RARA-AVIS: French smoke

From: Steve Novak ( Cinefrog@comcast.net)
Date: 16 Feb 2008


From the Guardian UK....this interesting interview of Vargas... Steve Novak Cinefrog@comcast.net

Crime writer Fred Vargas - also a renowned archaeologist and vociferous political campaigner - is not only a bestseller in her native France, but a hit across the English-speaking world

Nicholas Wroe Saturday February 16, 2008 The Guardian

About a third of the way through French crime writer Fred Vargas's new policier, This Night's Foul Work, the sometimes infuriating, sometimes inspirational hero, Commissaire Adamsberg, stands over a grave he has ordered to be opened. Adamsberg is a man who values intuition as much as logic, and while there seems to be nothing suspicious in the disinterred plot, his nagging hunch that foul play has occurred - the menacing sense of
"shade" that haunts him - is not unfounded. Turning to a subordinate, he explains: Article continues

"If there's a sound to be heard, and we're not hearing it, it means we're deaf. The earth isn't dumb, but we are not skilled enough. We need a specialist, an interpreter, someone who can hear the sound of the earth."
"What do you call one of those?" asked Justin, anxiously.

"An archaeologist," said Adamsberg, taking out his telephone. "Or a shit-stirrer, if you prefer."

It is not a bad description of Vargas herself. She is a distinguished archaeologist who has written important works on medieval social structures and on the epidemiology of the plague. She is also a vociferous and persistent critic of the French political and judicial systems as a prominent supporter of the fugitive Italian writer Cesare Battisti, exiled from France and currently in custody in Brazil, who is accused of committing terrorist offences in Italy in the 1970s.

But Vargas is now best known as a crime writer. Her stories of Adamsberg negotiating his rural Pyrenees roots with his job in a Parisian murder squad
- in the latest novel, he places a pebble from a village stream on the desks of his wearily perplexed staff after a trip home - have not only topped the French bestseller lists, but stormed the English-speaking world. Her 1999 novel L'Homme ࠬ'envers, published in English as Seeking Whom He May Devour in 2004, was shortlisted for the Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger. In 2006, she picked up the International Dagger for The Three Evangelists
(Debout les morts), and last year she repeated the triumph - an unprecedented double - with Wash This Blood Clean from my Hand (Sous les vents de Neptune)

Speaking in the offices of her French publisher in a courtyard just off the Place de la Bastille in Paris, Vargas exudes the focused intensity of the proselytising political activist. But she says her roles as scientist, campaigner and novelist are essentially separate. "I don't think the detective story is there to change social reality. As a historian, I know that decisive victories in social and political problems are not made by authors. ɭile Zola did it with J'accuse, but that wasn't a novel. The novel serves other purposes, which are just as important and deep in their own way, but they are different to politics."

Vargas sees the novel, and the detective story in particular, as fulfilling some of the same functions as Greek tragedy. In This Night's Foul Work, Adamsberg travels out to a Normandy village where the locals' caustic observations on his investigation resemble nothing so much as a Greek chorus. "I like to use these people from villages. Theirs are the voices that never move and never change." She makes a low humming noise. "I think of the story like an orchestra with the violins and the brass at the front taking forward the action. But at the back are basses" - more low humming -
"making a noise that comes from eternity. I know the Normans very well because my mother's family is from there. But for me they represent all village people, and by extension some sense of elemental humanity."

Fred Vargas was born Fr餩rique Audouin-Rouzeau in Paris in 1957. Both she and her twin sister Jo, a painter, adopted the name Vargas from the Ava Gardner character - the Spanish dancer Maria Vargas - in The Barefoot Contessa. Their father was a prominent surrealist who wrote studies of Andr銊Breton and other leading figures in the movement, but he made his living working for an insurance company. "He never talked about his job," she recalls. "Apart from saying 'I am going to the box.'"

Vargas says her father was a brilliant but intimidating presence who seemed to know about everything except science. He forbade television, and from the
"thousands" of books in the house he would "authorise" what the children could read - mostly myths, folk tales and 17th-century baroque poetry. "Can you imagine it? Having books that were 'authorised'! And many of them were too old for children, although I did love the myths. And our house was also full of primitive arts and masks and this surrealist fascination with death and decay. Thank God my mother was a chemist who helped us keep our heads on our shoulders, because a surrealist atmosphere is really not so good for children."

It's no surprise that the children eventually rebelled in interesting ways. Vargas's elder brother, St鰨ane, is a leading historian of the first world war. "My father absolutely hated war and thought it was disgusting. So my brother did history - as father would have liked - but another type of history. My father was a wonderful cartoonist, but my sister's art is very different. I went into science and then writing. He was a wonderful writer, but thought that detective stories were the silliest thing imaginable."

Although her father wrote many books about surrealism, he never published
"anything personal", Vargas explains. "I once asked him why and he told me that, when he was 17, he had said to himself he will be 'Rimbaud or nothing'. That is a bit sad." Vargas began to write when her father was ill at the end of his life, and he died before she was published. "But of course I would have shown it to him and I know what he would have said: 'Fred, this is shit from A to Z' . And he would have been right, and I would have stopped writing, so it is strange how it worked out."

It was while on an archaeological dig in the Midi when she was 28 that Vargas began writing "for fun. I'd tried the accordion and was terrible." She loved her job, but when she looked at her older colleagues, she knew she had to have "something else" in her life "apart from this rather austere science".

Her first book, Les Jeux de l'amour et de la mort (Games of Love and Death), won a competition for unpublished manuscripts. The prize was publication, but she says "it was a very bad book. My ambition was to find some music in the language, but I made the mistake of thinking the plot had no importance. Now I hope I also put in a good story, but I still believe even the best story is nothing without having music in the writing."

The music she was seeking to emulate came from Rousseau, Proust and Hemingway. "Rousseau was my first love when I was 15. He was so criticised at the time when compared to Voltaire, whom I never liked. But in the French language, his writing achieved the most beautiful music." Since the 1970s, Vargas argues, serious literature has regarded stories as "slightly silly", forcing them to become "refugees" in the crime novel. "It has been a literature of narcissism about 'me and my family', 'me and my problems', 'me and my lover'. I'm sick of it, especially as Proust did this perfectly all those years ago. But when he spoke of himself, he spoke of the whole world. Most writers today just speak of themselves. And Hemingway's language is precisely the opposite of Proust in that it feels rougher, and while Proust could deal with the infinite smallness of life, Hemingway has the infinite hugeness of it."

Despite her own disappointment with her first novel, Vargas took to writing as she "did to smoking - it was an addictive habit". She began to write the first drafts of new books during her three-week summer holidays, and followed this routine until four years ago when she took a break from archaeology. "I had completed two big projects and needed a rest. I had always been interested in the economic story of the Middle Ages, the Roman times and the 16th and 17th centuries. I wanted to paint a picture of economic life, but also cultural life, involving hunting and eating habits. Show me what someone eats, and I will show you who they were." She ended up with a comparative research project that included over a thousand archaeological sites from different periods. "I then continued with another interest I had about the rat and the transmission of the plague - it had never been resolved to my satisfaction - and that took six years."

With her books selling well enough for her to support herself and her son, she took a year off. "It was wonderful. I had all this time in front of me to work on another book. Three weeks later, it was finished. The problem never was me having to work in this way, the problem was me. I take time to correct and change the books, but my first drafts still take three weeks."

By the time she was due to return to work, she had become involved in the campaign to exonerate Battisti - who denies the 1970s terrorist charges against him - and she put her research skills to use in the Italian legal archives to try to clear his name. "I told them not to wait for me. Something more urgent had come up." The campaign continues, and Vargas has written a book explaining why her friend is innocent. She has also found time for a dispute with the French ministry of health about her suggestions for dealing with a potential avian flu epidemic - "it is 90% certain to happen" - based on her research into the plague.

"I'm involved in many fights, which can be quite dangerous sometimes. And I will continue to shout that there is something rotten in the state of France and Italy and everywhere in Europe. But I do this with reality. With facts and with interviews and with protest. When I write about archaeology, I use science. My novels are something else again."

She says she has a theory of art, into which the crime novel fits, that goes back to Neolithic times. "I think art emerged as a sort of medicine to deal with the fact that we are afraid, alone, small and weak in a dangerous world. But we are not like all the other animals and cannot live with just a pragmatic and realistic life. So we invent a second reality, similar but not identical to ours, into which we escape to confront these perils."

Her work is defiantly not realistic in that Adamsberg drives just a car, not, say, a Renault, and we don't know what he eats or wears or listens to.

"In real life, I love clothes and labels and shops. But not in my novels. It becomes too precise." She unexpectedly cites Agatha Christie as a model.

"Holmes is rightly thought to be brilliant, and people now laugh at Christie. But I see links between her and the mythology I read when I was young, and I think she was conscious of it, too. Like her, I want to tell a story that identifies and deals with the dangers we face. It's no longer wild animals, but the fears are just as real, so I make a journey with the reader, confront the horror of humanity, and deliver them safely home. Instinctively we feel better and can sleep soundly. Then, in the morning when the sun comes up, we can again face the world and move forward."

Inspirations

Marcel Proust Jean-Jacques Rousseau Ernest Hemingway Agatha Christie Arthur Conan Doyle

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2008

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