An aboard the Louisiana Story, about halfway from New Orleans to Saint Louis, a sailor calls out, “Mark Twain”. He’s sure to like adventure novels, thinks Eddie, the most fearful and well-read of the four protagonists in Davide Morosinotto’s novel The Mississippi Gang. Maybe that has something to do with them. “Pff”, replies his friend Te Trois. Against her, the eponymous gang, to which, besides Eddie and Te Trois, Julie and her little brother Tit also belong, Huck Finn is a real adventure beginner: Instead of being satisfied with his treasure, “this Huckleberry jumps on a raft and lets himself down from the river wear. While we drive upstream and have to work very hard and the further we go, the more difficult it becomes. “
As Eddie finds out a little later, the sailors are really not interested in literature, but just do their job, measuring the depth of the river (“mark twain” denotes mark two). Eddie remarks a bit sadly that the author’s name was just a coincidence – one of many in a novel full of detours and diversionary maneuvers, in which it is not only about experiencing adventures, but also finding out how they actually come about. And how you can tell about it. But from the beginning.
To write “but from the beginning”, that is, to confront the reader with promising information and then stop him, is also Morosinotto’s narrative strategy. Even the subtitle promises that the novel will be about how the friends “got rich with three dollars”. The money recovered from the swamps of Louisiana (a small fortune at the beginning of the twentieth century when the plot begins), however, is immediately spent again on a revolver from the catalog of the Chicago mail order company Walker & Dawn. The very first sentence, on the other hand, says that “everything” began with the murder of a certain Mr Darsley, only to explain what it was all about more than two hundred pages later. This is not a mere tension-creating maneuver, but Morosinotto’s literary program: How should one experience and tell in a straight line, he seems to ask, when even the smallest path offers infinite possibilities to get lost, and days, hours and minutes sometimes breathtakingly fast, sometimes pass infinitely slowly?
Involved in the invention of the hot dog in passing
Above all, it is 1904 that makes exploration difficult and easy for children at the same time. In her native bayou, largely cut off from the outside world and modernity, her only connection to both is the mail order catalog, on the cover of which a train circles the globe at full speed. In reality, they can’t even order a revolver from Chicago without worrying that the postman who brings the mail once a week will lose the package, pocket it himself, or get hopelessly drunk at the neighbors’ house. When it finally arrives, instead of the coveted item to pass the time, it contains a device for measuring time – a rare, valuable pocket watch. In the hope of a handsome reward, they now want to personally deliver the watch to Walker & Dawn.
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