting an aunt of mine in the Midlands. Steeleye Span were playing in town that evening and, for old times' sake, I went to their concert. It was the night Elvis Presley died but that isn't why I remember it. I remember it because the concert I didn't go to that evening was one of the dates of the last (real) Sex Pistols tour in the UK. I didn't go because they were performing under a different name to avoid being banned, and I couldn't have read my NME closely enough that week; I'd slipped out of the loop. In those years, I saw pretty much everyone on the punk and post-punk scene, from X-Ray Spex and Siouxsie and the Banshees to the Buzzcocks and Generation X to Wire and the Gang of Four, but I still regret missing the Pistols for Maddy Prior.

I was in Portugal when Sid Vicious OD'd on heroin, two months after the death of Nancy Spungen. A voice on the BBC World Service announced that Mr Sidney Vicious had been found dead at the age of 21, etc. I wanted to shout out that Vicious wasn't his real surname but found myself crying instead. It was a low point in my life and it felt as though something messy and possible, some sort of dirty inchoate hope for a different sort of future, had been definitively stifled. By the time I was back in Britain, the world had changed, or mine had, and I found myself wearing a suit and working for a medical publisher's near Tottenham Court Road. The man I was working with, it turned out, had shared a flat with Malcolm McLaren and an actress, I think a midget, who'd worked in The Great Rock'n'Roll Swindle. He shook his head when I asked him what it had been like. When I insisted, he mouthed the word 'drugs', and shook his head a second time.

And that slight degree of separation was as close as I got to McLaren, apart from buying his music when a lot of other people had probably stopped. Which doesn't quite explain the sadness I felt this morning when I read that he was dead. It's not like the death of Sid Vicious, but something has gone, a smidgeon of naughtiness and fuck-you-allness that won't come back easily or be found in quite the same guise as it was in McLaren's joyfully sleazy post-situationist stance, and a wide-open and essentially generous eye for the main chance in a world that tends to seize its opportunities, and then close them off, in a meaner and somehow more self-interested way than he did.

Interview

2010-04-06T16:40:00.004+01:00

Patricia E. Fogarty of TheAmerican | inItalia interviewed me recently, about Little Monsters and Any Human Face, along with the whole business of living and writing abroad. As you'll see, I'm snugly placed between a piece on the highly regarded Italian actress Margherita Buy and an article about the eastern coast of Lake Como. You can read the interview here.

To heaven with a handgun

2010-04-06T12:10:00.003+01:00

Would you buy a used apocalypse from these people? More information here.

"By Monday, the Stones’ house stood empty, its front door ajar and two dogs still tied up in the muddy yard, which was littered with dilapidated furniture, a washing machine and tires."

Via Parlamento

2010-04-03T14:04:00.003+01:00

I took this photograph on the day it was announced that the leader of the regional parliament of Sicily was being investigated for Mafia connections. He isn't the first: his baby-faced predecessor was famously photographed offering his partners in crime a trayful of cannoli - a local delicacy - to celebrate his conviction for a similar crime a couple of years ago. This street looks sufficiently nondescript to house the gang of self-interested delinquents that currently run the island ("by special statute"), but the real parliament sits, from Monday to Thursday each week, in a wonderful structure, shared with an Arab tower and a room of extraordinary beauty known, like a child's nursery, as 'Roger's Room', some distance from here. You'd think from the hand-written nature of this street sign that someone is making an ironic comment on the absence, or shabbiness, of the Sicilian parliament, or a suggestion that the damn thing simply go away. But this really is the name of the street, although I've no idea why. In a city where signposts are lamentably few, this small square of cardboard is probably no more than a private gesture of good will.

Biofeed? No thanks!

2010-04-03T13:55:00.007+01:00

The next time you're thinking of adding a little extra fertiliser to that rubber plant in the corner of the living room, consider these monsters from Piazza Marina in Palermo and think again. (I'm just there for purposes of scale.)

Author Blog Awards

2010-03-31T08:25:00.003+01:00

I'd like to thank whoever nominated me for the Author Blog Awards. I'm not sure how this works but it looks as though you can vote for me, raising my profile and readership to new heights. There are quite a lot of us angling for your vote, so don't feel too bad about clicking elsewhere; I'll understand.

The finest dead

2010-03-29T12:59:00.005+01:00

Well, what an unsettling experience. Our last afternoon in Palermo and we found ourselves up near the Capuchin monastery, the one whose catacombs are filled with the dried and mummified remains of some of Palermo's most important citizens. Originally, the catacombs were reserved for friars, the first one - Silvestro of Gubbio (see right) - being placed down there in October 1599. More recently, the tunnels beneath the convent became the place to be - and be seen - for the cream of Palermo society and I've no doubt large sums of money changed hands before the defunct were allowed in and prepared for eternal display. It can't have been a pleasant process, if the description at the entrance is at all accurate. The bodies were seated on marble racks in a room called the colatoio (the dripping or draining room), which was then sealed hermetically until the perishable parts of the body had putrefied sufficiently to drain away and gather on the floor underneath. The corpses were then removed to another room, the drying room, where they were cleaned with vinegar and dressed, often in clothes of their own choosing, before being inserted into niches in the appropriate section and held in place by a wire at the neck. Some bodies have been replaced by straw-filled sacks; others, like Silvestro, have arms and even legs. Some have been embalmed - a two-year-old child who was placed there in the 1920s might have died last week.

All in all, it's a peculiarly dispiriting and discomforting place, perhaps because so many of the ideas behind it are foreign to us, and find us ill-equipped to deal with them; we're surfeited by so many ways of not seeing the dead that to have them ranked before us in their hundreds, dangling from their hoops of wire or stacked, in some cases appearing to strain forward as if to press home the question of our being there, is an assumption of intimacy we're not prepared to take on. I'm not sure what I expected, but what came to mind first was the banality of it, the déjà vu of it. These dead resemble heavy metal sleeves and George A. Romero extras; if you stare at them too long they seem to move. Some of them have crumbled into semi-dust, others are almost intact. The saddest ones, for me, have wisps of hair and moustaches. Those skulls that retain their covering of skin often appear to be howling, presumably the result of the skin shrinking and pulling their jaws open. These bring to mind the almost dead of the camps, the shamelessness and the desperation of those faces as the allied troops rolled in. It's both hard to remember and hard to forget that what we are looking at are human beings who have died. But, after the shock and the thrill and the fascination, what struck me most was the indecency of their display, of their desire for it, and of our attention. It's not a moral or spiritual lesson - I don't feel it taught me anything useful about how to live or die - so much as one of decorum, which is being offended. Every third corpse or so a sign says NO FOTO NO FILM but this doesn't seem to deter anyone, and is presumably only there to increase the sale of postcards in the shop above. In any case, the people who chose to be preserved here would probably have welcomed an audience.

Soft-selling Scent of Cinnamon

2010-03-21T17:13:00.006+01:00

I suppose it's just possible that one or two of you out there might not already own a copy of The Scent of Cinnamon and Other Stories. It's all right, I don't want to know your names. All I want to do is tell you that you can now buy the prize-winning collection in paperback. It's just as big and fat and full of goodness (and a pinch of wickedness too) as it was in hardback, but it costs less! You can buy it direct from Salt at only £8.79 by clicking here.

Which means you no longer have any excuse. Right? So what are you waiting for? Come on...

dsh, or seduction in lower case

2010-03-18T14:38:00.004+01:00

I've been shamefully absent from this blog recently, but, in partial recompense, here's the chance to read a piece I wrote for the first number of the resurrected Cambridge Literary Review about my memories of the concrete poet and Benedictine monk, Dom Sylvester Houedard, otherwise known as dsh and seen here in priestly garb. This excellent new magazine is putting some of its contents online here, but you'd be much happier if you actually bought a copy and held it in your hands. It's beautifully produced and, of course, contains things that will never see the light of a computer screen.

Curtains on Wordle

2010-03-11T19:05:00.001+01:00

Curtains is a new story. This is what it looks like on Wordle. I love Wordle.

Local news

2010-03-11T19:04:00.001+01:00

Philopassianism

2010-03-11T12:29:00.006+01:00

One of the many odd notions peculiar to the religious mindset is that pain is a good thing. This isn't the same as masochism, which allows that pain is fun, a source of gratification, etc. but does not, I think, claim any higher moral ground for what happens as a stiletto heel grinds down into a crotch (ouch!). When Paola Binetti straps that spiky mediaeval thing around her upper thigh, on the other hand, the rush of pain she achieves is somehow ennobling. And when JP2 gave himself a good flogging in the hush of the papal apartment he wasn't just being kinky - he was recharging his soul. That's why the word masochism doesn't begin to describe the saintly practice of getting a hit from suffering. So I was pleased to discover (from a review of Gilte Legende in the LRB, 3 December 2009) that there's another term for it, coined by Esther Cohen: Philopassianism. It's glossed by Barbara Newman thus: 'It differs from masochism in that pain is valued, not as a perverse source of pleasure, but as a moral and spiritual good'. So where does that put people like Mother Teresa, the subject - as you can see from the picture - of a new musical, who don't derive much pleasure from their own pain, but thoroughly enjoy that of others? It's not quite sadism, also a perverse source of pleasure, although it looks worryingly similar.

Maybe it's a case of Munchausen philopassianism by proxy.

Vatican update!

2010-03-05T12:08:00.008+01:00

The Vatican has been having a bit of a rough time these past few days. News arrives from Poland that the 'miracle' needed to sanctify GP2 smells a bit fishy, news that has been roundly denied by B16. In 2006, it was claimed that the wandering Pole had cured a French nun of Parkinson's disease, described by GP2 as 'another sign of God's creativity'. Now it looks as though the nun might not even have had Parkinson's disease, suggesting that the creative one isn't God, but his earthly representatives. They'll have to fish around in the tub of other purported wonder cures to see what they can find. Maybe evangelist Benny Hinn has one he can spare, when he's finished talking to his divorce lawyers and counting his money.

As if this wasn't enough, tapes have just been published of conversations in which a Vatican chorister (correction: ex-Vatican chorister), a certain Thomas Chinedu Ehiem, known to his friends as 'Mike', has been pimping men at the rate of two or three a week for Angelo Balducci, a Gentleman of his Holiness (correction: ex-Gentleman of his Holiness), known to his friends as 'Brenda', and deeply implicated in the latest wave of corruption scandals to fail to rock Italy*. Balducci's tastes are eclectic. Among the men that seem to have been procured by Ehiem are two black Cubans, a RAI dancer and a professional footballer, not to mention assorted seminarians. Still, he doesn't seem that easy a man to please. Ehiem's sidekick, Lorenzo Renzi, apparently told one of the lucky hookers to take the Viagra and not to touch the Gentleman's (correction: ex-Gentleman's) balls. Fussy! In a possibly related item, the Ratisbonne boys' choir appears to have been a hotbed of under-age sexual abuse under the direction of B16's brother, Georg, who ran the show from 1964 to 1993. Now why does the name Georg ring a bell?

And there's no cake without a small and delectable fruit perched on the top. In this case, the cherry is the news that money squirrelled away by Diego Anemone, one of the leading figures in the Italian Civil Protection corruption scandal and currently enjoying the comforts of a cell not that far from Balducci's, has been found in the safe of don Evaldo Biasini. (That's don as in catholic priest, not mafioso. I know, I know...) Something like a million euros was hidden behind a religious painting in the office of the priest, who just happens to be responsible for the financial affairs of an organization called the Congregation of the Missionaries of the Ever-so Precious Blood of Jesus. Where do I start?

* One of these facts about Balducci isn't true. Guess which!

Smut or not smut

2010-03-03T19:29:00.004+01:00

An interesting post on the always interesting ReadySteadyBlog. As someone whose new book (note subtle plug) is being marketed as 'part thriller, part love-story' and in which there is both a murder and a mystery to be solved, I was very interested to see Jon Fosse's stigmatization of the crime novel as 'pornography of death'. Take a look and see what you think. Here's a taste of his views:

What then about crime fiction, so highly esteemed as literature, at least here in the Scandinavian countries? Is it at all literature? No it isn’t. The aim of this literature is not to ask into the fundamentals of existence, of life, of death, it is not to try to reach the universal through the unique, it is a try to avoid such an asking, such unique universality, by stating already given answers that are not really answers, but just something one has heard before. It therefore feels as a pleasant and safe answer, and what feels pleasant and safe one could also call entertaining.

And when you've had a chance to read Any Human Face, I'll tell you what I think...

Now where did I put that old Bible?

2010-03-03T19:03:00.000+01:00

Picador Day

2010-03-02T16:20:00.004+01:00

A little public announcement here for you, folks. I'll be taking part in an event called Picador Day at Foyles, Charing Cross Road, London, on 20 March. You can find the whole programme here, and it looks well worth attending. I'll be on at 12.30, with Graham Robb, William Fiennes and Jim Crace, to discuss Writing and Place. I'll be reading a few pages from Any Human Face and then talking about the role the setting plays in that and other work of mine. I imagine the other three writers will be doing pretty much the same. If you hang around after lunch you'll also be able to find out what lies beyond poetry with, among others, Jackie Kay, and what becoming a writer might involve, with one of my favourite novelists (and a poet to boot), Gerard Woodward. Sounds good.

Um diddle diddle (Shelly Goldstein)

2010-02-27T11:52:00.000+01:00

Three men, one tree, Fondi

2010-02-25T11:05:00.000+01:00

Travelling

2010-02-25T09:25:00.001+01:00

Snow in Rome

2010-02-25T09:22:00.000+01:00

Arseholes (kangaroo) and princes (not)

2010-02-21T16:08:00.011+01:00

Disaster was narrowly averted yesterday evening when Pupo, Pickles and the unknown tenor (see two posts down) came second in the Sanremo song festival. How they did this is anybody's guess, but foul play certainly shouldn't be ruled out and consumer associations are already asking for an investigation to be made. Given that the odds of the unholy trio not making the finals were substantial, there was clearly room for a little imaginative accounting down Ladbrokes way. I wouldn't be surprised if Bertolaso, the nation's saviour, hadn't put a bob or two on them, possibly even of his own money.

I'd have a more detailed account of the evening, which sounds fantastically unstructured and infantile in a way only Italian TV can be, if I'd seen it, but I was, and am, in the UK. Still, I'm sorry I missed the scene where an infuriated orchestra ripped up their sheet music and refused to play, not to speak of Antonella Clerici (see photo) exclaiming Che topolona! at the sight of the private parts of all-round entertainer Loredana Cuccarini or the brass band of the Carabinieri playing the Star Wars theme in a bid to calm things down, like a foretaste of the new regime. This kind of nonsense is not only the stuff of Sanremo legend - it's also, paradoxically, par for the course on Italian telly.

People who don't know the Bel Paese often wonder how on earth the Italian version of a programme like I'm a Celebrity, Get Me out of Here can just go and on for hours, weeks, months, without anyone even seeing a kangaroo's arsehole, let alone eating one. Well, it's easy. All the people on it forget that they're there to further or revive their careers and just go completely OVER THE TOP! It's as though a horde of utterly spoilt children on truth drugs were given free rein to loathe each other and then, to their horror, slapped back into sense and forced to realise what they'd done. It's boring for hours on end and then deeply, grippingly, stomach-turningly awful in a way those of us brought up on the milder fare of Anglo-Saxon television can't begin to imagine. It's almost as excruciatingly adolescent as John Fowles' journals. Well no, not quite that excruciatingly adolescent.

Shored against ruin

2010-02-18T23:45:00.008+01:00

Meet at the Gate, Canongate's excellent book site, has just posted a short piece I wrote about Ross Leckie's Punic trilogy: Hannibal, Scipio and Carthage. These are great historical novels and my piece looks at the way the trilogy contrasts the two warring cities in a sort of paradigmatic way. I won't repeat that here, though I hope you'll take a look over there. But one of the things I most enjoyed about the books - and didn't say in the piece - was the way they play around not so much with the past as such, but with just how we know what we know, or think we know, about the past. The opening novel, Hannibal, is straightforward first-person narrative, and excellently done (as I've said before). The other two novels are - on the surface - a bit more complex and, in some ways, might be less successful as a result, but they're also more intriguing because of what can't be said. First person narrative presupposes a very modern notion of what constitutes character and the self, as in self-awareness and its opposite, self-delusion, and Hannibal takes this as given. Hannibal tells us all he knows but also reveals himself to us in a way that's closed to him, through accidental lacunae and deliberate refusals, so that, by the end of the novel, our knowledge of the man is greater than his knowledge of himself. This is the kind of knowledge about the past we can rarely have, however we seem to be promised it by the notion of history as a sort of authority. In the second novel, Scipio, the story is told, once again, by the hero, Scipio, but this time the information is mediated by Bostar, the man to whom Scipio is dictating his memoirs, but also the teller of his own more ambiguous tale and a man, we discover in the third volume, with his own agenda, in its way as extraordinary as that of the two men he's served. Carthage, which describes the destruction of the great Punic capital (the harbour of which you can see in the picture), takes this doubling one stage further, gathering together a sequence of fragments that imitate the eventual fate of the city and, also, the failure of the Hellenistic faith in reason and logic that Bostar represents. There's a mimetic shift in the feasibility of confidence as the trilogy develops. By the end of it, any faith we might have had in the uniqueness and authenticity of voice, and of history, has been replaced by something more modern.

Pickles returns!

2010-02-17T17:43:00.005+01:00

The Sanremo Song Festival started its annual five-day occupation of RAI Uno last night, with the usual mix of old lags and young hopefuls, people with talent and people with friends, songs we'll be hearing on the radio all summer and songs that are so utterly dreadful they'll barely make it through to the final on Saturday evening, international stars (the unlikely pairing of Susan Boyle and Dita Von Teese) and indigenous celebrities - last night's guest was the charisma-lite footballer Antonio Cassano, who seems to think he's James Dean but is closer to Robin Askwith after the charm has been removed. His mother, in the audience, was apparently worried that someone might steal her mink, perfectly understandable given that she was surrounded by the nomenklatura of the RAI in all its brazen-faced finery.

But the best bit of the show was what happened when Antonella Clerici announced the arrival of Pupo (don't ask) and Emanuele "Pickles" Filiberto, along with a rather good tenor no one had heard of. At the mere mention of the appalling ex-heir to the Italian ex-throne a good proportion of the audience burst into spontaneous jeering, whistles, catcalls, etc. And they hadn't even heard the song! Some time ago I forecast that the grubby halfwit, after winning Italy's Dancing with the Stars, would be starring on Fop Idol. This was meant to be a joke. Given the speed with which satire is overtaken by reality in Berlusconistan (thank you, Wendell), I'll be more careful in the future. And if you'd like to hear the song, winningly entitled Italia amore mio, you can do so here. It's already been eliminated from the festival itself, so this may be your only chance.

But who will protect us from our protectors?

2010-02-16T12:12:00.003+01:00

Guido Bertolaso, the head of civil protection in Italy, looks like turning into the gift that keeps on giving. After being flown to Haiti by Berlusconi to offer his expert advice, he upset Hillary Clinton by calling US aid to the country 'pathetic', only to be contradicted by the Italian foreign minister, Franco Frattini, on behalf of the government. As head of said government, Berlusconi's typically diplomatic response was to pat the man on the back and promise him a ministry, at which Bertolaso had the grace, at least, to cover his face, probably to hide his satisfaction.

Now it turns out that the megalomaniac buffoon's favourite superhero - Rubbish in Naples? Send Bertolaso! Earthquake in Abruzzo? Send Bertolaso! Cat stuck up a tree? Send Bertolaso! - isn't Mr Clean after all. Tapped phone calls have revealed a richly flavoured stew of corruption, fixed tenders, jobs for the boys and the brothers-in-law, with, as a spicy topping, the usual scattering of whores, escorts, masseuses and pimps (see photograph). Bertolaso denies it all, then most of it, then says that it was all too much for one man. He's on TV every night, bewailing the injustice of it all and insisting that everything he's done he's done for Italy. This clashes with a comment he was heard to make while 'solving' the rubbish problem in Naples, to the effect that an emergency stopped being an emergency when the TV and press stopped talking about it, a definition Haiti would do well to remember.

The shit has hit the fan just as the government was about to pass a law that redefined Italian Civil Protection as a Società per azioni, i.e. a public corporation quoted on the stock exchange, with Bertolaso as its natural CEO, thus removing any shred of accountability other than to its shareholders. Given that Berlusconi has been using the civil protection apparatus, and Bertolaso, for such unlikely activities as building the Pharaonic structures originally intended for the last G8 summit and the world swimming championships - a beanfeast for the construction companies involved but hardly natural emergencies - the new law didn't seem that much of a big deal; it merely legitimised the status quo. These latest developments have cast the law, and Bertolaso's saintly dedication to the national good, in a different light.

Chinoiserie

2010-02-15T17:10:00.005+01:00

This illustration appears on one of my favourite blogs, The Age of Uncertainty (where you can see it in a bigger version). I love the way it uses a sort of squiggle to reinforce the depiction of shadow. Steerforth, who discovered it, hopes it will make its way around the blogosphere. I hope so too.

You can find out more about it by clicking here.

Lone nuts and first followers

2010-02-15T11:37:00.002+01:00

Are you a lone nut or a first follower?

(From Cynical-C Blog. Thanks.)

Fuck off, Binetti

2010-02-14T14:13:00.006+01:00

Good news for all those people, like me, who know that the best way of getting rid of Berlusconi is to concentrate votes on the Partito Democratico (PD), but just can't stomach it while Paola Binetti, fundamentalist catholic and - alas - member of the Italian senate, is a PD member. Well, she's gone. That's right, gone. After announcing her opposition to the candidate chosen by the PD for the regional elections in Lazio, Emma Bonino, she's taken her obscurantism and intolerance where it belongs, to the UdC, a party I can't bring myself to describe after a decent lunch. She ought to be a lot more comfortable there. Among her new chums is Rocco "Buttplug" Buttiglione, an orang-utan lookalike and self-styled catholic philosopher, who was forced to resign from his role as EU commissioner some years ago after making a homophobic speech, and then whined about freedom of expression and ungodliness until he was fobbed off with another sinecure. He was working for Berlusconi at the time, without any noticeable spiritual unease, whore-mongers presumably being less disturbing to the soul than the idea of civil partnerships.

Binetti has made a number of previous appearances on this blog. You can find one of them here, along with a picture of her favourite item of jewellery. And while I was looking for a picture to grace this post (and found the one to the right, where the senator is caught discussing that specific item), I came across Binetti's blog. As you can see, it was rather short-lived, withering away after only four posts. I wonder if the little poll she ran (see right, beneath the profile link) discouraged her. She asked her readers if they wanted the law permitting abortion in Italy to be 'modified' (theodem newspeak for 'revoked'). Of the 26 people who bothered to vote, 84% said no. That's the trouble with the internet; it's just too bloody democratic.

Saints and charlatans

2010-02-12T12:42:00.007+01:00

In religious circles there's a term - bilocation - that describes the ability of certain extremely holy figures to be in two places at the same time, obviously for miraculous purposes. Padre Pio was reputed to have this extraordinary power, popping up here to wave a bloody hand at the devil, popping up there to...well, we needn't go into details, but I'm sure a good time was had by all. But this photograph is the first time to my knowledge that an entire group has been able to duplicate itself, presumably at the bidding of the grinning master of ceremonies on the podium. I guess it's a loaves and fishes thing.

(My thanks to Peter and Wayne for drawing my attention to this sacred image.)

Writing in Rome

2010-02-07T13:49:00.004+01:00

If you'd like to spend a month in Rome this summer, before the weather gets too hot, and want to flex your writing muscles at the same time, you might like to consider signing up for the Summer Institute Creative Writing and Literary Translation, run by John Cabot University. Mark Strand and Booker-shortlisted Simon Mawer are, respectively, the Poet and Novelist in Residence, and I'll be running the fiction workshop. Just click on the link for more information.

Gil Scott-Heron: I'm New Here

2010-02-07T12:10:00.002+01:00

Don't miss this interview either...

The Wonder of Whiffling

2010-02-06T18:37:00.004+01:00

A couple of years ago I wrote a post about a book called Toujours Tingo by, as I said then and will repeat now, the splendidly named Adam Jacot de Boinod. The book, a sequel to The Meaning of Tingo, trawls the world's languages for the wise, witty and inconsequential, gathering, among other gems, such terms as chapponage - the act of sliding a finger into a chicken's backside to see if it is laying an egg - and womba - the smile of a sleeping child.

Well, Mr Jacot de Bionod has done it again. His new book, entitled The Wonder of Whiffling is a mine, once more, of the kind of information you never imagined you needed and, once it's acquired, will wonder how you lived without.

To put you in the mood, here are three questions that only this book can answer:

A parnel is:

a) a species of seabird

b) a priest's mistress

c) the lining of a cassock

To call pigs to their food, a 19th century Irish farmer would say

a) hurrish

b) pleck-pleck

c) poa poa

An applesquire is

a) the son of a cider-maker

b) an orchard's bookkeeper

c) the male servant of a prostitute

If you'd like the know the answers to these, along with a host of other lexical wonders, I wholeheartedly recommend The Wonder of Whiffling.

Personality politics

2010-02-04T19:13:00.005+01:00

Local elections are coming up in Fondi and the walls of the town are plastered with advertising for the candidates for town mayor. They tend to appear in pairs, like teenage girls on a first night out. They use as few words as possible and prefer those words to have purely feel-good value. The bald man on the top right, for example, is saying yes to transparency. Beneath him the woman with the pleasant smile is suggesting that we start again, though to do what isn't specified. The man with the glasses on the bottom left is saying yes, you can, which is very generous of him, although, once again, I wasn't aware that his permission was needed. The girls on the top left have nothing at all to do with Fondi, or politics for that matter, but I felt like including them, if only to contrast their very focused plea with the vote-catching vacuity of the mayoral candidates around them.

What's even worse is that, in their frenzy to attract the punter, these mayoral candidates haven't seen fit to indicate their political allegiances. Where do they stand on all that other duller stuff, like job opportunities and how local money is spent and, sorry though I am to bring this up, the role of organised crime in local government? I mean, I'm all in favour of transparency, but not if it's the transparency of De Meo's spiritual father, Saint Silvio of Berlusconi. And knowing that yes, I can might make me feel empowered at the outset, but it starts to lose its appeal if the person enabling me thinks money-laundering, or illegal parking, or building a villa on public land, are some of the things I'm empowered to do.

I think I'll vote for the Faith Tones. They not only have fabulous hair - I know where they stand.

A writer's life

2010-02-03T15:16:00.004+01:00

I just make Facebook friends with fiction writer Viet Dinh and what's the first thing I do? Steal this cartoon from his excellent blog, that's what.

How do I live with myself?

For PC users everywhere

2010-01-30T19:11:00.000+01:00

Customer care

2010-01-25T18:11:00.007+01:00

I was leaving the FAO building in Rome a few days ago when a display of half-price books caught my eye in the international bookshop there, run, I believe, by the Lion Bookshop. The last thing I need is more books, so naturally - in the way these vices perpetuate themselves - I stopped to see what was on offer and found some nice new Penguin editions of a handful of Maigret novels marked down from €10 to €5. I'm a sucker for Simenon (I can't believe I just typed that), so I picked out four and walked into the shop to pay. There were two women behind the counter, neither of whom showed much inclination to attend to me, so I waited in my usual polite way until one of them took the books off me in a crabby, ill-humoured way, as though I'd interrupted her in some more rewarding task. I told her, in English - it was, after all, an international bookshop - that they came from the half-price box outside. Ignoring me, she asked her colleague - in Italian - who had put the books there. Pat, said the other woman. She had no right, snapped Crabby. I can get full price for these books. Well, I don't know, said the other one, you'd better ask Pat when she gets in. She can't just take books off the shelves and put them in the box when she feels like it, continued Crabby. The other woman shrugged. Well, you'll have to tell her yourself, she said, while I stood there, wallet in hand, waiting for the discussion to finish. Eventually, I asked Crabby, also in Italian, if she intended to sell me the books or not. My intention, if not my tone, was ironic. She clutched the Maigrets to her chest. I suppose I can give you a 30% discount, she said, in a tone that suggested I'd been caught in the act of extracting a tenner from her purse. Normally, if anger is a cooking technique, I'm more of a pot roast than a stir fry, but this time my temper flared and I told the woman I wouldn't have the books if she gave me them, and left. But I wish I'd made her sell them to me at the full discount, if only out of spite. What she's done, of course, is make it unlikely that an incorrigible book-buyer (me) will use the shop again; she's also responsible for this post. On the other hand, she did save €6.

Thinking about it afterwards, I realise I shouldn't have been surprised. The main branch of the Lion Bookshop is notorious for its ill-mannered staff and over-priced stock, despite its claim to be an important reference point for the English speaking community. Perhaps someone should tell them about the Almost Corner Bookshop.

It should be part of the deal

2010-01-22T12:50:00.008+01:00

I was going to do a simple post today, celebrating my blog's third birthday. But I've just received an email that I thought I'd share with you instead. It comes from someone who doesn't sign his (her?) name but shops at Waitrose and mails from the address ckr@waitrose.com. The subject is "It should be part of the deal that I as an individual is (sic) told the book I am reading is written by a homosexual."

Had I known you were homosexual I would not have chosen to read your book. But once bitten............. etc! Your plea (read this) for others to see reason and accept homosexuality falls on deaf ears with myself and the majority of people. The recent years of outpouring of vile homosexual promotion from every corner, has done them no favours whatsoever. Instead we now know "homophobic" attacks have never been greater. I am not in anyway supporting this, just reporting facts.

But why should we (the general public) be forced to agree with such depravity. When gays become unwell, as they will, it is of their own making. They bring about their own demise. Penetrating the anus, the bodies sewage system is an extraordinary low life act. Why would anyone ever want to engage in any activity that involves their own and others faeces?! It is the most direct way to pass life eroding disease from one individual to another.

The only cure for A.I.D.S is to stop the debauchery that causes it.

I'm not sure which of my books ckr has read, but I hope the experience wasn't too distressing (or, indeed, faecal). In the meantime, it might be worth considering some sort of colour code indicating the sexual preferences of all authors to protect such delicate readers. And why stop at authors? Why not doctors? Busdrivers? It should be part of the deal....

Fear and loathing in Empoli

2010-01-20T07:53:00.007+01:00

This sign, which forbids entry to all Chinese who don't speak Italian, can be found* in the window of a clothes shop in Empoli, near Florence. In an Italy that seems to have woken up and found itself racist and can't quite work out why, this looks like just one small tile in an increasingly large and ugly mosaic, if that isn't too colourful a term for the phenomenon. But there's an interesting and, to my mind at least, partly mitigating, story behind the sign. The owner of the shop, Gino Pacilli, says that he's sick and tired of Chinese customers coming into the shop, examining the way the clothes are made, trying them on, refusing to speak Italian when he asks them if he can help, leaving without buying or saying Grazie. He claims that they're simply checking out the competition and looking for items they can profitably make copies of, undercutting the legit producers from whom he buys his stock (almost certainly made in China). It's certainly true that there's a massive presence of Chinese sweatshops, invariably both illegal and exploitative, producing clothes in the Florence area, and that the Chinese community is the least interested of all ethnic communities in integration, to the point of concealing its birth and death rates from the local authorities so that documents can be recycled (Chinese immigrants to Italy rarely die, in official terms at least). So, while there's no doubt that the sign is ostensibly racist, there's also a sort of exasperation and anxiety behind it that shades the issue grey, just as the Rosarno riots two weeks ago were shaded grey by the social context in which they took place, the presence of organised crime, the absence of the state, and so on - a presence and absence from which both local people and immigrants suffered on a daily basis, and in which they were all, without exception, complicit. In this type of situation, blanket accusations of racism may be as compromised, and ineffective, as the racism they're attacking. In the meantime, Pacilli says that no more Chinese customers have entered his shop - a sure sign that they do in fact read Italian. If that were the case, of course, they could enter with impunity. But whoever said fear and its consequences were logical?

* The sign has now been taken down and Pacilli has apologised to the Chinese community about any offence he might have caused. Which solves precisely nothing.

Wrap it up

2010-01-14T10:58:00.002+01:00

This sculpture, outside the House of Deputies in Madrid, may look like a Christo but it's just been wrapped to protect it from damage during the works taking place in the square (I imagine). Christo prides himself on the fact that all his work is temporary and that he has no existing artworks. If public works take as long to complete in Spain as they do in Italy this statue looks set to remain under wraps for longer than anything ever covered by the well-known Bulgarian packager and his collaborator-wife, Jeanne-Claude, now alas dead. I can't help wondering if her body was cremated or embalmed in some way. The earliest example of meaningful wrapping I remember was Lon Chaney's Mummy. And now I really must take a nap.