A Comparative Reading of Two 'Completely Different' Books

 

 

I usually read a few books at the same time, and there is typically some significant differences between them, along with some minor similarities or connections. However, considering the statements of Chicago police officers in the early 90s and the articles of faith of a 16th century Friulian heretic, I don't think I've ever read two books quite as different as these.

What Cops Know was recommended to me by my crime fiction tutor Dr Steve Somethingorother pretty much twenty years ago. The Cheese and the Worms was the subject of episode 458 of the History of Philosophy podcast, an extensive and truly world-class education on its subject.

On similarities, they both provide verbatim accounts, and they both deal with the delegation of the right to violence by the state. In the 90s, a conviction for murder in Chicago carried the death penalty, while poor Menocchio was eventually burned at the stake for heresy at the age of 67.

On differences, reading The Cheese and the Worms teaches you that a careful examination of a person's ideas along with their available reading materials (unusually for a 16th century miller, Menocchio was literate) can yield the definite identification of the influences on those ideas and the individual's particular way of understanding what they perceive.

As such, The Cheese and the Worms unintentionally provides the frame for reading What Cops Know. As I read the statements, I listen for the voices of their trainers, and the filters they apply to their experiences. The extent that What Cops Know provides a frame for The Cheese and The Worms is most probably that it provides an insight into the minds of the priestly interrogators who compelled Menocchio to detail his extraordinary theological cosmogony.

I can almost hear them speaking in the voice of a Chicago police officer, 'The most unbelievable thing I ever saw on the streets was this guy. He'd got together a bunch of books and cooked up this whole religion about the world being made of cheese, and angels springing out of it like worms. I think about that a lot sometimes.'

Individually, as a writer, Menocchio has provided a wonderful real-life model for a working class rebel whom I can see taking centre stage in a sequel to my debut novel Glassworld: Out of the Darkness (2024), while the paradoxes inherent in the multiple perspectives of What Cops Know are particularly fertile for writing.

For example, Chicago police officers blame victims. They blame them for being in their own homes and for not being in their own homes, provocative of the violence committed against them in either case, and they accuse murderers of blaming their victims too. Such self-contradictions have provided a basis - at least in thought - for a wonderfully creepy piece of true crime existentialism, which I have added to the stack of short stories I will write one day.

In conclusion, reading is one of the most immense pleasures of my life, not only for the works themselves but for the curious and unanticipated interplays that occur between them.

Book Review: Lunch with Charlotte

I have had the pleasure of listening to the audio edition of Lunch with Charlotte written and read by the late Leon Berger. It is the true life story of the eponymous Charlotte revealed across innumerable lunchtime conversations with her friend, the author.

She was born to Jewish parents in Austria in 1919, fled to England during the war and died in Canada in 2010. It should be straightforward therefore to think of it as a holocaust survival story. However, perhaps it would be more fully encompassing to say that the second world war was, yes, a crucial and traumatic event in her life, but by no means its only event of significance. Nor is its core message that the Nazis were, and fascism is, deplorable.

Indeed, the event that most formed Charlotte's fascinating and contradictory character, while it may have been facilitated by the war, was much closer to home. And it is the formation of Charlotte's personality during her turbulent and ever-changing life that, in my view, is the true subject of the story.

The novel is written with simple realism, with few elaborate turns of phrase. However, it is in this uncomplicated language that the compassion and wisdom of the novel reside. All its many characters are drawn as people living within the confines of their limitations, as humans who must breathe, eat and love. Even the Brownshirts and Nazi bureaucrats are humans first, for all their flaws.

I wept considerably while listening to this novel, out of fear for its characters' safety as well as the wretched inability to do anything to help them. Indeed, some may be wary of reading a novel that covers such a dark period.

Therefore, allow me to reassure you. The novel is composed of a warmth, humour and humility that raise it well above the reach of the ravages of hatred. By the time you come to the end of the novel, though death and despair will have paid their visits, it is the mutual affection of a friendship lived to its fullest that will remain.

Buy the book. Watch the promotional video.