Abstract
What is known as Mediterranean Noir has crimes that occur in a landscape set under the azure skies and seashores of cities such as Marseille, Barcelona or even Venice. In contrast, Italian writer, Valerio Varesi, relocates his crime novels to the more rural landscapes of villages in Tuscany and Emilia-Romagna. In these places, it is the landscape of mist, rivers and mountains that creates the noir Gothic narrative and atmosphere surrounding the crimes committed. My article will examine how, in Varesi’s The Dark Valley, a subtle fusing of the devices of landscape, food and a Gothic disruption of the return of the past into the present are central to the story world of the novel. This dislocation between past and present, I contend, will lead to Varesi’s detective, Commissario Soneri, questioning his own identity.
Highlights
Food has come to play a fairly prominent role in Mediterranean crime fiction, what is often called Mediterranean Noir, in works by writers such as Andrea Camilleri, Manuel Vásquez Montalbán, Jean-Claude Izzo, Massimo Carlotto and Donna Leon, to name but a few
Numerous critical studies tracing the history of Italian crime fiction as a genre and its sociopolitical relevance to Italy have been done, so I will not attempt to situate my article within the development of this historical continuum
While much attention has been paid to the work of Italian crime writer Andrea Camilleri and the importance that the regional food and landscape of Sicily holds for his Commissario Montalbano, relatively little engagement with the importance of the Gothic landscape and food in the crime novels of Valerio Varesi has occurred
Summary
Food has come to play a fairly prominent role in Mediterranean crime fiction, what is often called Mediterranean Noir, in works by writers such as Andrea Camilleri, Manuel Vásquez Montalbán, Jean-Claude Izzo, Massimo Carlotto and Donna Leon, to name but a few. Throughout the novel, the interrelated ‘habitus’ of the landscape and peasant food is shown to underlie the past and the present of the village, so that Soneri’s memory of place and his identity are held in the act of gustation and its relation to the surrounding natural world.
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