Dark Paradise

"Marseilles is paradise. They respect me here. I'm not a wog." That's the voice of an Algerian soldier fighting for France in Rachid Bouchareb's 2006 World War II drama Indigènes (released here under the terrible title Days of Glory). Fifty years after VE Day, the opposite could be spoken by nearly any of the contemporary Arab and Algerian characters in the hard-boiled novels that form Jean-Claude Izzo's Marseilles Trilogy. The Arab youths who endure suspicion and harassment from the cops and the prejudice of the native non-Arab French, who are the target of violence from the far-right National Front and the fool's game of fundamentalist Islam: almost all of these kids feel like wogs.

And yet, as Izzo writes of his native city, Marseilles is a kind of paradise. The three books that make up his trilogy--Total Chaos, Chourmo and Solea--can be read as an extended love letter to the city. Izzo, son of an Italian father who had immigrated there, spent most of his life in the city. His output wasn't vast. It included the trilogy, two novels--The Lost Sailors and The Sun of the Dying (the latter will be brought out later this year by Europa Editions)--and a book of short stories. He was one of those rare writers lucky enough to be popular with critics as well as the public, though nothing surpassed the popularity of the trilogy, which was written from 1995 to '98. Izzo never got a chance to build on the acclaim and popularity of the books. In 2000 he died of cancer at the age of 55.

In the trilogy, Izzo describes the city as an ever-unfolding flower of sensual delight, a place where natural glory, the sun and the shimmering presence of the Mediterranean exist side by side with the man-made glories of a polyglot city. At times the progress of Izzo's story might be nothing more than the movements of his hero, Fabio Montale, as he drifts from one of the city's pleasures to the next. "There's nothing more pleasant," begins Chourmo, "when you have nothing to do, than to have a snack in the morning and sit looking at the sea."

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