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Interview
1 November 2015 2.00 h

Crime novels: the best social criticism

The creator of inspector Kostas Jaritos and scriptwriter for filmmaker Theo Angelopolous received the Liberpress Literature Award 2015 in Girona last month

The crime novel is the only social novel left in European literature
The EU is not responsible for our problems, we the Greeks are
You are about to re­ceive the Liber­press lit­er­ary award. How do you feel about it, and about Girona?
I am very happy and ho­n­oured and it has been a sur­prise to be se­lected. It's my sec­ond time in Girona; I was here in May at the Mot fes­ti­val when I vis­ited the city and loved it.
What is the sit­u­a­tion in Greece?
Greece is going through very dif­fi­cult times. On the one hand, there is a big part of the coun­try suf­fer­ing, and there is a mini-po­lit­i­cal class only con­cerned about the in­ter­nal games of the po­lit­i­cal cri­sis. The third part of this tri­an­gle is Eu­rope, and the aus­ter­ity mea­sures they im­posed. In order to fight and achieve, peo­ple need a per­spec­tive, and this is some­thing that doesn't exist at the mo­ment; on the con­trary, peo­ple don't be­lieve that these mea­sures are even ap­plic­a­ble. So I don't know how the coun­try will get out of this mess, the mess of de­stroy­ing the mid­dle class, the mess of the po­lit­i­cal land­scape, and the mess of the aus­ter­ity mea­sures. So I don't know if there is a way out.
Is there lit­tle place for hope in Greece?
If you ask the av­er­age Greek if they still hope for some­thing, nine out of 10 will tell you to for­get it, there is no hope.
What about your­self, what do you think?
I am not a politi­cian, but I can tell you that what is hap­pen­ing now is the re­sult of a se­ries of mis­takes and wrong de­ci­sions, mainly from the Greek side, not the Eu­ro­pean. We've made huge mis­takes, but Eu­rope didn't want to see the mag­ni­tude of the prob­lem and didn't take mea­sures until now. The wrong de­ci­sions and the false steps of the Greek gov­ern­ment de­prive us from being able to say to the Eu­ro­peans: “Come on, what are you doing now?”
Which mis­takes are you refer­ing to?
These mis­takes go back a long time. Since the be­gin­ning of the 1980s, when Greece en­tered the Eu­ro­pean Com­mon Mar­ket, money started com­ing into the coun­try in amounts never seen be­fore. The gov­ern­ment of that time dis­trib­uted the money to their cronies in the sys­tem and thus we missed the op­por­tu­nity to build up an in­vest­ment pol­icy. The Eu­ro­peans never con­trolled how the money of the Eu­ro­pean tax-pay­ers was spent, when the truth is that they went there to do busi­ness. And when the sub­si­dies were over, they started to ask for huge loans. I was so against the Olympic Games. It was a silly, a huge mis­take.
Why was that?
We've asked for so many loans and we've never been able to pay them back. Throw­ing money away that way just for three weeks! The es­tab­lish­ment got rich with it, but the peo­ple are still pay­ing for it. An­other se­ri­ous mis­take was that we should have first made the nec­es­sary re­forms and after that enter the eu­ro­zone. So, I think the EU is not re­spon­si­ble for our prob­lems, we are. We can't ex­pect oth­ers to be more sen­si­tive to our prob­lems than our­selves.
Is there a lot of cor­rup­tion in Greece?
Look around you: see Volk­swa­gen, Blat­ter...you think cor­rup­tion in Greece is big­ger than this? No. I've heard this story about cor­rup­tion in Greece many times, but it is in small com­pa­nies, small-scale cor­rup­tion. The next time the Ger­mans ask me about cor­rup­tion in Greece, I have my an­swer pre­pared (he laughs).
You were very crit­i­cal of Syriza a few months ago and Tsipras has been cho­sen as prime min­is­ter again. What do you think of that?
I am still very crit­i­cal of Syriza. Peo­ple have de­cided, but this is not the point. Those who voted for him are a 35% of the 57% who went to vote. I am among the 43% who didn't vote. We live in a coun­try with al­most 44% of vot­ing ab­sten­tions. And this is a prob­lem that should make them think.
In your books you de­scribe a so­ci­ety in cri­sis, about to lose its val­ues. You once said that Greeks knew how to be happy with very lit­tle. Has this changed?
Yes, in­deed. I've al­ways said that Greece was a poor coun­try with a high level of cul­ture. And this got lost. In the 30 years of wealth in Greece, which began in early 1980s and ran through to 2009, peo­ple stopped think­ing about poverty, and along with it, the val­ues of poverty. Now they are going back to poverty with­out any val­ues, and this is a huge prob­lem.
What val­ues do you mean?
Being happy with small, min­i­mal things. They could be happy sit­ting for hours in a tav­ern with a cu­cum­ber, tomato, two sar­dines and a glass of wine and be happy. Also the way of un­der­stand­ing cre­ation and cul­ture; this got lost, too. The prob­lem with Greece is that it was a coun­try that was fed in­tra­venously. Any stu­dent of med­i­cine knows that once you cut the in­tra­venous nu­tri­tion you have to adapt the pa­tient slowly to nor­mal food: first soup, rice, and so on. What hap­pened to us is that they cut it off and they put in front of us pork and pota­toes. It was too much and the coun­try got sick.
In your lat­est book, Fins aquí hem ar­ri­bat, you point out the ori­gins of the cri­sis and how it af­fects or­di­nary peo­ple.
I try to ex­plain that the coun­try can­not be fixed, but it has to be re­built from scratch. The cri­sis will be deep and the dis­as­ter is mas­sive. This can't be fixed with a few mea­sures. This needs to be re­built and this means that the po­lit­i­cal and eco­nomic forces, ed­u­ca­tion, cul­ture have to work to­gether. I know it's not easy and it will not be done to­mor­row, but it is a real need.
You have mixed ori­gins, which are also re­flected in your books.
Yes, I was very lucky. Hav­ing dif­fer­ent ori­gins is a source of in­spi­ra­tion and it helped me un­der­stand the di­ver­sity of cul­tures. The fron­tier be­tween Al­ba­nia and Greece, Epirus, used to be the poor­est and purest part of Greece. I de­cided that in­spec­tor Jar­i­tos came from there for the val­ues and the de­cency of those peo­ple, who are still keep­ing to tra­di­tion and the old cus­toms.
Do you have more plans for in­spec­tor Jar­i­tos?
I am writ­ing an­other book, not about cri­sis, but post-cri­sis. I don't have any plans when I write a book; I dis­cover it as it hap­pens, the same as my pro­tag­o­nist. Now I am at a point where I don't know what is going to hap­pen. I plan to fin­ish the book by the end of Jan­u­ary next year.
Is there a lot of your­self in Jar­i­tos?
Not a lot, but there are a few things. We have com­mon fea­tures, his points of view on the city and the peo­ple are sim­i­lar to mine. My daugh­ter tells me: “I am fed up of hear­ing your jokes about Athens and the Athe­ni­ans and then read­ing them in your nov­els. You have to find some­thing else, you know?”
Are crime nov­els a pre­text for so­cial crit­i­cism?
Yes, in the last 30 years, and in fact ever since Dick­ens, Dos­toyevsky, Balzac and Zola, we've been using the crime novel to de­nounce so­cial prob­lems. That's why the crime novel nowa­days is prac­ti­cally the only so­cial novel ex­ist­ing in Eu­ro­pean lit­er­a­ture. Other gen­res focus more on the char­ac­ter, but in the case of the crime novel it's more a mix­ture of bour­geois and me­dieval novel. In the same way Qui­jote went from vil­lage to vil­lage to fight, Jar­i­tos goes from novel to novel to dis­cover in­jus­tice and un­ravel crimes.
Is Jar­i­tos a mod­ern Qui­jote?
Yes, they all are. Our char­ac­ters are more so­cia­ble than Sher­lock Holmes and the pro­tag­o­nists of clas­si­cal nov­els. There are no ge­nius in­spec­tors. Car­valho wasn't a ge­nius, I am not a ge­nius, nei­ther is Jar­i­tos. Nei­ther Mon­talbán, nor Camil­leri. They are or­di­nary peo­ple who do their job, and by doing it they dis­cover so­cial prob­lems and in­jus­tice.
Do you read a lot of crime nov­els?
Yes, I do: Ital­ian: Camil­leri, Di Cataldo...I learned a lot from Mon­talbán, An­dreu Martín and Ledesma. Also from the French. But I am fed up with the Scan­di­na­vians: I can't read any more about writ­ers who only feed them­selves with pizza and beer. What I like about the Mediter­ranean novel is the con­nec­tion with gas­tron­omy. There is a bal­ance be­tween solv­ing crimes and en­joy­ing life. Scan­di­na­vians, mean­while, have a more evan­gelic, protes­tant way: only solv­ing the crime. I don't un­der­stand why a de­tec­tive, in order to be suc­cess­ful, must have a dis­as­trous per­sonal life. Jar­i­tos has a happy fam­ily life, he loves his wife and daugh­ter, his son-in-law, and so on. In the south of Eu­rope and in South Amer­ica, read­ers iden­tify them­selves with the fam­ily, too, not just with the in­spec­tor.

Cosmopolitan soul

Marcela Topor

Through his crime novels, Greek writer Petros Markaris has been warning us for many years about the deep structural crisis that Greece is going through at the moment. An admirer of writers Manuel Vásquez Montalbán and Sicilian Andrea Camilleri, Markaris is a left-wing spirit, with a great critical consciousness about what is going on in his country. He is also so disappointed with the situation that he did not even go to vote in the latest elections. Up close, Markaris is a lucid, outgoing person, with his own special charm. In fact, when his daughter reads his novels, she often tells him that she sees his sense of humour in inspector Jaritos. However, Markaris is much more than a celebrated crime novel writer. Trained in German culture, he was actually born in Istanbul, to an Armenian father and a Greek mother. Translator, playwright, television scriptwriter and, above all, a scriptwriter of five films by the mythical Greek director, Theo Angelopolous, which include the great Ulysses' Gaze and Eternity and a Day. In memory of his good friend, who sadly died after being run over by a car while directing one of his movies in 2012, Markaris stopped writing film scripts. However, he does keep alive the cosmopolitan soul of his origins.

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