I have read a lot of the books mentioned in this thread ("The Road", "The Painted Bird", "Tess" etc.) I have done my own delving into the unconscious, casual, banal cruelty of human nature. But nothing on earth has undone me like this book.
[div class="excerpt" style="border:solid 1px #000000"]Last month a man left a tombstone on my doorstep.
The slab was more than a foot long, nearly a foot wide, and as thick as a corpse's forearm. It arrived in a big brown box, as if someone had sent a stereo amp or some neatly packaged antique. When I opened the box, I saw the slab, black as a shroud, all nine-and-a-half mournful pounds of it.
It was inscribed: INFERNO, in faint red letters. And then, below the title: JAMES NACHTWEY, in ominous black.
The book is divided into nine lengthy chapters (one per country) that Nachtwey calls "narrative and cinematic." They are meant to echo nothing less than Dante's Nine Circles of Hell. (Quotes from Dante Alighieri, in fact, open the book.) Each chapter is a sequence of spreads, cankerous and wordless, meticulously printed in a rich cloak of black and gray on pliant white. Each photograph is framed by a severe band of black. Together, the spreads constitute a series of horror-panels. Like woodcuts in some modern-day Book of the Dead, many are as solemn as medieval religious paintings. Yet heaven is nowhere present in them. If anything, they evoke the busy, peopled netherworlds of Bruegel and Bosch instead, as if the isolated corners of their canvases had been distilled to their sinister essence: Hades pure and uncut, in stark black and white. "It's a visualization of the kind of hell on earth that can be created by human beings for human beings," Nachtwey said in a recent interview with French television correspondent Laura Haim of Canal Plus. "I felt devastated and angry against the atrocities that created such cruelty."
One glimpses Nietzsche in Nachtwey. One hears the whisper of the deranged Colonel Kurtz from Apocalypse Now, Francis Coppola's masterful Vietnam epic. Inferno pulls its readers into the jungle hut with Kurtz to hear him describe his twisted logic in finding something sublime in a pile of limbs (severed from children who had recently received polio shots): "They had come and hacked off every inoculated arm. There they were in a pile, a pile of little arms. . . .And I realized like I was shot. . .with a diamond bullet right through my forehead, and I thought, my God, the genius of that, the will to do that." Inferno bears the stench of such menace and virtually aches with the sorrow of the victims of such acts.
I've had a a copy of it on my bookshelf for the last ten years. I still can't get through more than a dozen images before the tears well up and despair floods me like a tsunami.
The very worst thing about it is that you know it's real - every single soul-destroying image happened right in front of this man and was recorded simply as it was.
Some of the images are available on the net. If you go looking for them, you go forewarned.
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