| Saturday, May 3, 2008 11:36AM | | | | Bad Boys, Bad Boys | Posted By: Marlon James
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The Mean Streets:
I could call it the bad boys panel, but that would seem glib not to mention reductive. Truth be told, you could almost feel this panel, all men except for the brilliant and spunky SJ Rozan sapping the testosterone from everybody in the room. The topic was “Mean Streets” and the writers, Jo Nesbo (Norway), Roberto Saviano (Italy), Christian Jungersen (Denmark) and Juan Gabriel Vasquez (Colombia). Whether through non-fiction (Saviano’s blistering account of Neapolitan crime organizations), hard-boiled Scandinavian crime fiction (Jo Nesbo), a workplace hell unlike anything you’ve ever imagined (Jungersen) or a report from the dark days of Colombia’s recent history (Gabriel Vasquez), they have all written books that plunge into unflinching darkness, with boldness, candor, and sometimes even beauty.
Saviano recalled the first murder he witnessed, a priest gunned down in his own neighborhood when he was still a teenager; a priest who had ran afoul of the Camorrah, the Neapolitan mafia. The shock and shame of it produced an outrage in him, an anger that could only be quenched by writing about it many years later. And while closure did come, the end of one season in hell came with the beginning of another, where he became the marked man. It’d easy to call Saviano brave but I think he looked at his actions as merely what had to de done— the right thing by any other name. Asked if he would have still written this book had he known the consequences, he replied that he would have changed it “1000 times.”
Perhaps buoyed by Saviano’s own heroism ( a tag he refused), conversation lead to the nature of the hero itself —especially in morally ambiguous fiction and non-fiction steeped in hearts of darkness. To Jo Nesbo the almost classic sense of the hero still mattered, an essentially good man, maybe even a potentially great one hemmed in by a flaw that he had to transcend. Usually the righting of wrong and the overcoming of weakness coincided so that true heroism was an internal and external act at once. Vasquez rejected the classic hero in his own work, while Jungersen made a critical distinction between heroes and ordinary people who did heroic things.
Funnily enough it was Saviano, the only writer dealing explicitly with non-fiction, who reminded us that the very notion of the hero or villain depend on a number of things, not the least of which, who is telling the story. Growing up in Naples it was the Mafia that were the heroes, the men who by their glamour, wealth and bravado embodied the heroic ideal. Or at least the ideal man to look up to. It was bound to appear in a panel dominated by men, the confession that heroism and masculinity seemed too tightly intertwined, that the hero himself is the very masculine archetype. Saviano was quick to support and dispel this theory at once, pointing out how these very mafia types drew for exaggerated fictional types on which to model themselves—a mafia man who built his house in an exact replica of Tony Montana’s in Scarface, or made men, practicing lines from The Godfather; uncanny cases of real people drawing from fiction to appear more real.
Any panel with writers if it goes well becomes a veritable lesson on storytelling itself. Nesbo and Gabriel came from opposing ends; Nesbo preferred clearly plotted Characters whose motives earn the readers trust from the get-go while Gabriel preferred narrators who didn’t know the story before they began to tell it. And even with that in mind they all rejected overt displays of technique, over-clever tricks that drew attention to itself. Jurgensen admired novels where the characters continually evolved and reader is continually molding his expectations as the story changed. Saviano drew from great non-fiction novels like Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, where fact gained gravitas from the techniques of fiction.
It’s fitting then that one of the questions from the audience was what drew these writers to the mean streets in the first place. Aren’t they all to some extent drawn to the very darkness they wrote about? Both Saviano and Gabriel reminded us that they weren’t drawn to mean streets but raised in them. Nesbo admitted to being drawn to darkness but only in the service of recognizing how much more heroic mere heroism is. Saviano, was quick to admit the appeal of crime stories, but also the limitations of the form especially when reality is much darker. “Stories must not stop at the sight of blood, but give us the stench of money,” he said. Crime is a business and everybody pays in one way or another. And real heroism is not just in big gestures but when ordinary, good people resist, and refuse on their own terms. | | | |
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