Noir in Pageant: a Daniel Pennac he Raymond Chandler Award

“In your approach dwelling, plan a superb thriller with a number of murders: will probably be good in your well being”. It’s the recipe of probably the most beloved of European writers, the French Daniel Pennac, the creator who with The Paradise of Ogres gave life in 1985 to the profitable cycle of novels that includes Benjamin Malaussène, knowledgeable scapegoat, probably the most paradoxical and entertaining unintentional investigator in all of detective literature. He’ll obtain the 2023 Raymond Chandler Award on December 1, the opening day of the Noir in Pageant within the Crimson Room of Casa Manzoni in Milan.

“Now we have been chasing this extraordinary author who devoted a big a part of his work to crime fiction for a very long time,” say Marina Fabbri and Giorgio Gosetti, administrators of the competition along with Gianni Canova (IULM Delegate), “and we’re notably proud that he has accepted within the 12 months his formidable arrived in bookstores Malaussène terminus (Feltrinelli)”.

Born in Casablanca on 1 December 1944 – nearly an indication of future pondering of Humphrey Bogart’s Rick -, of Corsican and Provençal origins, raised in Africa after which in Good the place he graduated in literature, Pennac was firstly a instructor and guys devoted, even after his success as a author, a lot of his manufacturing together with a well-known comedian journey, Fortunate Luke contro Pinkertonco-written with a grasp of Mediterranean noir like Tonino Benacquista in 2010. And exactly for his dedication to pedagogy in 2013 he was awarded an honorary diploma from the College of Bologna.

After having explored science fiction (two works), youngsters’s fiction and non-fiction, the Malaussène saga was born by likelihood, which can unfold by way of 9 novels. It occurred in Brazil, the place by likelihood Pennac found the thriller or hard-boiled novel and have become so keen about it that, utilizing it as a device for creativeness and creativity, for orality and morality, he would turn out to be an incredible author. The primary time in 1985, along with a pseudonym: Lifeless Binary, a form of spy story printed in collaboration with pals Jean Bernard JB Pouy and Patric Raynal, which arrived in Italy in 1997, masterfully translated by Luigi Bernardi. Pouy and Raynal provoke Daniel by claiming that he’s incapable of writing an actual detective story on his personal. Pennac takes up the problem, bets and so, for Gallimard’s Série Noire, Benjamin Malaussène, an involuntary investigator, and his unusual household are born, protagonists of the tales written between 1985 and 2023. In between, his nice ardour, theatre, which Pennac frequents each as a playwright and as an interpreter of his personal monologues or of basic texts akin to Bartleby The Scribe, a Wall Avenue Story by Herman Melville, additionally staged in Italy in 2012. However on the theater he can even convey a tribute to Fellini, in centenary of his start, with a studying of The Dreamer’s Regulation on the Piccolo Teatro in Milan on 20 January 2020.

Well-known and far beloved by the general public for his humorous and versatile writing, permeated by a style for paradox and hyperbole, a virtuoso of a extremely private and colourful language able to shifting from the vernacular to a purely literary type, Pennac creates a universe of straightforward individuals, of masks of gathered through the years across the “little man” Malaussène, into whom the creator pours his imaginative and prescient of the world.

The theater of Pennac’s opera is the Parisian neighborhood of Belleville, one other nice protagonist for the reason that first novel: a poor, soiled and dilapidated place, however vigorous and welcoming, teeming with life and humanity, amongst Arabs, Africans, muezzins chanting from the window a WC and couscous served in any respect hours accompanied by the inevitable pastis. A splendid portrait of a universe whose editorial success is attributed by “Le Monde” to the sensation of proximity that the reader feels with the Malaussènes.

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Within the checklist of winners of the Raymond Chandler Award, probably the most prestigious recognition of Noir in Pageant, Daniel Pennac succeeds the American Harlan Coben; however through the years the well-known Brasher Doubloon, described by Chandler in Excessive Window and that the prize has turn out to be the image of literary excellence inside and past the thriller style, it has gone to masters akin to Graham Greene (first winner in 1988 by settlement with the Raymond Chandler Property), Leonard Sciascia, Manuel Vazquez Montalban, Osvaldo Soriano, Ed McBain, John le Carre, John Grisham, Scott Turow, Elmore Leonard, John Banville, Jø Nesbo, Robert Saviano. Pennac’s title crowns this magnificent sequence of extraordinary storytellers of our time within the thirty third version of Noir in Pageant, which takes place this 12 months in Milan from 1 to 7 December.