Qué Pasa (CL), November 28, 2003

Literature: Conspiracy is fun too
An entertaining and idea-filled bestseller

A 500 page literary rebellion, about the year 1954, Cary Grant, and a handful
of ordinary - but not insignificant - lives

By Alvaro Bisama

54. Wu Ming.
Mondadori, 2003
542 pages.

Can best sellers become revolutionary? Yes, and it's easy: they can do it by overturning genres, dismantling modern myths, and transforming story-telling into an explosive bomb. This is what Wu Ming seeks to do. Wu Ming is an Italian collective of writers without a face but with a massive vocation. Wu Ming is Version 2.0 of the Luther Blissett Project (authors of Q). They expound the disappearance of the author as a mediatic figure, the end of copyright laws, and subversion of the rules of the publishing industry from within its very bowels. Their most recent novel, 54, is, at bottom, pure rebellion served up as music for the masses. 54 refers to the year 1954, and weaves its plot from diverse materials composing a choral narration in motion: a tv set full of dope, Cary Grant as an agent of the British MI6, Italian communists, impossible loves, Lucky Luciano, and messenger pigeons. The anecdote(s): a child looks for and finds his father, while Cary Grant redeems himself, while the Russians try to win the recently inaugurated Cold War, while Hitchcock films in Cannes, while a melancholic television set wanders around Bologna. A tour of Europe as theme and backdrop, and a narrative synchronized with James Ellroy’s American Tabloid. Wu Ming's project is apparently the same - to tell the myths of the 20th century in a conspiratorial key - but they oppose irony to the Yank's wrath. With short sentences, cinematic style, and minimal stories, 54 affects the espionage novel, the noir genre, and social realism. It plays with these forms, seeking to transcend them. And it does: this is mutant fiction, a living narrative organism composed of various bodies that aim at multiple endpoints. The most accomplished: a spy story on the surface, with an eye on the ordinary citizen, who acts as witness or protagonist of history. This happens at a level where myths - the archetypical hero, but it goes beyond that - are described as doubtful and ambiguous constructions. It makes sense then that Cary Grant reads Casino Royale (the first James Bond novel) with perplexity and amazement, before he meets General Tito and ends up talking with him about the personality cult. Thus, for Wu Ming - through Grant and Tito - the hero should be a humorous figure, a shell made of many identities, explicable only through literature.
This is pop contraband. 54 replaces history with a collection of popular codes turned against themselves. We are in the presence of a best seller but, above all, in front of a story that doubts its own materials. 54 reads quickly and is not forgotten easily. It is pure politics, both paranoid and exciting for the reader. 500 pages of guaranteed diversion, made with indelible ideas but at times deeply sad: the ill-fated Frances Farmer plaguing Cary Grant’s conscience, revolutionary practice as immanent but unavoidable defeat, the value of ordinary lives: workers, bar flies, and rogues that move with a certain elegance at the margins of the law: they are the true adventurers, the real heroes.

[Translated by Nate Holdren]

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