“[This is] a terrific series of French noir novels, a Marseilles trilogy of sun-baked bad guys and beautiful women, smart cops and mean situations. Mr. Izzo was a marvelous food writer in addition to being a poet of violence and regret. His books are filled with winning descriptions of Provençal meals run through with the flavors of north Africa, Italy, Greece.”

—Sam Sifton, The New York Times

 

“Caught between pride and crime, racism and fraternity, tragedy and light, messy urbanization and generous beauty, the city is for Jean-Claude Izzo a Utopia, an ultimate port of call for exiles. There Montale, like Mr. Izzo himself perhaps, is torn between fatalism and revolt, despair and sensualism.”—The Economist

 

“What makes Izzo’s work haunting is his extraordinary ability to convey the tastes and smells of Marseilles, and the way memory and obligation dog every step his hero takes.”—The New Yorker

 

“In Izzo’s books . . . Marseilles is a ‘ville selon nos coeurs,’ a city in tune with our hearts, as we can read in the penultimate sentence of Total Chaos. A cosmopolitan, maritime city, greedy, sensual and warm, but undermined by racism, hatred, money, mafia, and religious fundamentalism—and passive complicity in the face of these scourges.”—Michel Samson, Slow Food

 

“Jean-Claude Izzo’s Marseille trilogy . . . delve deep into the guts of multiracial Marseilles, a city that is at once a hopeful symbol of the Mediterranean’s rich cultural past and an urban dystopia burdened by unemployment, racism and violence . . . Noir at its finest: compelling, sophisticated literature with a biting social edge.”—Hirsh Sawhney, The Times Literary Supplement

 

“Like all tragic noir heroes, Montale treads a dangerously narrow line between triumphant savior and doomed avenger.”—The Village Voice

 

“Total Chaos is undeniably literature . . . Part of this is due to Izzo’s amazing characterization . . . Izzo takes a convention of noir—the lost soul who finds himself in vengeance—and packs it with enough realism to make it utterly lifelike . . . Total Chaos is a noir through and through, but it feels so real that it reminds us that the clichés of noir were originally drawn from real life.”—The Quarterly Conversation

 

“A few years ago I was planning a trip to Madrid and Paris from Los Angeles. I was also deep into Jean-Claude Izzo’s Total Chaos . . . By the time I finished the book, I had replaced the Paris leg of my trip with Marseilles. I’d found Lagavulin, the main character’s scotch of choice. (Mine was always Laphroaig.) And a whole lot of interesting jazz . . . The story had leapt out from the book and into my life.”—Valla Vakili, CEO, Small Demons

 

“Like the best American practitioners in the genre, Izzo refrains from any sugarcoating of the city he depicts or the broken and imperfect men and women who people it.”—Publishers Weekly

 

“Jean-Claude Izzo’s Total Chaos is a marvelous noir novel in which passions and feelings are thrown into the narrative mix without reserve and without gratuitousness.”—La Repubblica

 

“Total Chaos . . . draws from the deep, dark well of noir . . . Izzo’s plot is labyrinthine, but his novel is rich, ambitious and passionate, and his sad, loving portrait of his native city is amazing.”—The Washington Post