Garlic, Mint, & Sweet Basil: Essays on Marseilles, Mediterranean Cuisine, and Noir Fiction
120
Garlic, Mint, & Sweet Basil: Essays on Marseilles, Mediterranean Cuisine, and Noir Fiction
120eBook
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Overview
A short sublime book on the three things dearest to Jean-Claude Izzo’s heart: his native Marseilles, the sea in all its splendor, and Mediterranean noir—the literary genre his books helped to found. This collection of writings shows Izzo, author of the acclaimed Marseilles trilogy, at his most contemplative and insightful. His native city, with its food, its flavors, its passionate inhabitants, and its long, long history of commerce and conviviality, constitute the lifeblood that runs through all of Izzo’s work.
Reminiscent of Henry Miller’s The Colossus of Maroussi and the lyrical essays of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and Albert Camus, as uplifting and touching as Daniel Klein’s Travels with Epicurus, this slender volume will appeal equally to gourmets who delight in the strong flavors of Mediterranean cuisine, to those travelling on the Riviera (or arm-chair travelers who wish they could), and, naturally, to aficionados of noir fiction.
Praise for Jean-Claude Izzo
“Mr. Izzo was a marvelous food writer . . . His books are filled with winning descriptions of Provencal meals run through with the flavors of north Africa, Italy, Greece.” —The New York Times
“Just as Raymond Chandler and James Ellroy made Los Angeles their very own, so Mr. Izzo has made Marseilles so much more than just another geographical setting.” —The Economist
“In Izzo’s books . . . Marseilles is a ‘ville selon nos coeur,’ a city in tune with our heart . . . A cosmopolitan, maritime city, greedy, sensual and warm.” —Slow Food
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781609451752 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Europa Editions, Incorporated |
| Publication date: | 10/08/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 120 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
THE MEDITERRANEAN: POSSIBILITIES FOR HAPPINESS
On his return from Cairo, Flaubert wrote to a friend: "I've come to the conclusion that the things we expect rarely happen." That's the way it often is in the cities of the Mediterranean. You never really find what you came looking for. Maybe because this sea, the ports it gave birth to, the islands cradled by its waters, and the contours of its shores make truth inseparable from happiness. The very intoxication of the light arouses the spirit of contemplation.
I discovered this at home, in Marseilles. Near the Baie des Singes, some distance beyond the little harbor of Les Goudes, at the very eastern end of the city. Hours spent watching the fishing boats returning through the straits of Les Croisettes. It is there, and nowhere else, that they appear to me, and will always appear to me, the most beautiful. I also spent hours watching for that moment, as magical as any, when a cargo ship sails into the light of the sun setting over the sea and disappears for a fraction of a minute. Time enough to believe that anything is possible.
Here, we do not think. Only afterwards. It is afterwards that we dream of all those hours in our lives when we should have learned, and all those when we should have forgotten. Of course, it is unusual for a whole life to go by like this, in contemplation. "The nomad," writes Jean Grenier, "regards the oasis as the Promised Land, and his life is an alternation of grim wandering and bouts of merrymaking. To him, the city is the oasis."
I have travelled like that. From oasis to oasis. From Tangier to Istanbul, from Marseilles to Alexandria, from Naples to Barcelona. And each of these cities, with its narrow, winding streets swarming with people, has offered me its colors, its fruits, its flowers, the gestures of its men and the gaze of its women. Until one day I was able to utter the one essential truth: yes, I love these Mediterranean cities where we feel as if we are carried away.
My Mediterranean is not the one you see on the picture postcards. Happiness is never given, it has to be invented. Not all travelers have the same tastes. Some travel to see, others to enjoy. Still others seek both. But all you need to have done is take, at least once, a bus to a distant oasis, lost in the sands, to know that here, in the Mediterranean, everything will always be given to you, provided you want it, provided you open your eyes and your hands to it.
I arrived in Biskra one evening to find a light hot wind, a smell of dust and coffee, the light of a bark fire, the smell of stone, of mutton floating in the air. I made them mine. In this way we lay claim to landscapes.
That is the essential thing when we travel on these shores: to lay claim to what we will never be able to carry away with us, to what exists only in the moment when we look at it and belongs not to our memories but to the joy of living. Small things, like the last quiver of the light before noon. Because, as Leila would say, "life is a fragment of nothing."
I remember one late afternoon in Oran. I had left behind the tumult of the city center to climb the hill of Le Planteur. As far as Santa Cruz. The higher I climbed, the more distant the horizon. The sky opened up. I discovered the city, then the city and the sea, then the city and the sea and the mountain of Tlemcen.
I don't know what I was looking for in Santa Cruz that day. But I liked what I found. Peace. Perhaps because all I had needed to do was close my eyes and the landscape entered into me and became mine, and I realized it would stay inside me wherever I went.
I realized later, in other ports, in other cities of this Mediterranean, that it would always be like this. That what I had discovered was not the pre-packaged Mediterranean sold to us by travel agents and purveyors of easy dreams. That it was just one of the possibilities for happiness that this sea offered. Offered me. Somewhere else, of course, it would have been the same.
And so, over the years, I have created for myself a geography of possibilities for happiness. Byblos is part of this geography. Yazid, a fisherman I met in the little harbor, told me the legend of Adonis. A Phoenician legend. On the first day of spring, Adonis died in the arms of Astarte, at the source of the river that today bears his name. His blood gave birth to the anemones and turned the river rust-red. Astarte's tears rained down on a resurgent nature and brought her lover back to life. A Phoenician temple at the foot of the cave of Afqa pays homage to Astarte.
It was this temple that I had come to see. A temple to love. To fidelity. I was alone. Beirut and its big-city bustle were 25 miles away, and Jounieh, a seaside resort like any other, was just as far. I had barely taken a few steps into the town when, for me, Byblos once again became Gebal, one of the oldest cities in the world.
Yazid did not go with me. That walk to the temple was a solitary one. As were my walks along the Cinque Terre coastline in Liguria, from the Mesco headland to the San Pietro headland. I had let myself be borne along from village to village: Monterosso al Mare, Vernazza, Corniglia, Manarola, Riomaggiore.
Evoking these names was already a joy in itself. You can't get lost in such small villages, and yet that was the true pleasure, to lose yourself in this maze of dark, narrow streets piled one on top of the other, some made entirely of steps.
At a certain point, we know, we will come back to the sea. Inevitably. Each of these villages at the end of five valleys resolutely turns its back on the mountains and faces the Mediterranean. For a long time, it was only possible to reach them by boat. And this memory of the sea is even inscribed on the hulls of the boats, when, upended on the shore to receive a new coat of paint, they reveal shells stuck to their prows.
To get to Manarola, I had taken the Via dell'Amore. The road of love. The only land link between that village and Riomaggiore. A road hollowed out of the rock that falls sheer to the sea, a road that crosses hills covered in vineyards. You feel the desire to caress that nature, even those walls of rock resting in the water.
It was late spring. The hour when the light has not yet grown dense. I was assailed by other images. The Golden Shell of Palermo, where the sun rests all day like a flower in a vase. Djemila, where a heavy, unblemished silence reigns, with that woman running, as in a short story by Camus, toward the starry night that will finally restore her tranquility. Ronda, the Andalucian mountain city hanging in the sky, which even cured Rainer Maria Rilke's depression. The blue bay of Salamis, when you discover it from the Philopappos Monument, between bare hills and the stony plain.
I searched with my eyes for the island of Elba, and other islands emerged. The volcano of Santorini, which rises from the sea with the transparency of glass. Cape Sounion, and the tiny Psara, swept by the dust and the winds, Symi, the island of sponges, clinging to Mount Siglos.
This Italian land suddenly spoke to me in Greek. Doubtless because in Greece, as Jean Grenier has written, there is a "friendship between minerals and man." And the Mediterranean is nothing other than an appeal to their reconciliation.
There, gazing lovingly around, I remember telling myself that there is nothing more beautiful, more significant, for anyone who loves Africa and the Mediterranean with the same love, than contemplating their union in this sea. When, that evening, I got back to Vernazza, the village flag, with its Arab crescent moon, merely confirmed it. At that point, the only thing remaining was to go to the Princes' Islands, a stone's throw from Istanbul. Kizil Adalar —"the Red Islands" in Turkish. There, I discovered the limpid waters of the creek of Kalpazankaya. But I didn't travel there only to bathe in the sea, or even to eat the most delicious tandoor kebab — mutton roasted in a clay oven. I went there for the sheer pleasure of knowing that I was between two waters, between two worlds. Between East and West.
CHAPTER 2LISTENING TO THE SEA
From Marseilles, I look at the world. It is from here — at the top of the steps that lead up to the Sainte-Marie lighthouse, at the eastern end of the sea wall — that I think of the world. Of the distant world, of the world nearby. That I think of myself too. Mediterranean. A Mediterranean man.
Marseilles is 2,600 years old. I belong to that history. I am in that history. I am in this minor century and sea, as the Neapolitan writer Erri de Luca so rightly calls it. Marseilles is my destiny, like the Mediterranean. Yes, that is what I declare as I gaze out at the open sea, my back up against the hot stone of the Sainte-Marie lighthouse, my head full, as always, of the poetry of Louis Brauquier:
Lost men from other ports, who carry with you the conscience of the world!
Marseilles exists only in these words. All the rest is just hot air. Political, or economic. Cultural too, sometimes. If we forget that, we die.
Wherever I go these days, the word on everyone's lips is Europe. That's why I come to the Saint-Marie lighthouse. It's enough to make you despair. Because I don't see any European future for Marseilles. In spite of what they say. Marseilles is a Mediterranean city. And the Mediterranean has two shores. Not just ours. Today, Europe only talks of one, and France is all too ready to fall in line. Making this sea, for the first time, a border between East and West, North and South. Separating us from Africa and Asia Minor.
On behalf of the lost Andalucias, the silent Alexandria, the divided Tangier, the massacred Beirut, we ought to remember that European culture was born on the shores of the Mediterranean, in the Middle East. Europa, lest we forget, was a Phoenician goddess abducted by Zeus!
Forgive me, but I can't rid myself, when I talk about Marseilles, of this fear of being marginalized. Just as the cultures of central Europe are already marginalized. The philosopher Predrag Matvejevi writes: "Our century is coming to an end marked by 'ex-worlds': ex-communist, ex- Soviet, ex-Yugoslav." Tomorrow, the Mediterranean may well be one of these "ex"es. And Marseilles with it.
From the Sainte-Marie lighthouse, I do not turn my back on the city, no, on the contrary, I lean over her. And I look at the sea. The open sea.
That horizon from which one day the boat of a Phocaean named Protis emerged.
Protis is our Ulysses, the Ulysses of Marseilles. I assume that before dropping anchor here he had travelled for many years, known many countries and met many Calypsos. The legend does not say whether there was a Penelope waiting for him in his country. It simply recalls that a young girl from this region, Gyptis, handed him a glass of cold water and chose him as her husband.
The myth has no meaning unless we read it for what it is. And unless it becomes a project. Marseilles proudly proclaims its experience of the world. We might add: its Mediterranean experience. Because we have no other. But could we ever have any other? That is the question I ask, as a bastard from Marseilles, a half-breed product of Italian, Spanish and Arab cultures. And although I may be a French citizen today, the sea — this Mediterranean of ours, on which my eyes, my heart and my thoughts are focused — remains the only place where I feel that I exist. Where I can envisage a future for myself. In spite of everything. That is how much trust I have in Marseilles. Marseilles. The one true survivor of the worlds of the Mediterranean will, I hope, be able to avoid becoming the border post — a modern version of the Roman Empire's limes — between the civilized world and the barbarian world, between Northern Europe and the countries of the South, as advocated in a World Bank report to the European elites.
Yes, I believe, as I look at the sea, that there is a future for Europe, and beauty in that future. It lies in what Edouard Glissant calls "Mediterranean Creoleness."
Those are the stakes. The choice between the old economic, separatist, segregationist way of thinking (of the World Bank and international private capital) and a new culture, diverse, mixed, where man remains master both of his time and of his geographical and social space.
This I demand. All this. Out of loyalty to the first two lovers of Marseilles, Gyptis and Proteus. In other words, out of love.
CHAPTER 3I AM AT HOME EVERYWHERE
You may be surprised to hear this, but I am not a traveler. I am a child of migration. My father, having met a beautiful woman from Seville, halted on his road of exile. In Marseilles. I could have been born somewhere else, like my cousins. In Buenos Aires, or New York. Or else in Canada, where my parents dreamed of going to live soon after the war. It wouldn't have made any difference. Here or elsewhere, I would have been the son of an exile. That is my only baggage. My only inheritance. My memory. And therefore my story. That means that the blood that courses through my veins does not belong to one race, one country, one land. Or even one nation. One day I will have to explain all this, better maybe than I have done in my novels. Telling the itineraries of my old friends, Armenians and Greeks, Spaniards and gypsies, also children of migration. To be "from somewhere else" changes everything. You look at the world in a different way. I mean that wherever I am, I am at home. Even in those countries whose language I do not know. I just have to read a travel story or a novel by a writer to make his territory, his memories, my own. And become his twin. I had this sensation for the first time when I read Wedding in Tipasa by Camus. I felt as if I was an Algerian. I felt a passionate need for Algeria. Not long after that, I found myself in Ethiopia. In Hara, to be exact. In the footsteps of Rimbaud. There, I learned the freedom of wandering, of moving from place to place not to discover, to meet, to learn, but to merge into the Other, and see through his eyes "the other world," the one from which you come. And so I became an Ethiopian. I was an Egyptian one night in Cairo. I've been a Turk sometimes. But also Irish, and Argentinian out of love. Often I am still Italian or Spanish. And if it's true that I have been so many other nationalities, today I dream of being Laotian, and sometimes also Japanese, thanks to a writer named Haruki Murakami. There are times, I must say, when I no longer know if I have lived in Havana, in Bali, in Missoula or in Shanghai, or if I've simply read too much Cendrars, Hemingway, Luis Sepúlveda, Jim Harrison and James Crumley, Vicki Baum, Stevenson, Melville, Conrad, and Pierre MacOrlan, whom nobody reads these days. None of this really matters, when you come down to it. Truth and falsehood. Imagination is a reality, sometimes more real than reality itself. Conrad could explain that better than I can. The importance of allowing reality to find its own logic.
All too often we do not dare go deep enough into ourselves. We meet the gaze of the Other as an invitation. But we remain on the dock. Because the dock is the safest thing that exists, isn't it? Terra firma. The earth, reminding us that we are from here, from one country, one race, one nation. We generally prefer docks when we have a set reason to be there. A journey. A vacation. For a specific time. With a guidebook in our hands and a return ticket in our pockets. We know that we are leaving and that we will come back, of course, to the same dock. It is often at that moment that we look away from the Other. And that he becomes a stranger to us. Hostile. A stranger is necessarily hostile to the country, the race, the nation to which we claim out loud to belong. I don't know if you've followed me so far. I like to think you have. I also like to think that there is no point going anywhere else if we do not recognize ourselves in the eyes of the Other. That, I think, is why most tourist resorts resemble fortified camps. We don't try to meet the Other. We only want what belongs to him. His sea, his beaches, his palm trees. All these things I learned from my father.
And Marseilles completed my education. Beyond the horizon, toward which I looked from the end of the sea wall, down in the harbor, I knew that I had cousins, with their many children. They are still out there somewhere, but I no longer know where. On which side of the barbed wire that divides Cyprus between Greeks and Turks? On which hypothetical border in Rwanda? In which nation of the former Yugoslavia? Or in which unsanitary gypsy camp at the gates of the city? It's when I think about them that my feet start to itch, and I take out my cardboard suitcase and dream of setting off. To go and meet them, and share what we have in common, the pleasure of the universe. The pleasure I taste when, at home, in the still air of summer and noon, I read Louis Owens and put myself in the shoes of an Indian.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Garlic, Mint and Sweet Basil"
by .
Copyright © 2013 Catherine Izzo.
Excerpted by permission of Europa Editions.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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What People are Saying About This
“What makes Izzo’s work haunting is his extraordinary ability to convey the tastes and smells of Marseilles.” —The New Yorker
“Our last true romantic, Jean-Claude Izzo transmits warmth to his readers, as if granting them a mouthful of pure love.” —Le Point (France)
“Just as Raymond Chandler and James Ellroy made Los Angeles their very own, so Mr. Izzo has made Marseilles so much more than just another geographical setting.” —The Economist