The stunted but monstrous creature

Bari was considered a quiet place in the Eighties. A place where he could further his career, be promoted to captain, and so on.

It hadn't taken him long to realise that things were different.

Not only were there plenty of routine crimes — possession of drugs, bag snatching, burglaries — there were also major robberies, extortion, dynamite attacks, murders.

Something not unlike the Mafia lurked beneath the surface. Something opaque, like the stunted but monstrous creature you glimpse through the transparent shell of a reptiles' egg.

The Past Is a Foreign Country, by Gianrico Carofiglio, is a character study. It's a study of multiple characters and miraculously brings to life many people who appear on the page for even only a few paragraphs.

The main characters in question are Francesco — a card hustler, a Mr Ripley type — and Giorgio, who falls under Francesco's spell and the narrator through whose eyes their story unfolds. He jeopardizes his studies, his family relationships, and his entire moral centre of being.

Minor characters include Giorgio's sister; Francesco's mother; an Italian expat waiting tables in Spain; and several of the marks that the boys conduct business with.

Among the police officers, the lead is Lieutenant Chiti, literate and artistically inclined, plagued by migraines and a troubled childhood; his colleagues are no less colourful.

While the novel is ostensibly about a police investigation into a series of sexual assaults occurring in Bari, this is a surprisingly minor aspect of the book. Chapters concerning the progress of the case are few and far between, breaking up the story of Francesco and Giorgio. It is not certain till the very end how these two threads relate to each other. The mystery is less who is behind the crimes than how do these stories fit together, and this is less pressing than the reader's concern for how things turn out for our narrator.

"Manipulating cards, like manipulating objects, is more that just a matter of simple dexterity. The real skill of a magician is the ability to influence minds. Performing a magic trick successfully means creating a reality. An alternative reality where you're the one who makes the rules."

This is a very easy-to-read novel. What gives Francesco his power? What motivates him? Is it the thrill of a win, or is it watching someone lose? And even when we see the darkness behind someone's charm, why do we let ourselves be carried along by it? How far will Giorgio follow Francesco? How easy is it to give up everything you ever strove for? Why do we take the risks we do?

Carofiglio draws a very clear line between right and wrong, but shows us how murky the human heart is, how easily a person can slip across that line.

Review.
Excerpt.

Two Italians

Today's issue of Shelf Awareness dedicated to Rizzoli's Ex Libris imprint delighted me because it features two of my favourite Italians.

Umberto Eco

An oldie but a goodie. As the years pass, I like Eco's fiction less and less — it was all downhill after Foucault's Pendulum. But my appreciation of his work in the realms of semiotics, aesthetics, etc. continues.

His new book, The Book of Legendary Lands, will be published November 19. "This book is not concerned with fictional places alone. [...] I am dealing instead with those places that many people believed to have really existed, like the Earthly Paradise or Atlantis."

While I think the legend of Atlantis is a little tired (and for this reason I'm having a heckuva time plodding through William Azuski's Travels in Elysium), I'm curious to read Eco's erudite take "on why writers are compelled to create these worlds — and why readers are drawn to them."

Plus, it's illustrated, and if the publisher's website is anything to go by, it's bound to be gorgeous.

Gianrico Carofiglio

Sigh.

My literary crush of earlier this year was resurrected on reading this short interview. I mean, we share some of the same favourite authors! And he loves Stoner. And some of the books that changed his life changed my life! And he's so handsome and charming!

Sigh.

Carofiglio's new novel, The Silence of the Wave, is a standalone thriller involving a former undercover narcotics agent, his visits to a psychiatrist, and an 11-year-old boy's nightmares.

These and other things I would have liked to say

"Guido, how well you look! Have you been going to the gym over the winter? Are you alone or with a girlfriend?" Here she winked, as if to say: You can tell me all right, I'll confine myself to putting a notice in the paper and pasting up a few hundred posters around the town.

"Yes, you bitch, I'm alone and I want to stay that way. However, since you've turned up to get on my tits I've got something to say to you, so lend an ear. Your dinners were always a torture and, most of all, the food was vomit-worthy. I know they all said you were a great cook, but that will always remain a mystery to me. Your husband is, if possible, worse than you are. And your friends are, if possible, worse than him. One time they even suggested I join the Rotary Club. I want to tell you that I'm a Communist. That at so many dinners for so many years you were entertaining a Communist. Got that?"

These and other things I would have liked to say. But obviously I replied with nauseating courtesy.

Involuntary Witness, by Gianrico Carofiglio, was the perfect palate cleanser of a book for me last week — matters of truth and justice, characters of substance, yet light of touch.

Guido Guerrieri, defense counsel and narrator of the story, is now inextricably intertwined with the impression of the author I developed when I saw him in person. And that's not a bad thing. In fact it makes for a charming read.

Having never read a John Grisham novel, I do not what the standard is for "courtroom drama" or "legal thriller." This book is not a criminal investigation, and the truth about the crime is never fully resolved. This novel has courtroom scenes and some legal minutiae, but this aspect to me feels incidental. I almost care less about the outcome of the case than I do about how Guido gets on with his day to day, how he comes to grips with being separated, how his interior monologue unfolds.

(In this regard it reminds me a little of Sergio De La Pava's A Naked Singularity and it is a legal thriller to a similar extent — all that life getting in the way of the story. The plot, if one can so call the main legal proceeding, is interrupted by neighbours, pop music, and philosophical meanderings.)

I'm quite certain I'll be picking up another Carofiglio, but it won't be for the puzzle to solve, or the suspense of the proceedings, or throwing myself in with the defendant's lot. It'll be for Guido alone.

Whether there are books

When I enter a house for the first time I check on whether there are books, if they are few, if they are many, if they are too neatly arranged — which is a bad sign — or if they are all over the place — which is a good sign, and so on.

— from Involuntary Witness, by Gianrico Carofiglio.

This seemed reassuring

I had the pleasure of seeing Gianrico Carofiglio in interview yesterday evening, as part of the 15th Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival. He is a former anti-Mafia judge (in Italy) turned crime writer. I have not read his books, but I fully intend to (in fact, I bought a book after the show, and I'm already seven chapters in).

He's charming — modest and self-deprecating, yet exuding a calm confidence. He embodies very much the same qualities as his protagonist, defence lawyer Guido Guerrieri. When asked if he (Gianrico) and Guido are one and the same, he explains that, while he used to maintain a firm distinction between himself as author and Guido as an entirely fictional creation, upon seeing how popular Guido is with his women readers he's become much more flexible in the matter.

(He's so charming, in fact, that when he was signing my book for me, gosh, I don't know what came over me, my senses left me entirely, I think I flirted with him, and the opportunity to ask him a serious question about non-Scandinavian European crime fiction slipped past.)

Carofiglio came to writing relatively late in life, though he'd wanted to be a writer since he was eight. The question is not why a lawyer should decide to turn to writing, but why a young child who wanted to be a writer decided to become a lawyer instead.

He has mixed feelings about the port city Bari, the setting for this series of novels and from which he hails. He clarifies, it's good to have mixed feelings toward people and things you love. When things are too clear, it's not very interesting.

He echoes the sentiment in explaining why Guido is flawed: Weaknesses are more interesting than strengths. (And this is, I'm sure, why we love our poet detectives, our broken heroes, our tragic men — men readers find them easier to relate to, women readers come to care for them, want to fix them.)

Carofiglio tries to define a good lawyer. You must above all else have respect for people, all people. You must not be a moralist — there is no room for moral judgement in law. You must practice doubt.

In Italian, there's a saying: La verita, relativa. The truth is relative. One is an anagram of the other. There are always different versions of a crime, different versions of the truth. If you don't know this being a lawyer, then you're not a good lawyer, Carofiglio remarks. But he is not a relativist. Rather, acknowledging different perspectives and examining the multiple points of view is the best way to arrive at the truth.

I've started reading Involuntary Witness.

The psychiatrist was tall, massive and imposing, bearded and with hands like shovels. I could just see him immobilizing a raving lunatic and forcing him into a straitjacket.

He was kindly enough, considering his beard and bulk. He got me to tell him everything and kept nodding his head. This seemed reassuring. Then it occurred to me that I too used to nod my head while clients were talking and I felt somewhat less reassured.

It has a tone that reminds me a little of the one book I read by Wolf Haas. Self-involved, self-reflective, chatty, playful. It feels different from the Scandinavian crime novels. Though, Carofiglio wasn't about to make any generalizations of this sort. (He has read the first of Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy, and admits he found the stuff about computer hacking quite boring — he would've cut 150 pages.)

At any rate, Carofiglio has a brand new fan in me.

Here's a link to a review of Temporary Perfections, one of the later books in the series, but it in turn has links to reviews of several of his other books.