I have just finished a prize winning Manuel Vázquez Montalbán detective novel with Pepe Carvalho as its central character, The South Seas. I was also a devotee of Andrea Camilleri’s Inspector Montalbano series (who was named in honour of Manuel Vázquez Montalbán). And of course Jean-Claude Izzo has been a revelation. What all the novels have in common are middle […]
Joseph Conrad’s The Shadow Line is an odd novella. A ghost story, a beautifully symmetrical tale, a strange little fable, or a metaphor for the First World War (as Wikipedia seems to say)? A young man is given command of his first ship. He finds that the previous commander of the ship had gone mad and died. […]
Imagine a trans-textual “proletarian” protagonist, one that has travelled the world, gets stuck into adventures aboard ships and on land, and has a laconic easy sarcasm and a way with words. A kind of working class Marlowe with a better sense of humour and no penchant for imperial condescension. Imagine, then, that this character […]
It is extraordinarily rare to read someone whose work haunts you and then becomes part of your personal canon. That you wake in the middle of the night wanting to look at the map of his imaginary geography. The last time this happened to me was with Roberto Bolaño. But my new discovery, courtesy of […]
From Hegel through Schmitt to Foucault and onwards, there is a way of thinking about sea and land not as inert backdrop but as factors determining politics, history and the transformation of the world. Hegel’s The Philosophy of History is geographically deterministic and intensely racialised. His reading of Africa and Africans doesn’t even bear thinking about. And […]
With thanks to Michelle Woordward whose 2007 blogpost on Allan Sekula’s Lottery of the Sea brought me here, it seems that Adam Smith has a wonderful passage about the sea which does the familiar two discursive manoeuvres -speaking of the sea as a place of work and as the romantic sublime- really well: [33] What a common […]
“Let us have the courage to be crude: let us sweep the spirit of subtlety down the sewer along with the flags and the great warriors.” Paul Nizan Paul Nizan’s star burned bright and brief. He was a classmate of Jean-Paul Sartre‘s at École Normale Supérieure and a member of the French Communist Party who resigned his membership […]
In his Reflections on Exile, Edward Said has a lovely elegiac essay called Cairo and Alexandria, which is an ode to Cairo and a eulogy for Alexandria. I love the bits that follow (and especially sympathise with the fear of consulates disappearing): Her loneliness convinced me that Alexandria was in fact over: the city celebrated by […]
It’s at moments of misfortune that we remember we are all exiles (Total Chaos, p. 98) I first read about Marseilles when I was around 10 years old and someone gave me the Persian translation of The Count of Monte Cristo. Although Chateau d’If has become a tourist attraction on the strength of its prominence in […]
There is an amazing bit in Alan Sekula‘s magisterial Forgotten Space where Angelenos of Latino origin sit at an outdoor space drinking beers and watching enormous container ships glide towards the unloading docks and cranes. Ever since watching that, I really wanted to go visit the ports and on my trip to Los Angeles I did. LA/LB […]
