It’s probably true that readers come to expect a certain product from an author, though this may be more true of specific genres like crime fiction and historical romances, built, to a more or lesser extent, on working, known models. Good authors, however, surprise. They are to be identified, as often as not, by the breadth and range of their writing, the diversity of the situations they tackle and the spread of characters they invent. Louis de Bernières is one such.
He started his writing career with the so-called South American trilogy (The War of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts (1990), Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord (1991) and The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman (1992).
The South American titles are all well written and plotted, with quirky, fully-fleshed characters who stay as voices in your head long after you have finished the books. De Bernières is also one of those remarkable authors who is able to inject pathos and sympathy for his characters without becoming maudlin or overly sentimental. Simply put, as well as being funny and true, his writing can make you very sad too. In fact, it can be quite operatic. Imagine for a moment the aria I Pagliacci, a clown singing with tears in his eyes, quite beautifully. I remember being shocked by the brutality in these books, characters that you had lived with for hours and pages being killed in the most gruesome fashion, yet, de Bernières holds it all together and never slips into gratuitous horror. In his books violence is a fact of life, and serves to make a point. Perhaps it is something inherent in South American authors and those who spent time there, due to their situations and history, (not unlike South African writers), that violence and death are such an integral part of their writing. Much the same (surprisingly savage) violence can be found in Puig and Llosa, even Borges and Marquez.
It was his fourth novel, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (1993), that bought him to the attention of a large, world-wide audience. It became so well-known and –liked that it suffered the ghastly fate of coming to the notice of the terminally dim-witted, addle-brained, money-hungry denizens of high office in Hollywoodland.
It was degraded into a Hollywood movie, but by all accounts the author was not happy with the outcome. He was correct in that respect and it is an entirely missable, if not entirely tiresome adaptation of a subtle, clever, funny book. (Incidentally, for a really good cinematic interpretation along the same lines, look for the Italian movie Mediterraneo – it will leave you with a smile on your face, and that is almost more than one can reasonably ask for.)
Many would have thought that Captain Corelli’s Mandolin was the best he could, or would, do. Many would have been completely wrong. Birds Without Wings (2004) followed. It’s a masterpiece, a big, beautiful, sprawling epic of the Middle East. Set in a small village in Turkey in the time leading up to, and during, the First World War, in the time of Kemal Atatürk, it recounts the story of two friends, one Christian, one Muslim, making their way in a world that is soon torn asunder by world-wide conflict, the disintegration of old ways and the eruption of nationalistic and religious conflicts. It is a very rare thing, a book that makes sense of the lunacy, the zealotry and the seeming mercilessness of the Middle East. It’s a thick, juicy, funny, sad, true, wise look at a part of the world with problems so intractable that the rest of the world really would like to forget that it was there at all.
His latest offering, A Partisan’s Daughter (2008) is, to just burden the hackneyed phrase absolutely to death, another masterpiece. This time he picks another part of the world that seems to suffer a spot of bother every now and again – the Balkans. Her father a partisan with Tito in the Second World War, Roza lives in a squat in England in the Seventies, and tells her tale to Christian in a series of encounters, chapters alternating turn by turn with the voices, thoughts and experiences of a twenty-something Roza and forty-something Chris.
De Bernières’ fluidity of writing, his ear for dialogue and the way he manages to observe details that make you go “ah” when you read it is nothing short of remarkable. He has the heart of a storyteller. He makes you listen to what he says. You find yourself turning pages just to find out what happens, and along the way become so entranced with the characters, their lives and thoughts, that the world he makes for you, the words he feeds you, the thoughts he plants and the conversations he offers you, lets you into a complete, and completely human, world of his making. Along the way he tells you how the world came to be the way it is. By sketching the lives of people not unlike you, he reveals history to you. Not the large history of dusty tomes filled with reams of dates of slaughters past, nor that of equally dusty dons, nit-picking cause and effects over port and stilton, but the real, local, immediate history of people trying to live lives forever at the mercy of events too large for them to ever influence in the slightest.
He has a turn of phrase, a sense of language and an understanding of human experience that never ceases to take your breath away with the startled realisation of just having had the truth revealed to you. “Old men don’t become virtuous just because age pins them up against a wall and snarls contempt into their ears. Time screws death into you through every orifice, but it never stops you yearning.” ( From A Partisan’s Daughter).
Perhaps he is so succesful as a writer because he submerses himself so completely into his characters and their circumstances, whether they be boys, men or women, and in whatever troubled region they live, that he never once fails to make them real and honest and true. How else can we understand the world than by looking at it through the eyes of those who live there, and then?
He started his writing career with the so-called South American trilogy (The War of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts (1990), Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord (1991) and The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman (1992).
The South American titles are all well written and plotted, with quirky, fully-fleshed characters who stay as voices in your head long after you have finished the books. De Bernières is also one of those remarkable authors who is able to inject pathos and sympathy for his characters without becoming maudlin or overly sentimental. Simply put, as well as being funny and true, his writing can make you very sad too. In fact, it can be quite operatic. Imagine for a moment the aria I Pagliacci, a clown singing with tears in his eyes, quite beautifully. I remember being shocked by the brutality in these books, characters that you had lived with for hours and pages being killed in the most gruesome fashion, yet, de Bernières holds it all together and never slips into gratuitous horror. In his books violence is a fact of life, and serves to make a point. Perhaps it is something inherent in South American authors and those who spent time there, due to their situations and history, (not unlike South African writers), that violence and death are such an integral part of their writing. Much the same (surprisingly savage) violence can be found in Puig and Llosa, even Borges and Marquez.
It was his fourth novel, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (1993), that bought him to the attention of a large, world-wide audience. It became so well-known and –liked that it suffered the ghastly fate of coming to the notice of the terminally dim-witted, addle-brained, money-hungry denizens of high office in Hollywoodland.
It was degraded into a Hollywood movie, but by all accounts the author was not happy with the outcome. He was correct in that respect and it is an entirely missable, if not entirely tiresome adaptation of a subtle, clever, funny book. (Incidentally, for a really good cinematic interpretation along the same lines, look for the Italian movie Mediterraneo – it will leave you with a smile on your face, and that is almost more than one can reasonably ask for.)
Many would have thought that Captain Corelli’s Mandolin was the best he could, or would, do. Many would have been completely wrong. Birds Without Wings (2004) followed. It’s a masterpiece, a big, beautiful, sprawling epic of the Middle East. Set in a small village in Turkey in the time leading up to, and during, the First World War, in the time of Kemal Atatürk, it recounts the story of two friends, one Christian, one Muslim, making their way in a world that is soon torn asunder by world-wide conflict, the disintegration of old ways and the eruption of nationalistic and religious conflicts. It is a very rare thing, a book that makes sense of the lunacy, the zealotry and the seeming mercilessness of the Middle East. It’s a thick, juicy, funny, sad, true, wise look at a part of the world with problems so intractable that the rest of the world really would like to forget that it was there at all.
His latest offering, A Partisan’s Daughter (2008) is, to just burden the hackneyed phrase absolutely to death, another masterpiece. This time he picks another part of the world that seems to suffer a spot of bother every now and again – the Balkans. Her father a partisan with Tito in the Second World War, Roza lives in a squat in England in the Seventies, and tells her tale to Christian in a series of encounters, chapters alternating turn by turn with the voices, thoughts and experiences of a twenty-something Roza and forty-something Chris.
De Bernières’ fluidity of writing, his ear for dialogue and the way he manages to observe details that make you go “ah” when you read it is nothing short of remarkable. He has the heart of a storyteller. He makes you listen to what he says. You find yourself turning pages just to find out what happens, and along the way become so entranced with the characters, their lives and thoughts, that the world he makes for you, the words he feeds you, the thoughts he plants and the conversations he offers you, lets you into a complete, and completely human, world of his making. Along the way he tells you how the world came to be the way it is. By sketching the lives of people not unlike you, he reveals history to you. Not the large history of dusty tomes filled with reams of dates of slaughters past, nor that of equally dusty dons, nit-picking cause and effects over port and stilton, but the real, local, immediate history of people trying to live lives forever at the mercy of events too large for them to ever influence in the slightest.
He has a turn of phrase, a sense of language and an understanding of human experience that never ceases to take your breath away with the startled realisation of just having had the truth revealed to you. “Old men don’t become virtuous just because age pins them up against a wall and snarls contempt into their ears. Time screws death into you through every orifice, but it never stops you yearning.” ( From A Partisan’s Daughter).
Perhaps he is so succesful as a writer because he submerses himself so completely into his characters and their circumstances, whether they be boys, men or women, and in whatever troubled region they live, that he never once fails to make them real and honest and true. How else can we understand the world than by looking at it through the eyes of those who live there, and then?
