Dentro il Palazzo Fuga

How do you begin a blog? I don't know, and all those I've checked seem to have been going so long as to have never begun at all. So, I shall jump straight in.

I am reading Tahar Ben Jelloun's L'Auberge des Pauvres - that is, I am reading L'Albergo dei Poveri, the Italian translation, which Serena gave me months ago when she came to stay, and which I have finally got around to tackling. I'm about half-way through. The story is narrated by Bidun ('senza', or 'without'), a Moroccan professor of Comparative Literature and minor writer, who comes to Naples on a creative writing grant to write a book about the city, and to find the Italian woman with whom he has been in correspondence. At the Albergo dei Poveri, the enormous, delapidated, almost abandoned almshouse on via Foria, he encounters 'la Vecchia,' an old bag lady and collector of stories who lives within.

As the title suggests, the Albergo is itself an important 'character'. Built by Charles III to house his poorest subjects, it is one of the largest eighteenth-century structures in Europe, and, until its recent makeover, sat in the middle of Naples like a 'transatlantico arrugginito', a rusted transatlantic liner. Within the novel it is described as "l'asilo dei Rifiuti", the asylum of the discarded, "il rifugio della grande solitudine", the sanctuary of grand solitude, and, perhaps above all, "l'Albergo degli Amori straziati", the hotel of broken loves. It is "l'Albergo dei Naufraghi dell'Amore, o se vuoi dei Naufraghi della vita", the hotel of love's shipwrecks, or, if you prefer, of the shipwrecks of life. The tales told within are all tales of broken love, and of an accompanying fragmentation of the sense of self that is at the same time its assertion of wholeness.

The book hasn't yet been translated into English, so far as I can gather. The edition I have, which is published by Pironti, prefaces the novel with eight pages of black and white photographs of Naples. The photos are good enough in themselves, if rather predictably evocative of the sinister Baroque Napoli of old women in catacombs tending the skulls of adopted strangers. Their connection to the novel, though (and bear in mind I'm only half-way through, so who knows) seems tangential at the very best. The back cover declares that the novel was born 'almost by chance' at the table of a Neapolitan restaurant during a conversation between the author and the editor, who offered to put him up during his stay in the city. We're left to infer from the book's existence that Ben Jelloun took advantage of this invitation. Luciano Ferrara, the photographer, acted as the author's guide, which would explain the photographs' presence here.

On his official website, however, Ben Jelloun describes this edition so:

Pironti, a former boxer turned editor, gets hold of the French edition, has it translated and publishes the novel without a contract. A few months later, the book is published by my regular publisher Einaudi. A lawsuit for piracy follows. Pironti counter-sues for defamation, as I have called him “a thief and a pirate”. Rift with my friend and translator Egi Volterrani, who deceived me and was responsible for my problems with Pironti.

It sounds like there's a whole novel there. Volterrani is the translator of the Einaudi edition - the Pironti translation is by Filomena Vitale. If the National Library catalogue ever comes online again I'll see if I can get hold of the Volterrani and compare the two. This row over the translation I'm reading - and, probably, the fact that Pironti is based in Naples (at Port' Alba,

scene of the one attempted mugging I managed to foil) - makes me wonder if it isn't simply a pezzotto knock-off job. But then Ben Jelloun's snobby little reference to Pironti being an ex-boxer (so what?) irritates me too, and his website certainly suggests he might be a difficult character.

The impression I have from the Vitale is that Ben Jelloun has a clean, almost purposefully naïve prose style, which lets the stories take centre-stage. (I've no idea whether it would be correct usage to do so, but in Italian I'd be tempted to describe it as liscio). I've just been reading about the reaction in the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries against florid Ciceronian prose styles, in favour of a Senecan simplicity - there's probably no properly legitimate parallel to make, but both in style and structure L'Albergo feels a refreshing antidote to some of the more ostentatiously postmodern metafictional stuff I've read of late - much of which I've liked too (Jacques Roubaud's The Great Fire of London kept popping into my head as I read this, although for no good reason that I've yet managed to pin down). L'Albergo has all that metafictional stuff going on - it is about a writer, after all - but doesn't smell of the schools (Jonson's {unfair} bash at Drummond's verse).

Again, to ramrod my academic work in here, Morris Croll makes a distinction between two kinds of brevity that emerge as part of the Senecan, neo-Stoic reaction against Ciceronian embellishment: the curt, and the loose. I still need to get to grips properly with this distinction myself - I couldn't get hold of Croll's essay today, so this is a third-hand version at the moment - but what I understand is that the curt aims at transparency, letting the thing or thought stand clear from the texture of the prose, and finding an internal stability (associated with the exercise of reason); while the loose entails a freer experimentation with thought, is associated with Montaigne, who saw the deployment of reason as varying from individual to individual, and sets a pattern for the libertine mode that comes after.

Ben Jelloun's style here, at least as filtered through Vitale and my often deficient reading of Italian, seems closest to the curt, although that word could only be applied in a technical, Crollian (??) sense. In fact, the style throughout is engagingly conversational. Of course, there's a question here as to whose tone I'm talking about: the author's, or his characters' (and whether that distinction holds good anyway). All the characters' narratives (so far, at least) are transmitted through the voice of the narrator, and perhaps for that reason the style seems unified, smooth, notwithstanding the several, very different voices that are speaking.

One thing I like about L'Albergo is that it portrays a Naples I recognize, a Naples that faces across the Mediterranean to Africa, rather than Northwards to Rome, let alone Milan. It's the Naples of the Senegalese, i marrocchini, the senza documenti, and of those on the edge of society, in a city where the edge is sharp and at the centre. What Bidun says of Naples here is perhaps not particularly original, but comes close to my experience:

Napoli! Prima di arrivare qui da voi, ho cercato il centro di questa città; non l'ho trovato. Non ci ho capito niente. Sento che la città attrae e respinge perché, prima di tutto, è un porto in cui la vita è tumultuosa, fatta di lampi, temporali, fantasia, una vita cangiante, mascherata, brutale, sporca, piena di colori e di spezie, inverosimile, stupefacente, deludente, dove la verita non è mai unica, mai sicura, la menzogna è necessaria, il furto è un arte, il riso una volonta, dove le superstizioni si mescolano alla realtà, il sogno scende neo sotteranei e le rondini fanno il nido nelle moschee...

I never had that feeling of confusion - the confusion made perfect sense to me before I had a chance to try to understand it, perhaps corresponding to a consonant confusion within me at that time. But otherwise that's a fair description of my initial impressions of the city.

At the same time, there are things that trouble me in the novel. Sometimes it has a kind of seductive home-spun cleverness that makes me look at its evenness of tone more sceptically:

Le persone che hanno certezze, che non dubitano mai, sono incredibili. Sono come fatte di cemento. Ma non bisogna fidarsi del cemento. La minima crepa nel muro può provocare il crollo di tutta la casa.

People who are always certain, who never doubt, are incredible. They're like beings made of cement. But one shouldn't trust cement. The smallest crack in the wall can cause the whole house to collapse.

The first time I read this I hid my suspicions about it away somewhere and took it as a clever simile. But actually, what is most striking about it is that we do trust cement, or at least I do. Very few houses made of cement collapse, and very few cracks in cement do cause the whole structure to break. It's true that in Naples whole apartment blocks sporadically collapse into the ground - but this is the result of the warrenous sotteranea, the underground city that means Naples is essentially built on a honeycomb. And then what follows from this is that, in my experience, it's exactly those people who never do seem to crack. Petrify to a rictus, yes, and of course sometimes the breakdown comes, but often it seems to me it doesn't, and that's the tragedy, both for them and for those of us who crack up rather too easily and would like a bit of that solidity. The simile ultimately reads to me like wish-fulfillment. And I do wonder whether there's something sentimental going on here, akin to the worst magic realism. Of course, I'll have to wait and see where the book goes. After this I'd like to have a look at his book Racism Explained to my Daughter, which I discovered my French friend, Lise, was reading when I began L'Albergo.