July 2009: Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio (Lakhous)

Post date: Jan 07, 2010 11:4:5 PM

Thanks to Nancy for hosting our discussion of Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio by Amara Lakhous, on Tuesday, July 21. We got off to a rather wandering start, as I asked for some impressions of the previous month's meeting with Professor Cheung, which I'd missed. Eventually we did get to July's book, however. The general consensus seemed to be that the book supports the idea that the immigrant experience is much the same everywhere. Most people found it an enjoyable read, although Kate wondered if the prose had suffered in translation. I read it in Italian, but since I'm not a native speaker, it is not that easy for me to judge style. Having the Italian copy handy allowed us to sort out something which had confused Jennie. The dates listed in one of the "yell" sections had been incorrectly translated: January had been translated to June in one entry, so that sequential entries that were four days apart in the Italian version were six month apart in the English version. It seemed like an odd mistake to make.

During the discussion, I mentioned that I expected a Rashomon-style story, and was surprised to find that not everybody was familiar with the term, which refers to Akira Kurosawa's film Rashomon, in which a crime witnessed by four individuals is described in four mutually contradictory ways. The film is based on two short stories by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, "Rashōmon" (for the setting--Rashōmon was the former main city gate in two Japanese capital cities, Heijokyō (now Nara City) and Heiankyō (now Kyoto) ) and "Yabu no naka", otherwise known as "In a Grove" (for the story line). The term "Rashomon effect" is now used in psychology; it is the effect of the subjectivity of perception on recollection, by which observers of an event are able to produce substantially different but equally plausible accounts of it.

~ Sherrill