Jack London: The Assassination Bureau, Ltd

Το ημιτελές μυθιστόρημα του Jack London Το Γραφείο Δολοφονιών, ΕΠΕ [The Assassination Bureau, Ltd.] είναι για μια αντιπροσωπεία που σκοτώνει τους ανήθικους ανθρώπους. Είναι μια θαυμάσια ιστορία περιπέτειας, γράφει ο Alberto Manguel, αλλά και μια πολιτική αφηγηματική αλληγορία [The Guardian].

During my childhood in Buenos Aires, I was a devoted follower of the Robin Hood Library, a series of what was then called "juvenile literature." With happy insouciance, the publishers offered abominations such as Bomba the Jungle Boy by Roy Rockwood (which I then enjoyed for reasons today mysterious) together with classics that I still read with pleasure, such as the imaginary voyages of Jules Verne and the adventure novels of Jack London.Perhaps even more than Verne, London appealed to my longing for adventure; he also echoed my urge to change the world, the urge that so often accompanies our discovery of suffering and injustice.

"I look forward to a time when man shall progress upon something worthier and higher than his stomach," London wrote in 1905, at the age of 29, "when there will be a finer incentive to impel men to action than the incentive of to-day, which is the incentive of the stomach. I retain my belief in the nobility and excellence of the human. I believe that spiritual sweetness and unselfishness will conquer the gross gluttony of to-day." I told myself that I too shared his belief.

I admired his stories (I later learned that Stalin, Hitler and Theodore Roosevelt all shared my admiration) and I envied his adventurous life. The son of an itinerant astrologer who abandoned his family on the docks of San Francisco, London grew up learning to thieve, drink and box, and worked as a sailor, a laundry-boy, a coal-shifter in a power station, an oyster-pirate and an unsuccessful gold-digger in the Klondike, before discovering literature in the Seaside Library, a series of popular fiction in which, he said, "with the exception of the villains and the adventuresses, all men and women thought beautiful thoughts, spoke a beautiful tongue, and performed glorious deeds."... [article continues]