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A Sun for the Dying

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Enforce attention like deep harmony:
Where words are scarce, they are seldom spent in vain,
For they breathe truth that breathe their words in pain."
Wm. Shakespeare, King Richard II

Jean Claude Izzo was born, lived, and died in Marseilles. Marseilles was the center of Jean Claude Izzo's universe and it was the centerpiece of his acclaimed Marseilles Trilogy, Total Chaos (Marseilles Trilogy), Chourmo, and Solea (Marseilles Trilogy). It is both fitting and more than a bit ironic that A Sun for the Dying, his last book before he died at age 54, should be about a man who wanted nothing more out of life than to come home to die in Marseilles.

Rico is a homeless vagabond living in an alcoholic daze on the streets of Paris. When his one `real' friend, Tito, dies while seeking warmth on a cold winter's night on the Paris metro, Rico decides it is time to leave Paris and head back south to Marseilles. "A Sun for the Dying" tells the story of Rico's trip home. The narrator for most of the book is Rico. The narrator for the closing chapter is a young Algerian that Rico befriended on his return to Marseilles. As the story progresses we hear snippets of Rico's story, the events and circumstances that propelled him from a comfortable middle-class existence in Marseilles to a homeless drunk. He is sick, he is dying and for this reader at least the tongue of this dying man breathes his word in pain.

Izzo's narrative is compelling. Rico is beyond pity at this point and his words spill out of him without affectation. He doesn't seek, or seem to seek, redemption or pity. He just tells his story. There is nothing particularly physically attractive about Rico. He knows that to the world around him, the world of those who have not fallen, he is mostly invisible. When he is seen he is either feared or pitied. The most compelling moments in the narrative occur when event rekindle certain feelings (love, desire, compassion) that Rico can barely recognize when they rise up out of him. On his journey he comes a across a Bosnian refugee, living an underground existence as a prostitute beholden to a vicious pimp. The relationship between the two is brief but powerfully drawn. When Rico arrives in Marseille he takes a young, physically-scarred Algerian refugee under his wing. That boy concludes the book with his account of Rico's time in Marseilles.

All in all "A Sun for the Dying" was a beautiful, melancholy book. The melancholy was heightened by the knowledge that it was written by someone so close to his own death. This book stands alone and is not at all related to Izzo's earlier work. However, I think reading "A Sun for the Dying" after reading his Marseilles Trilogy and another novel set in Marseilles, The Lost Sailors, added to my enjoyment of this volume. In either case this book is worth reading. L. Fleisig

A classic "there but for the grace of God" story, stunningly told by Jean-Claude Izzo and translated by Howard Curtis. It takes the reader along on a chronicle of a life on a long slide from middle-class striving and respectability into the abyss of underclass invisibility. The protagonist of this tale is Rico, a decent man with a bourgeois morality whose fall begins when his feckless wife dumps him after 10 years of unremarkable marriage and takes up with a family friend. In that single stroke, Rico loses his wife, son and self-confidence. Alcoholism, unemployment and homelessness soon follow.

Author Izzo graphically portrays the plight of Rico and his many homeless compatriots, which ironically has become a kind of cautionary tale for this period of financial instability for the working class, and even middle class, Americans. What saves this wonderfully written novella from complete darkness and hopelessness, is the humanity that Rico continues to find even as he descends further into his bleak future. He experiences moments of happiness and understanding with fellow travelers Titi, Mirjana and Abdou. They serve to balance out the brutality that is also part of Rico's life as a scorned, non-person in a middle-class society.

The book closes with Rico's arrival in the warm south (Marseilles), where he was once happy, in love and without responsibilities. While it is literally the end of the road for him, he does find a happier life, friendship, and even a resuscitation of his vocation as a saleman (and hence, some return of his self-respect)

Beautiful writing here and a lot to think about.

From the very beginning, there's something special to "A Sun for the Dying". The book is written in a style that is on the one hand vivid and elegant, but the almost immediate obscenities fit into the narrative easily, without coming off strangely. "A Sun for the Dying" follows Rico, a bum living in Paris, as he decides to leave the freezing city that killed his good friend and instead move to the warmer Marseilles. Rico has memories of good times and a good love in Marseilles and hopes to recapture some of that love, long missing from his life.

"A Sun for the Dying" is more about Rico's quest for love than anything else. In describing a number of Rico's relationships with friends and lovers alike, his need to have a clear closeness emerges - love. As Rico attempts to distance himself from Paris and get closer to the death he awaits (as he might a loved one), the reader is introduced in bits and pieces to his past life (and loves) in addition to his present situation, whether it's getting kicked off a train by a ticket inspector or living temporarily with a "dead" prostitute. The story of how his life derailed - how he ended up on the streets as a penniless alcoholic bum with a hatred for his ex-wife and no contact with his son - is told in bits as well, though from the start it is obvious that Rico's life was not always one of a homeless drunk.

The book is often crude. Not offensively so, perhaps, but there's a bluntness to the writing, an unabashed explicitness and a myriad of graphic scenes. Enough, at least, that it is worth mentioning. This is a difficult book to read, partly because of this explicitness but also simply because it is so effective - by the end of the book, I was so involved in all the characters' lives (including those only introduced at the very end of the book, in the second closing part) that it was difficult to part with them.

But the book is not without flaws. While I felt deeply attached to the characters and found it difficult to break away, I did have a bit of a difficult time adjusting to the general tone of the novel. I had trouble with the overt graphicness to the novel - though it adds a realistic color to the story, it at times feels too crudely drawn. I also wished in the end that Izzo could have given the reader just a few more scenes with some of the characters, not simply to make them more whole, but also to expand on why Rico loved them as he did, something that is attempted with one character and works wonderfully - it is too bad this was not done with others as well.

In the end, it's difficult to judge this book. "A Sun for the Dying" manages to hold the reader's attention. It raises a lot of moral questions, leaving them unanswered even in Rico's own mind. The book is well written (and, I assume, well translated - it reads quite naturally), is full of living characters, and is ultimately interesting. Even as I recognize that I've read better books recently, it's one that lingers in my mind and deserves to be read by those willing to stomach some of the scenes. 4.5 stars, recommended.

Jean-Claude Izzo (1945-2000) was born in Marseilles to immigrant parents, giving him the life of an outsider. In the 1990's Izzo wrote a series of noir novels, known as the Marseilles Trilogy, which made him famous. His final book, "A Sun for the Dying" tells the story of a homeless, down and out man in his 40s named Rico. For three years, Rico has lived on the streets of Paris. When his only friend, a homeless man named Titi, freezes to death at a metro stop, Rico leaves Paris and journeys to Marseilles in the south of France. The story is harsh, violent, graphic and moving as it speaks of love, loneliness, and loss.

The book is divided into two parts. The first part of the book takes the reader from Rico's life on the streets of Paris through a brutal beating he suffers from two pimps in Avignon. This part is narrated in the third person with an occasional reference to an "I" who comments on some aspect of the story he recounts. The second part of the book begins about a year after the first part. Rico has survived his beating and found his way to Marseilles. This portion of the story is told in the first person by the same narrator who speaks in part 1: an adolescent boy named Abdou, 13-15 years of age, who has smuggled himself into Marseilles from Algiers. Rico befriends Abdou. Part 1 tells what Abdou has understood from Rico about Rico's life. Part 2 is Rico's life in Marseilles as Abdou sees it.

Throughout the book, scenes from Rico's life on the streets are interspersed with flashbacks of his past life. The flashbacks center on Rico's search for love and his relationships with women. Rico wants to return, homeless and broken in heart, to Marseilles because as a young 20 year old fresh from military service he had fallen in love with Lea. He never forgot the beauties of their affair on the shore of Marseilles. Rico broke off with Lea and married a woman named Sophie and the couple had a boy, Julien. Rico was modestly successful as a travelling salesman. When Sophie leaves Rico for another man, Rico is crushed. He begins drinking heavily, loses his job, has affairs with two women, Julie and Malika, before landing inexorably on the street homeless and alone. In Avignon, during the journey to Marseilles, Rico has his last live relationship with a woman, a young prostitute from Bosnia named Mirjana. The relationship is intense on both sides and ends with Rico's beating from the pimps.

With its violent and lurid character, the book is cast in the form of a spiritual journey as well as a quest by Rico for the memories of his lost loves -- melded together in Lea, Sophie and Mirjana. There are three authors, Kerouac, Saint-John Perse, and Homer, whose works help frame the journey.

The most important influence on the book is Kerouac. After Rico's friend Titi dies early in the story, Rico remembers how Titi compared their journey in life to those of the beats that Jack Kerouac described in "On the Road" and "The Dharma Bums". Kerouac's spiritual quest pervades Rico's own sad journey. Rico travels with the flamboyant and criminal Dede, possibly a reminder of Dean Moriarty, Sal Paradise's travelling companion in "On the Road."

As for the second author, Mirjana, the prostitute with whom Rico has a relationship, carries among her few possessions a book of poems by the French poet Saint-John Perse. Little known to Americans, Perse was a diplomat as well as a poet who was forced to flee Vichy France during the 1940's. Perse won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1960. His evocative, difficult poems of the hope of a better life for people inspire Rico briefly and give Mirjana the strength to live.

The third important author on the journey is Homer. Near the end of the book, when Rico befriends Abdou, the pair briefly discuss Homer's Odyessy with its parallels to their own wandering lives and searches for love. These books and many of the French song lyrics that appear in the novel do a great deal to set the books themes of searching, love, loss, and memory.

The novel is harsh and raw, reminding me in places of Charles Bukowski. The book spoke to me of the universal character of suffering and of the common elements of the human condition. For all the desparation of Rico's life, a small sense of hope comes through based upon the power of love. Rico's final understanding of his life and his search may not be the same as the adolescent narrator's understanding. This, Izzo's final book, is absorbing, disturbing, beautifully written and bittersweet.

Robin Friedman