19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Chance Discovery, July 11, 2000
This review is from: Crime Album Stories (Hardcover)
Eugenia Parry opens Crime Album Stories with an anecdote of chance discovery. Approaching a man selling fossils in the Paris flea market, she asks him if he has any daguerreotypes. This question leads her to find an album of the most gruesome photographs you can imagine, culled from the Parisian police and tucked away in the back room of an oriental antiquities gallery. The photos are of bodies, body bits, and interiors bearing the telltale signs of violence and its untimely discovery.
Parry returns to Paris many times for the next twenty-five years, and each time returns to that barren back room to scrutinize the photos. "They're beautiful. They make me sick." Crime Album Stories spins this collection into an extraordinary series of poetic prose narratives which detail the "facts" behind each grisly scene. The stories are written from a number of points of view: bystander, acquaintance, intimate, criminal, investigator: the chance discovery of murder. Framing this structure is an autobiographical fiction purportedly by Alphonse Bertillon, the inventor of le bertillonage, or anthropometry, a system of statistical measurement that was designed to ensure the reliable identification of criminals and criminal behavior. Bertillon's perspective reminds us of the role of photography as documentary, and evidentiary, at the same time as it remains, throughout the book, hauntingly evocative of the transitoriness of what it seeks to document and evidence.
I was given this book by someone who claimed that they had seen it and knew it was for me. It's a disquieting thought, but quite correct. The pictures are like Atget seen by David Lynch (Walter Benjamin noted of Atget that his pictures were as if of crime scenes); the narratives are really pretty disconcerting: it's beautiful and it does make you sick. The book's stories capture the essential elements of crime: randomness and inevitability. Some deaths are terrifyingly happenstance, others dreadfully predictable. The death of the "Child Martyr," Pierre-Albert Gregoire (two years old), comes as the inevitable finale to his life of torture at the hands of his father and step-mother; the death of the "Ground Bird," Caroline-Celeste Fourmentin (seventy-nine years old), a vagrant eviscerated in the tool shed where she lived, is a random event with unknown actors. The murder of "La Petite Gourmet," Angele Cheze, falls somewhere between these two, as the seven-year old is lured off the streets by a familiar stranger, one of the anonymous denizens of the streets of fin-de-siecle Paris.
These crimes remind us that categories such as serial killers may merely be a contemporary way to classify the essentially unclassifiable phenomenon of random acts of violence, an urge not so unlike the bertillonage which frames the book. In a similar way, Parry's dedication, which comes rather unusually at the end of the book, reminds us that even in the story of the album's discovery, one which sets the scene for these tales of stray violence and what may be scattered yet informative, there's also a logic of inevitability - familial, historical, circumstantial, and appalling - which may render such shocking material poetic, and beautiful. Parry's stories are almost as haunting as the images: an elaboration of the past, in a different medium, that reminds us that we are always *after* the event, both historically, and intellectually. She captures this questing for more by offering the equivocal consolation of fiction, which supplies details at the expense of that very exactitude which makes these pictures so ghastly.
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16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
a poetic tour of crime, May 2, 2000
This review is from: Crime Album Stories (Hardcover)
what a wwonderful book on a such a gruesome subject. examining "crime" photos of fin de siecle france, the author blends myth, history, science, beauty, horror to provide a blow-by-blow account of some of the most sensational crimes to hit france in the late 1800s. this book is lavishly printed and designed, and the photo reproductions are marvelous if a bit horrifying to scrutinize. what the author does so skillfuly is how she evokes the spirit or sense of the crime--crimes of passion, rage, botched robberies, abuse--with a mastery of wit, art, awe, and elegance. the backdrop of the book is the birth of forensic science and the belief that looking at photos of crimes and criminal scenes would provide a taxonomic or scientific basis and model of the beast that lurks within. this is a book with many quiet surprises as well as bold, graphic images designed to shock.
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Invisible Masterpiece, October 13, 2000
This review is from: Crime Album Stories (Hardcover)
One doen't see or hear about this book anywhere which is a shame as it is so hugely original and compelling. Parry gives life in 19th Century Paris an incredible immediacy in this selection of stories. I found the photographs almost superfluous except that they do remind you that these imagined tales are actually real. Parry dignifies the dead in a way that is a genuine tribute to our humanity (or at least hers) at a time when I'm not convinced we're feeling all that good about ourselves. If you are hesitating, don't! A truly inspiring work.
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