THE PERFECT CIRCLE, exploring the odd geometry of Love

THE PERFECT CIRCLE
CLAUDIA PETRUCCI (Tr. Anne Milano Appel)
World Editions (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: Two women far apart in time, a mysterious unsellable mansion in Milan that connects them: two lives that start to overlap as impossible parallels are revealed in this story of passion, betrayal, and selfish desire.

In the round house on Via Saterna, its Palladian square exterior nothing but a trompe-l’oeil, the sun pierces through the central skylight. Its rays pass three floors unobstructed, before reaching the circle below at the heart of the house: four fingers of water filling a little silver basin. It is here that young Lidia dies, setting an end to her clandestine love affair with the ambitious architect. It is this house that real-estate agent Irene is asked to sell, decades later, as the climate catastrophe escalates, cloaking the divided city in a permanent orange haze. Returning to her native Milan for the sale, Irene feels the brunt of her father’s judgement. He is a proud Italian and prouder architect—how could his own daughter make a living selling cultural patrimony to the highest foreign bidder?

As she faces this new Milan and the old family tensions she had avoided while living in Rome, Irene throws herself into the impossible sale, getting to know Via Saterna intimately—this space that is as unsettling as it is hostile, with the slowly emerging traces of Lidia’s interrupted life. In every room of the house, the burden of a mysterious, unresolved past can be felt, remnants of a selfish and manipulative love.

The Perfect Circle tackles themes like time, death, and repetition with depth and originality, while carrying its philosophy lightly. Through it all, the novel is a subtly disturbing page-turner, every new page adding a new layer and twist.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: The Performance, my previous experience by this author/translator duo, was not a success the way this read was. It was not the prose that presented me with a problem, it was the story the elegant and insightful prose was telling that turned me off. "Positive gaslighting" is a bridge too far for this old-man brain to go along with.

Thank all those useless gods I'm not confronted by this issue in The Perfect Circle. I remember the Milan of the 1980s, and it's evoked very clearly in the setting of this strange, almost sentient-seeming house at 7 Via Saterna. I spent my earliest years in a house that, like this one, felt deeply and unnervingly like it was aware. I hope whoever lives there now has made friends with the house, otherwise it will eat their happiness the way my house and the Via Saterna did to its earlier inhabitants. I'm clear about why Lidia, the owner from 1985 and Dario, the architect she hired to revamp the place ended up the way they did. Their passionate, relationship-destroying affair, the tragedies (see the "CW" tag and heed it) that come from it...all of it was that damned house! In truth, the house should be exorcised.

If you're not clear which house I'm referring to, both is your best assumption.

The evevnts of the 1980s provide the foundation for a story in the near future, in a Milan that's more entombed than protected from a dystopian world as the smog of the 1980s is now...um...fog/mist/atmospheric weirdness. 7 Via Saterna is unoccupied, never was, and will finally be sold once Irene gets to work on the problem of how to present it to buyers. She didn't count on discovering the unoccupied house is lived in by a young woman called, interestingly, Lidia. Now what can she do to shift this property as she's contracted to do? Who is the mysterious young Lidia, who can't be the 1980s woman who owned the house or a descendant of hers as there were no descendants?

What's so wonderful about Author Petrucci's Italian text and Translator Appel's rendering of it is how sinuous and beautifully recursive it is. The clues as to your place in time during any given moment of the story are subtle, easy to miss; I missed them all...I was only aware that I had missed them once I twigged to the storytelling technique that had worked so perfectly on me.

I'm a pretty experienced reader. It takes a masterful hand to wave my attention away without also losing my interest in so doing. I was left feeling really impressed, really delighted, when at the very end of the story I caught on to what was happening.

That sounds like a five, or even five-plus star review. There aren't five full stars on the rating scale. What happened? The hints and tickles of a lesbian attraction, that's what. It was so underdeveloped as to be pointless, a distraction that added nothing to the story. In 2026 that feels like queerbaiting, not character-building; it could easily be snipped out without the smallest change to anything being needed. So no, no perfect rating...but a whole huge leap up over the first Petrucci I read in my esteem.

I hope this team will bring more stories to the anglophone world.

THE LAKE'S WATER IS NEVER SWEET, apt title for people who can't catch a break

THE LAKE'S WATER IS NEVER SWEET
GIULIA CAMINITO (tr. Hope Campbell Gustafson)
Spiegel & Grau (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$29.00 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In her English-language debut, award-winning Italian novelist Giulia Caminito follows a teenage girl as her family transitions from Rome’s impoverished outskirts to a fraught new beginning in a tranquil lakeside town, capturing the disillusionment, loneliness, and rage that defined a generation.

In the 1990s, Gaia’s family moves from the neglected peripheries of Rome to an idyllic lakeside town twenty miles away, in search of a new life that will lift them out of poverty. Each of them bears their own scars: Gaia’s strong-willed mother is fiercely determined to secure a better future for her children at any cost; her father, a once proud man, now suffers in bitter silence after a devastating accident; her anarchist older brother rebels against the political apathy he sees at home; and her young twin brothers wordlessly bear witness to a family in decay.

When Gaia meets two local girls, Agata and Carlotta, the trio builds a fragile friendship throughout their adolescence based as much on their insecurities and jealousies as it is on their mutual affection. Gaia’s encounters with callous boys and contemptuous teachers convince her that she might always be an outsider—excluded from a privileged life and perhaps even beyond the possibility of happiness. Faced with bullying and betrayals among her peers and immense pressure from her mother to excel, Gaia turns inward and her world becomes increasingly insular. Then tragedy strikes her friend group. As more friends slip away and her family fractures, Gaia vows to make the world pay for all the things it has denied her.

Winner of the Campiello Prize, The Lake’s Water Is Never Sweet is an unflinching portrait of a generation, striving to make a place for themselves in a world markedly different from the one their parents promised them. With psychological acuity and stylish prose, Caminito takes us into the volatile, searching mind of a young woman torn between her desire to connect with others and her drive for self-preservation. In a novel that has been acclaimed by readers around the world, Caminito shows how tenderness and fragility often lie just beneath the surface of simmering fury.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Gaia narrates this story to us, in all her adolescent angst, pain, confusion, bewilderment...all the usual things an adolescent in the middle of the utterly mystifying process of finding out who she is, what she wants, how she's going to set about getting it, feels.

That does not sound like a book I'd like very much. And yet you see those four stars up there. Where'd they come from?

From a scaffolding that wasn't safe. From a stable that showed Gaia she didn't have the power to heal the wounds betrayal leaves. From a bag of rotting lemons, from a carnival shooting game, from texts that can't be answered...from, in other words, life as it is lived.

Watching in real-time someone coming of age is *maddening* because you're helpless. Reading a novel about a young woman becoming herself is both faster and friendlier on the patience. Gaia's got a hard row to hoe in this life, her entire family's very badly broken in real, honest ways. That leaves her to do what she can with what she's got, and that is never enough. Nothing is ever enough when you're working on, working out, yourself. You paste together the bits you can find, then paper over the holes and cracks and voids. It is how humans have always done it, don't be fooled by fools telling you it used to be easier, it was better when..."when" is the slipperiest word in English. "When" never comes, never came, isn't coming, got lost. "When" immigrated from Old Frisia, from Proto-Indo-Europe whatever wherever whenever that happened. Who needs "when" because we have "now."

And "now" is Gaia's native land.

It was clear to me the story here was not purely foundationally fiction. The author says so in her last word on the subject. She's Gaia; other girls from her past were Iris and Agata. It doesn't help, particularly, to know that but it does make me trust the author more. She's honest; she wrote a novel about realness by using reality, and one person's reality is never, ever enough...see above...for a whole novel. It's too much and never enough, like Mary Trump says. We're not enough for fiction; we're too much for Life. It's a puzzlement, remember Yul Brynner talking those lines on pitch? And no king like The King and I ever spoke greater sooth. Imagine not feeling puzzled! Imagine feeling so sure of yourself that you, a teen anarchist boy, run your family! Imagine how *little* you feel in the face of Life, and you power through anyway, and rotten-souled bastards take your life, your living, your family's home.

Imagine.

And yet here we are. Absolutely in the same place we were, only without instead of with.

Read The Lake's Water Is Never Sweet by Giulia Caminito as translated by Hope Campbell Gustafson and imagine.

SEPARATE ROOMS, classic Italian novel of grief and loss in the AIDS plague's early years

SEPARATE ROOMS
PIER VITTORIO TONDELLI (tr. Simon Pleasance)
Zando (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$14.99 ebook, available tomorrow

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Thomas, a young German musician, is dying. His older boyfriend, a renowned Italian writer named Leo, finds it impossible to watch the slow and inevitable demise of his lover; he condemns himself to moving cities every few weeks instead, in the hope of finding a semblance of peace.

He travels through Europe where past and present overlap, years merge and faces emerge—and where reminders of the life he and Thomas shared are on every corner. Leo's memories become clearer with every road he takes, much as he wishes he could simply forget. While alive, and wanting to preserve the passion of their relationship, Leo had forced Thomas to live separately: in separate rooms, separate towns, with separate lives. But now, face to face with true solitude, Leo must finally reckon with the impossible striving of memory to recreate life and, ultimately, cross an ocean to find the strength to go on.

André Aciman's Call Me by Your Name meets Ocean Vuong's On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous: Separate Rooms is a singular and unforgettable meditation on almost-ideal love, told in three musical movements, by a fiery and unforgettable literary talent.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: This book came out in Italian in 1989. I assume most of y'all remember something about 1989, but probably not the sheer awfulness of the AIDS epidemic eating the gay-men's communities around the world at that time.

I was there. I loved and lost more than once in the hell of the times. It happened like Tondelli, dead a year and a half after this book appeared, said it did:

In his last moments, Thomas is back in the family fold, with the same people who brought him into the world. Now, with their hearts torn asunder by suffering, they are helping Thomas to die. There is no room for Leo in this parental reconciliation. Leo is not married to Thomas. He has not had children with him. Neither of them bears the other's name at the registry office, and there is not a single legal record on the face of the earth that carries the signatures of witnesses to their union. Yet for more than three years they have been passionately in love with one another. They have lived together in Paris and Milan, and they have travelled together, played music together and danced together. They have quarrelled and abused each other, and even hated each other. They have been in love. But it is as if, without warning, beside that deathbed, Leo realised that he had experienced not a great love story, but rather some little school crush. As if they were telling him: You've both had a good time, and that's okay, too. But here we're fighting a life and death struggle. Here a life is at stake. And we—a father, a mother and a son—are what really matters.

That made Thomas one of the lucky ones, the ones whose families did not reject him, refuse to see him, or came to his deathbed simply to reject him one final time. Leo? Oh please, like anyone not gay thought a thing of the feelings and needs of the ones left behind!

The book is a series of leaps and hops in space...around the cities Thomas and Leo occupied for moments in time...and time, either spent together or remembered in the loss of love, or remembered in the moment of being there as one of the spaces Thomas wasn't with Leo. I think this fracturing into the three acts of an operetta, as Tondelli said he aimed to do, this absence of cohesion in the third-person narrative awareness, pretty perfectly explains grief's effects on the grieving mind.

In the grief of losing one's belovèd partner there's a profound silence. Leo's early response of lurching heedlessly from pillar to post is a way many people have of trying to escape that horrific, entombing silence. In looking at places he saw with Thomas, there's a sense that the existence of the places he saw with his love somehow, in some small corner of their physicality, contain an Akashic record of the emotional bond they shared. It's as though Leo, seeing this place or that, gets his love now vanished without a record, memorialized. If people still living don't see Thomas and Leo's love as valid, the squares of Paris or Milan recorded and validated it by holding them as their moments ran steadily out. In Leo's still-prevalent idea of what makes a couple worthy of acknowledgment, these places are the best substitutes he can identify for external validation.

By the third movement Leo feels, as he did in their life, that he and Thomas are meant to live in separate rooms. There is no more separate room than the tomb. Leo, permaybehaps too late, thinks his way through his actions in light of the ending of the love story he so possessed, the love object he so powerfully cherished. It is not a story about Leo's resolution of his regrets. It is Leo's reckoning with his (now alienated from their proper object) feelings. It is Leo's possibly impermanent realization that he, and Thomas, simply were not going to be able to invent for themselves and each other a way to accept they could live in anything but separate rooms.

I don't think it will speak to everyone. It spoke to me because my "Thomas" is ever with me, as Leo's is in this récit. The reckoning Leo is doing, I have done, and expect I'll do many years to come.

It's very beautiful. It is the last work Tondelli ever completed. It might mean a lot to people like me who lived it; but the experience of intense grief for what one has experienced the tearing, severing, bloody viciousness of death ripping away will speak to you all.

Maybe not today, but it will.

THE HUNGER OF WOMEN, do not read if you're hungry and have no food available...that way madness lies

THE HUNGER OF WOMEN
MAROSIA CASTALDI (tr. Jamie Richards)
And Other Stories
$14.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

Winner of the 2023 National Translation Award in Prose!

The Publisher Says: Rosa, midway through life, is alone. Her husband passed away long ago, and her cosmopolitan daughter is already out the door, keen to marry and move to the city. At loose ends, Rosa decides to transplant herself to the flat, foggy Lombardy provinces from her native Naples and there finds a way to renew herself—by opening a restaurant, and in the process coming to a new appreciation of the myriad relationships possible between women, from friendship to caregiving to collaboration to emotional and physical love.

Unconventional in style and yet rivetingly accessible, The Hunger of Women is a novel infused with the pleasures of the body and the little shocks of daily life. Made up of Rosa’s observations, reflections, and recipes, it tracks her mental journey back to reconnect with her own embattled mother’s age-old wisdom, forward to her daughter’s inconceivable future, and laterally to the world of Rosa's new community of lovers and customers. A tribute not only to the tradition of women's writing on hearth and home but to the legacy of such boundary-breaking feminist writers as Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, and Helene Cixous, The Hunger of Women is nothing less than a literary feast.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: A chest-pokey second-person punctuationless stream-of-consciousness narrative of a woman's awakening to the body's hungers? Where she addresses me directly as "Reader" throughout?! Four stars?!

I have not been kidnapped, am not being threatened with grievous bodily harm, and have not lost (more of) my mind. This is a work that, like Ducks, Newburyport and Milkman, uses what could feel like a gimmick in less talented hands to drag you willy-nilly into the head of a woman who, in middle life, determines she is not living, but existing, so sets out to use her woman-ness to its fullest capacity. She's Neapolitan, living in Milan, the mother of an adult daughter whose life has (as they must) diverged from her mother's despite their living together. Her marriage ended when her husband was killed in a car accident...very believable for anyone who's driven in Italy...so there's a huge space in her life as yet unfilled.

So you know, US readers: Neapolitans are the Southern Black folk of Italy, and Milan is the mothership of Italian racism and fascism. AND Rosa's a woman in a misogynist society. These are facts that color the way one sees the narrator that might not be obvious.

Rosa addressing us as "Reader" is my least-favorite thing in this largely plotless inner journey of an adult into the selfhood denied for so long simply by doing the rote, expected things. Rosa decides to open a restaurant...she knows about food, so it makes sense...and thus opens the floodgates of her body's hunger for womanly touch. This is pretty much it as to plot.

A lot of the prose, then, is dedicated to telling us the story of a woman's world as circumscribed by her agreement to be repressed. As that agreement wanes, and as she regales us with...recipes is not the word, with ingredients and techniques for making them sing together, much as one does when talking to a friend who shares one's experience level and cultural referents. These are poetic prose evocations of the cuisine of Naples in all its seafoody glory.

I wanted it all. All the time I read the book I was FAMISHED for the flavors she so intensely evokes in her passages of passata and disfruitings of frutti di mare (seaborne creatures). Then to trudge upstairs to gob a blob of kosher "food"...well, it was its own special torture.

I think I might've withheld a fifth star simply out of enraged anguish....

Is this a read for everyone...well, honestly not. The narrative has no drive for the plot-driven reader. The story is richer with some background that many simply won't care to acquire. The narrator's food-driven hunger is not going to do good things to dieters' willpower. People experiencing sexual deprivation or skin-hunger are not going to feel soothed. I don't imagine the eww-ick homophobes will have too much to shudder over unless they're insanely sensitive to sensuality shared by others. Those sorts aren't likely to be reading my stuff, fortunately.

So I'll clutch my fifth star to my deprived-of-cuisine chest but urge most of y'all to get the beautiful, poetic, seamless translation of a vibrant, intense woman's coming alive for your pre-Thanksgiving (US) or pre-Yule pleasure.

The feast before the feast, let's call it.

SECRET POWER: WikiLeaks and Its Enemies, investigative journalism from the other side of the WikiLeaks issue

SECRET POWER: WikiLeaks and Its Enemies
STEFANIA MAURIZI (tr. Lesli Cavanaugh-Bardelli), Foreword by Ken Loach
Pluto Press
$19.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: An uncovering of the terrifying depths of authoritarian power that hide behind the infamous story of WikiLeaks.

*Winner of the European Award for Investigative And Judicial Journalism in 2021 and Premio Alessandro Leogrande Award 2022*

'I want to live in a society where secret power is accountable to the law and to public opinion for its atrocities, where it is the war criminals who go to jail, not those who have the conscience and courage to expose them.'

It is 2008, and Stefania Maurizi, an investigative journalist with a growing interest in cryptography, starts looking into the little-known organisation WikiLeaks. Through hushed meetings, encrypted files and explosive documents, what she discovers sets her on a life-long journey that takes her deep into the realm of secret power.

Working closely with WikiLeaks' founder Julian Assange and his organisation for her newspaper, Maurizi has spent over a decade investigating state criminality protected by thick layers of secrecy, while also embarking on a solitary trench warfare to unearth the facts underpinning the cruel persecution of Assange and WikiLeaks.

With complex and disturbing insights, Maurizi's tireless journalism exposes atrocities, the shameful treatment of Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, on up to the present persecution of WikiLeaks: a terrifying web of impunity and cover-ups.

At the heart of the book is the brutality of secret power and the unbearable price paid by Julian Assange, WikiLeaks and truthtellers.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I dislike what I know of Julian Assange as a human being. That doesn't make what's been happening to him acceptable, still less justifiable. WikiLeaks has been a force internationally for sixteen years now; it's got a pretty spotty record, but that's not a huge surprise given its antipathy to Authority...that kind of puritanism leads the best-intentioned and most honestly passionate defenders of individual liberty down some deep, dark rabbit holes. This is not accidental, or without outside baiting. The use of agents provocateurs and disinformation is an old, effective means to hide actual, factual embarrassments in loud, distracting noise (see: the lives and work of Paul Linebarger and Edward Bernays).

The author is an established investigative journalist. She's won major European awards for her work in this often thankless, always risky role. All this as well as her undeniable personal drive to take on Power on behalf of the ordinary person's right to dictate what they will and won't tolerate from their governing institutions is what made this retelling of the events surrounding the scandals they've caused trustworthy to me. The mass media have, at best, glossed over and/or slanted their coverage uniformly negatively against Assange and WikiLeaks. Books like this are welcome correctives to that kind of Authority-supporting heavily biased coverage.

What matters in the world at large is that people like Assange and Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning and Reality Winner are punished, not for being bad people, but for refusing to be silent and complicit in crimes committed by terrible people for vile aims and in service of reprehensible purposes. Author Maurizi makes this crystal clear, which is why the book appeared via Pluto Press not, eg, Random House. Big Business and Big Government are symbiotes.

I still think Assange, the man, is a creep. After eading this book, I am more convinced than ever that he will be made to pay and pay and pay for daring to reveal what the blandly evil rulers are really getting up to. As will, eventually, Author Maurizi and Bill Browder and Jessikka Aro the other people who hold the powerful's crimes up for the public to see clearly and judge.

CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS OVER AN ELEVATOR IN PIAZZA VITTORIO, interesting hybrid genre story from Italian-Berber immigrant author

CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS OVER AN ELEVATOR IN PIAZZA VITTORIO
AMARA LAKHOUS (tr. Ann Goldstein)
Europa Editions
$14.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: A compelling mix of social satire and murder mystery.

A small culturally mixed community living in an apartment building in the center of Rome is thrown into disarray when one of the neighbors is murdered. An investigation ensues and as each of the victim's neighbors is questioned, the reader is offered an all-access pass into the most colorful neighborhood in contemporary Rome. Each character takes his or her turn center-stage, giving evidence, recounting his or her story--the dramas of racial identity, the anxieties and misunderstandings born of a life spent on society's margins, the daily humiliations provoked by mainstream culture's fears and indifference, preconceptions and insensitivity. What emerges is a moving story that is common to us all, whether we live in Italy or Los Angeles.

This novel is animated by a style that is as colorful as the neighborhood it describes and is characterized by seemingly effortless equipoise that borrows from the cinematic tradition of the Commedia all'Italiana as exemplified by directors such as Federico Fellini.

At the heart of this bittersweet comedy told with affection and sensitivity is a social reality that we often tend to ignore and an anthropological analysis, refreshing in its generosity, that cannot fail to fascinate.

My Review: Reading that book description isn't necessarily helpful. Social satire plus murder mystery, to most book-readin' Murrikins, is gonna call forth the specter of Murder by Death. You are not in for a satire like that. You are in for a very sophisticated and layered short novel in which a murder is committed, but frankly no one really cares who did it because it needed doing, and the perp the police have identified is a community pillar. No one believes Amedeo committed this murder, which no one calls a crime.

Amedeo steps out of the stories of ten people who all live in a small apartment building on Rome's tatty side, on the Piazza Vittorio. All ten people are displaced, not Roman, and all are made to feel more alien than guest by Rome and its Romans. Amedeo comes to the rescue of each person here, in ways practical and spiritual. He's a fixer, a born organizer, he spends his time on this earth open to and listening for the truths under the stories his neighbors tell, the truths under the facts of Rome and Italian society, the truths that not very many people will bother to learn or, quite possibly, ever realize are there.

So how can the police suspect this wonderful, soothing, special man of MURDER?! Because he, like everyone else, fought with the shit who got murdered? No...because he has disappeared. Not for the first time in his life. He has vanished, and in police work, that's as good as a confession. The novel is told in the interviews the police take with all the residents of Amedeo's building.

Interspersed with these interviews are wails, the first-person accounts of Amedeo himself. They're called wails because Amedeo, né Ahmed Salmi in Algiers, spends a lot of time locked in his wife's bathroom with a tape recorder, setting down his impressions of the people around him, and vocalizing in that uniquely Arab way...the ululating wail, used for joy, for mourning, for any access of emotion that words can't encompass. It's a wonderful way to let us into the experience of being alive in the skin of a force of nature. We're inside Amedeo, Ahmed, we're privileged to be the unseen auditors of the story of his world.

His private world. We have no sense whatever of his work, his living...he remains in a tight little box, as do all the characters, one that focuses on someone we don't meet or hear from or, frankly, care about. The victim is not the point. The murderer didn't commit a crime so much as perform clean-up on aisle two. The more we hear about him, the less we care that he's dead. It works well as a narrative technique to emphasize the almost miraculous nature of listening, and its almost total lack in the modern world.

So why 3.75 stars, when all of the above sounds like such praise? Because the Italian reviews mention an exuberance of language, a gonzo balls-out feeling that the text gives. In Italian. The translation is like the book description above, not uninteresting but nobody's idea of gonzo or balls-out writing. It's a translation. It feels like a translation. It's never going to convey the sense that the original can, of different regional voices, of different classes and different kind of Italian, because American English isn't that kind of language and American culture doesn't, at least at the level of culture where one finds readers of translated novels, like “dialect writing” because it's not Nice.

We lose. I want to read this book in Italian now. It's bound to be more fun. The translation is a good book. The original, I will bet, is a fantastic one.

*sigh*

PERSECUTION, trial by media and innuendo & how that destroys lives

PERSECUTION
ALESSANDRO PIPERNO (tr. Ann Goldstein)
Europa Editions
$16.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3.9* of five

The Publisher Says: In a sprawling villa on the outskirts of Rome, the members of the Pontecorvo family have gathered for dinner. Leo Pontecorvo, an internationally revered pediatric oncologist, is forty-eight. His wife, Rachel, is a physician and the loving mother to Filippo and Samuel, two amiable pre-teens. The evening news is on in the living room but nobody pays it any attention until Dr. Pontecorvo's name surfaces from the background noise and a news item airs that will change the lives of the Pontecorvos forever.

Leo Pontecorvo has been publicly accused of a vile crime. A spotlight is turned on him that reveals the mistakes, regrets, and contradictions of a lifetime. Every detail of his private and professional life is about to come under scrutiny, to be debated by both friends and foes, by ravenous reporters and punctilious prosecutors. But Leo could bear all this if it weren't for the suspicious gazes of his wife and children. Surely they, of all people, believe in his innocence!

Alessandro Piperno is widely acknowledged as one of today's most talented European novelists. His voice is singular and shocking at times, yet always possessed of tenderness and enormous generosity of heart. His vision is broad and encompassing, his psychological insights penetrating and undeniable. In this deeply felt family drama, Alessandro Piperno paints a broad canvas and fills it with psychologically complex characters whom readers will instantly recognize and never forget.

Europa Editions provided this copy in a Goodreads giveaway. Thank you.

My Review: Words can not only hurt, not only damage...they can kill. They can annihilate, destroy utterly the target of the carelessly spoken or maliciously uttered or calculatedly disseminated words. They can blow up a life, a family, a career, a vocation, they can eviscerate the worthy and worthwhile work a person has done.

And what if they're true? What if they're not true? Half true? He said, she said? It doesn't matter at all. Words, when spoken, can only be forgiven but never forgotten.

Piperno's novel of a Jewish pediatric oncologist's fall from the pinnacle of his life-saving profession is profoundly unsettling. It is discursive in style, and it is peculiarly intimate because of that. Very few paragraphs lead directly to the subject allegedly at hand, but all of them, each of them, serves to build the image of the Pontecorvo world, that of Dottore Leo, la signora Rachel, the pre-teen boys, Telma the Filipina maid...all these intersecting, interlocking worlds are completely and finally and irrevocably smashed and cannot be restored, only re-formed. The tracks in the thickets of words Piperno creates are like the game spoor a hunter follows, requiring patience and attention to interpret and encouraging the reader, the hunter, to look around carefully, to attend to the landscape as much as the path.

Ann Goldstein ably translates the Italian text in such a way as to suggest the varying uses made of familiar and formal address. It's a very hard thing to do, and it's impressive to see the job done so well. Part of the job of a translator is to create the mood of the original in a different idiom...never does Goldstein do this better than in the passages where the snobbery and class-consciousness that Leo faces when others refer to or speak to his wife, daughter of an observant Jew who also happens to be a businessman, in contrast to his more assimilated, haute bourgeois background.

I was transported in the reading of this novel, though not to a lovely sweet cotton-candy land of milk and honey. (Frankly, that's always sounded revolting to me. Not to mention sticky.) I was immersed in the life of the disintegrating Pontecorvo family. I emerged after a catharsis feeling, oddly, buoyed up, able to see the shore and feel the water of the sad existence below me support me as I started for solid ground.

A FINE LINE, fifth Guido Guerrieri procedural set in Bari, Italy

A FINE LINE
GIANRICO CAROFIGLIO (Guido Gerrieri #5) {tr. Howard Curtis}
Bitter Lemon Press
$9.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: The fifth in the best-selling Guido Guerrieri series.

When Judge Larocca is accused of corruption, Guerrieri goes against his better instincts and takes the case. Helped by Annapaola Doria, a motorbike-riding bisexual private detective who keeps a baseball bat on hand for sticky situations, he discovers that the judge has links to the mafia. Larocca is blind to the immorality of his actions but Annapaola makes sure that justice is done, perhaps not in the most orthodox way. Of course Guerrieri cannot stop himself from falling for Annapaola's exotic charms.

The novel is a suspenseful legal thriller but it is also much more. It is the story of a judge who, to quote Dostoevsky, "lies to himself and listens to his own lies, so gets to the point where he can no longer distinguish the truth, either in himself or around himself."

Book One review — Book Two review — Book Three review — Book Four review

THIS BOOK WAS BORROWED VIA INTERLIBRARY LOAN. SUPPORT YOUR LIBRARY!

My Review: As you know by now, this is not the usual legal thriller. I found it just lovely to read, and for someone who's closer to 70 than to 40 I think that will hold true; but I'm sorry to say I do not think it will be of very wide appeal. The author's Italian-Mafia-prosecutor background has given us lots of good moments in the Italian legal system. Believe me, US citizens, it needs the kind of explication that will bore Grisham readers stupid.

Even I wanted things to get moving already, in fact several times flipped ahead two pages to get away from verbosity. So not my highest recommendation...but the pleasures of reading the book are there for the patient and the curious. Whatever you do, do NOT start here! Start at the beginning with Involuntary Witness and get to know Guido. He ages more or less in real time, unlike many (if not most) US series-mystery leads. This makes the Guido of this novel significantly more seasoned, and less approachable if you will, than his earlier self. Don't waver because of that...he's not surly! He's simply...feeling Time's Arrow nudging between his shoulder-blades.

But the pleasures of reading these stories are quite clear, very evident, eg:

Jurists, with rare exceptions, are unconsciously and tenaciously averse to clarity and brevity.

It is worth remembering what the author's career is...trial lawyer...when reading that quote. He's got the insider dope, alrighty all right, and is sharing it with us. In more ways than one, and some are unconscious and unintentional....

This quote should be engraved on the rocks we throw at 45 after he's impeached, convicted, and is being transported to his forever home in prison:

Power – any form of power – is acceptable only if it’s transparent and clean, if it’s exercised in a way that is equal for everybody.

Don't guess that needs belaboring.

Occasionally Author Carofiglio lapses into some sort of brain seizure, a strange and sad misalignment of synapses that produces these odd statements of unnecessary-to-refute error:

The situation had got out of hand, particularly because of the books. Apart from those on the shelves, there were books everywhere. On the floor, on the tables, on the sofas, in the bathroom, in the kitchen—and let's be honest, not all of them were indispensable.

Poor man. So sad, those delusions of...of...well, beats me what you call it, but it's the syndrome when some Satanic imp uses your brain to bring *shudder* book-desacralization disorder into the world. Imagine thinking some books are dispensible! It is to laugh!

TEMPORARY PERFECTIONS, fourth Guido Guerrieri procedural set in Bari, Italy

TEMPORARY PERFECTIONS
GIANRICO CAROFIGLIO (Guido Guerrieri #4) {tr. Anthony Shugaar}
Rizzoli USA
$11.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: The electrifying best-selling crime thriller from Italy, available for the first time in English. An instant sensation and number-one best seller since its publication, Temporary Perfections is the fourth crime novel by former Italian prosecutor Gianrico Carofiglio to feature Guido Guerrieri. A lawyer practicing in Bari, in southwest Italy, Guido Guerrieri is hired by an old colleague to work a missing-persons case that the police have failed to solve. Manuela Ferraro disappeared six months ago after spending a September weekend at a beach resort; as Guerrieri digs deep into her life and activities, he stumbles into a sinister drug ring and the real truth about why Ferraro vanished.

Simultaneously thoughtful and suspenseful, this is crime fiction at its best.

Book One review — Book Two review — Book Three review — Book Five review

THIS BOOK WAS BORROWED VIA INTERLIBRARY LOAN. SUPPORT YOUR LIBRARY!

My Review: Fourth in the Guido Guerrieri series of Italian legal thrillers, this entry is not a procedural but a traditional private eye investigation. It is a true noir, set in Bari...a weirdly San Franciscan venue, and my how well its noirness is invoked.

Counselor Guerrieri, as the new translator calls him, is mid-flow on one of his usual if not terribly interesting workdays. He's had to move his law practice into new, American-ish offices because his former secretary has passed the bar and is now of counsel, and the adopted Peruvian daughter of some old friends is in there with him too. Plus a new secretary inherited from a deceased colleague. What was once snug became claustrophobic. So now Guido looks around himself, hating the slickness and the newness, and feeling all at sixes and sevens with his solitary life.

In walks an old colleague, with the zombified parents of a six-months-missing daughter. The Carabinieri, sort of a cross between the sheriffs and the FBI, must have missed something, Guido; you find people, you solve cases, Guido; please, my clients will pay you just to look over the file, Guido, please help them, look at them, they can't function, help them!

What co-dependent with a savior complex could resist such a plea? Not our Guido! No matter that he's a lawyer, not a PI, and no matter that the cop min charge of the case when it was opened is a friend of his, a man he respects, whose investigatory talents he trusts. Someone Needs Guido! And we're off, talking to the friends of vanished Manuela already interviewed, chasing down leads that have grown cold, being seduced and boinked by gorgeous, curvaceous young suspects...all the noir PI tropes are here, and well deployed.

In the end, Counselor Guerrieri solves the tawdry case, as everyone knows he will, but the fact that a Sherlock Holmes short story is the trigger that presents the solution to him is a touch I treasure. That the crime is solved and the guilty punished is a reason to read any fictional mystery, since real life seldom offers such order and satisfaction.

But then there are the dissatisfactions of this outing in the series. It is not a legal procedural thriller. There is no doubt in the mind of anyone at all that the vanished girl is dead from the get-go, so the suspense is only moderate. I am no fan of the sudden sea change in the direction, for all that I like noirs. I want my legal procedural fix!

And then there's the weirdness of the book being published by Rizzoli. ..!!.. That's right, the pretty-pictures people! It's a nice job, and it's not like they printed the book on 100-pound glossy paper and used overly ornamental dingbats on every page, but it's...unsettling...sort of like finding gay porn in your mama's nightstand. Error 404: File Not Found.

So why give it 4.5 stars, if I hate it? I don't hate it, it's quite well written, if translated in a way I'm less happy with that the previous two-book translator Howard Curtis did the job. But the main reason I've rated the book so highly is the portrayal of the bereaved parents.

I've mentioned before that I lost my son when he was two. No worse thing can happen to a person. Manuela's father, heartbreakingly, goes to the train station and waits for his girl to get off the train. He walks up and down the train searching the faces of the arriving passengers, praying hoping believing that one will be his daughter. Guido, who witnesses this, is so powerfully moved that one can feel him suffering for, suffering with, truly having compassion for the mad father. This brief, perfectly imagined, beautifully underplayed scene is worth four stars on its own.

Recommended.

INVOLUNTARY WITNESS, first Guido Guerrieri procedural set in Bari, Italy

INVOLUNTARY WITNESS
GIANRICO CAROFIGLIO (Guido Guerrieri #1) {tr. Patrick Creagh}
Bitter Lemon Press
$13.95, available now

Rating: 4.9* of five

The Publisher Says: The first in the Guido Guerrieri series.

A nine-year-old boy is found murdered at the bottom of a well near a popular beach resort in southern Italy. In what looks like a hopeless case for Guido Guerrieri, counsel for the defense, a Senegalese peddler is accused of the crime. Faced with small-town racism fuelled by the recent immigration from Africa, Guido attempts to exploit the esoteric workings of the Italian courts.

More than a perfectly paced legal thriller, this relentless suspense novel transcends the genre. A powerful attack on racism and a fascinating insight into the Italian judicial process, it is also an affectionate portrait of a deeply humane hero.

"Carofiglio writes crisp, ironical novels that are as much love stories and philosophical treatises as they are legal thrillers."—The New Yorker

"Raises the standard for crime fiction. Carofiglio's deft touch has given us a story that is both literary and gritty—and one that speeds along like the best legal thrillers. His insights into human nature—good and bad—are breathtaking." —Jeffery Deaver

Book Two review — Book Three review — Book Four review — Book Five review

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My Review: Avvocato Guido Guerrieri, lawyer of Bari on Italy's southeastern coast, is fast approaching forty, newly separated from his wife of ten lost, bored years, and in the grips of the worst constellation of anxiety symptoms since Mr. Monk on the TV. He's moved into an apartment that he couldn't describe if you held a gun to his head, and he's absolutely unable to muster even a fake interest in his clients' problems. He sits, smiles, nods, files paperwork by rote, and in short lives on autopilot.

And then in walks a woman with a case. No money, but a case.

Non-European citizen Abajaje, Egyptian by birth, wants Guido to defend her...her...co-continental? boyfriend? fellow sufferer from race bias?...Abdou, a Senegalese immigrant and fake handbag selling beach vendor, against charges that he, a multilingual schoolteacher in Africa, with a love for children, did willfully restrain and cause harm to a child. The police are sure he did it; the few witnesses are sure it was him they saw acting strangely and cruising around the beach at the relevant time; what's the big deal here, anyway, he's just a black dude who talked to the kid, must be him who killed little Ciccio.

Except he was in Naples at the time. Guerrieri, in spite of himself, is intrigued by what the case doesn't have, proof, and what it does have, the defendant's improbable, unprovable, but true, alibi. Is truth capable of beating out prejudice in an Italian justice system not known for its love of Veracity, but more for her sister Verisimilitude?

Hmmm.

For 137pp, Carofiglio sets the stage with Guerrieri's craziness, his lackadaisical work habits, his depressed past and anxious present. It's all very nicely written, eg:

"You are intelligent, Avvocato. I have always thought of myself as more intelligent than other people. This is not a lucky thing, but it is hard to understand that.If you think yourself more intelligent than others, you fail to understand a lot of things, until they are suddenly brought home to you. And then it's too late."

Thus Abdou the Non-European citizen to his lawyer in the prison's meeting room. I was regularly able to pause and appreciate the euphony and the accuracy of Carofiglio's writing. It shines through the book that he was a judge, in fact one of the judges who very bravely brought in guilty verdicts against Mafia defendants in the 90s trials that revolutionized the Mezzogiorno (Italy's southern region)'s social structure.

So it's no surprise to anyone that, in the last ~130pp, Carofiglio delivers the best, most complete, court trial I've read between book covers. It's a gem. It's pitch-perfect, and it's so nicely built that I hate to reveal it in detail. It's different than the standard American courtroom drama, because it's about the words, not the deeds, of the players. It's like listening to a fine old radio drama after watching an episode of "Starsky and Hutch" on AntennaTV.

It's a pleasure. I'm delighted to have found Sig. Carofiglio and Avv. Guerrieri at last.

SUPERZELDA, an early canary in the Zelda resurgence mines

SUPERZELDA: The Graphic Life of Zelda Fitzgerald
Tiziana LoPorto and Daniele Marotta
One Peace Books
$16.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Dancer, painter, writer, muse, passionate lover, and freethinker, Zelda Fitzgerald is one of the most iconic figures of the Jazz Age. Born in Alabama in 1900, she was only 18 when she met F. Scott Fitzgerald, an ambitious young writer who would turn into one the greatest American authors of all time. Beautiful, talented, irreverent, extravagant, and alcohol-driven, the newly married couple took New York's high society and the whole literary world by storm. They traveled to France, Italy, and Africa; hung out with Ernest Hemingway, Dorothy Parker, and Gertrude Stein; managed to both charm and enrage most of the people they were acquainted with; and ended up destroying their love and themselves-Zelda was diagnosed with schizophrenia and spent more than a decade in psychiatric clinics, tragically dying at 48 in a fire. Superzelda is a thoroughly researched work based on period photographs and documents, as well as on Zelda and Scott's writing. It is a biography, a love story, and a travelogue all wrapped into one. The beautiful two-color illustrations bring to life one of the most fascinating women, as well as eras, of the early 20th century.

My Review: Twitter made me do it.

No, for real. I saw a tweet of a reviewlet for Superzelda and, well, I was too curious not to look into the book itself. Baz Luhrmann's adaptation of The Great Gatsby, the publication of Z, and now this! An embarrassment of riches in Fitzgeraldry. What can a comic book add to the merriment, I wondered, that something more meaty and textual couldn't do better?

Well now, given my overall lack of appreciation for comic books, the answer you're expecting now is either a grumbling "not a lot" or a shrieking "NOTHING!" Nanny nanny boo-boo! I liked this comic book condensed history of Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald a good deal.

The illos are, well, they're what I'd expect. I think they're okay. The fact that they're printed on comic-book paper, uncoated and not very thick and pretty rough, added to the charm of the thing. It even smells the way I expect a comic book to smell! I like the two-color printing, black and various screens of a lovely slate-meets-turquoise blue. I like the choices of subjects to illustrate and the sense I get that Marotta, the illustrator, had about six zillion photos tacked up and piled on tables and propped against books in his studio and he alchemically schlurgled them around in his visual cortex and blew them out his hands in a fury of creation.

LoPorto's writing I can't comment on, because of necessity it's been translated and that means I have no idea how this compares to her original since I haven't read all of it. The story is already familiar to me, so I'm not reading to be informed, only entertained. I was, at least enough to finish the book.

Which leads me to the heart of the matter for me: What is the point of these things? They're not violent or prurient, previously the two reasons that comic books existed; they're not in-depth, they're not glitteringly witty or lushly lovely; they're sort of limbic creations, in a twilight zone of fact meeting imagination that just makes no sense to me. This is a book that resembles Zelda, Nancy Milford's excellent biography of Zelda Fitzgerald, the way Wikipedia resembles the Encyclopedia Britannica. Did I enjoy it? Yeah, in a browsing-the-porn-sites way; nothing much not to like, but nothing to get my teeth (!) into.

Plus it's too hard to read.

THE BARON IN THE TREES by Italo Calvino, one of the best books I've ever read

THE BARON IN THE TREES
ITALO CALVINO translated by Archibald Colquhoun
Mariner Books
$13.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Cosimo, a young eighteenth-century Italian nobleman, rebels by climbing into the trees to remain there for the rest of his life. He adapts efficiently to an arboreal existence and even has love affairs.

My Review: This being a famous and well-studied book, I suppose the publisher didn't feel the need to do a sell-job on it. That little squib is barely a log-line!

I read this book first in ~1974, because it had a cool-looking jacket. It also had an Italian author, which was also cool. But the reading of it was a revelation because the titular Baron was the perfect rebel, firm of purpose and adamant of spirit. And all over what seems, at first anyway, such a ridiculous cause: Refusing to eat snails. I'd never had snails offered to me at that point, and I was in full agreement with the Baron. But as the pages flipped on, I could see what was really at stake was the right to set one's own boundaries, to establish a core identity by and for one's own self.

All adolescents resonate to that theme, I think, and that's why I'm surprised that this book isn't required reading until college. It would serve well in junior or senior year of high school. Anything that deals with the process and price of becoming and being an individual seems to me to be a good fit for that age. Plus it's beautifully translated, so it's easy to read.

And for the record, I ate snails the first time they were offered to me. They were delicious.

Book-A-Day #24: A book that reminds you of your English teacher

THE INFERNO OF DANTE
DANTE ALIGHIERI
translator: ROBERT PINSKY
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux
$21.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: This widely praised version of Dante's masterpiece, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award of the Academy of American Poets, is more idiomatic and approachable than its many predecessors. Former U.S. Poet Laureate Pinsky employs slant rhyme and near rhyme to preserve Dante's terza rima form without distorting the flow of English idiom. The result is a clear and vigorous translation that is also unique, student-friendly, and faithful to the original: "A brilliant success," as Bernard Knox wrote in The New York Review of Books.

My Review: The Doubleday UK meme, a book a day for July 2014, is the goad I'm using to get through my snit-based unwritten reviews. Today's prompt is the twenty-fourth, a book that reminds you of your English teacher.

Ninth grade, or freshman high school year, was The Odyssey, and tenth was The Inferno. We used, in 1974, the then-newish Ciardi translation, made in 1954; it was quite an event, since Ciardi (a poet of some renown) translated it as poetry instead of as Italian-to-English words.

Pinsky's translation attempts the damn-near impossible feat of preserving the terza rima (aba, bcb, cdc, etc.) rhyme scheme invented by Dante for this cycle of poems. The result is a noble experiment, one marked by many successes. There are some weird things like quotes flowing over multiple stanzas, and there are some...odd...rhymes. But hell, the man tried a damned near impossible feat! Italian is a language in which it's harder *not* to rhyme than otherwise, and English resists rhyme with all its might and main.

So what is any reviewer to say about a 700-year-old poem? Nothing hasn't been said by now. I am anti-christian. The theology behind the entire Divine Comedy appalls and repulses me. I speak rudimentary Italian. Pinsky's efforts to reproduce terza rima are, to my ears, clunky and unnecessary. But in the end, rating a book like this is about what the take-away is for the reader. I take away a sense of Dante as an intelligent, desperately lonely man, attempting to make a Universe in which his existence matters and is of some moment. I stand in awed amazement at his gloriously baroque imagination. I am gobsmacked by the sheer audacity of a medieval poet writing in the vernacular. If Dante was alive today, he'd be writing raps.

Ugh. Horrible thought.

But nonetheless, I am wowed at a root level by the joyous, exuberant viciousness and the unapologetic cruelty of Dante's score-settling fates for his enemies. What a guy! Those raps he'd be writing today? They'd inspire Wes Craven to make movies and Clive Barker to write gore-fests!

Try this exercise: Imagine a beat-box under the terza rima stanzas. Read a piece aloud imagining hand-claps at the end of each stanza. This is what I think we, in this relativistic age, should strive for: to interpret the classics of literature and poetry by standards relevant to today, in addition to the standards that we know were applied at the time of the work's creation.

Many more layers to this work that way. After all, a literary classic is a work that's never finished saying what it has to say.

And here one is.


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

THE TERRA-COTTA DOG, second Montalbano culinary adventure, I mean mystery!

THE TERRA-COTTA DOG (Inspector Montalbano #2)
ANDREA CAMILLERI (tr. Stephen Sartarelli)
Penguin Books
$12.99 ebook platforms, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The Terra-Cotta Dog opens with a mysterious tête-a-tête with a mafioso, some inexplicably abandoned loot from a supermarket heist, and some dying words that lead inspector Montalbano to a secret grotto in a mountainous cave where two young lovers, dead fifty years and still embracing, are watched over by a life-size terra cotta dog. Montalbano's passion to solve this old crime takes him, heedless of personal danger, on a journey through the island's past and into a family's dark heart amid the horrors of World War II.

My Review: I am truly gruntled and kempt after reading a Montalbano novel. Sleek, in fact; one could go so far as to say consolate.

The mystery, that is the modern-day mystery of arms-dealing and law-breaking, gets short shrift in this delightful book. It gets passed to Montalbano's second-in-command, Augello, at Montalbano's discretion, after Augello pitches a hissy fit and acts like a neglected wife because Montalbano runs a team within a team to do his real work.

Things Go Badly. In fact, a character I loved very much pays the ultimate price for Augello's jealous fit. But Montalbano, whose head everything ultimately falls on, has already turned his attention to Livia, his quite extraordinary lover from Genoa, and a mystery from WWII.

One guess which of those two gets neglected.

The point of these books is how much a mystery gets hold of one, how deeply set the hook is when it's properly baited for the mysterian. (Other than the name of a one-hit wonder band, I've never actually used that word before, and "I do not think that word means what you think it means." {Princess Bride reference}) Sure, yeah, people are smuggling submachine guns and stuff, mmm-hmmm get back to me if something needs my attention but some a-hole killed two kids in the Act of Luuuv 50+ years ago, then put them in a cave where evidence assures us they were NOT shot, and with some very odd burial goods...a bowl of money, a jug of water, and a terra-cotta statue of a dog...and then sealed them up carefully and invisibly. WTF? as Montalbano most certainly wouldn't have thought, who does that? What kind of story makes that not only okay, but so urgent as to force someone to do it?

Exactly what I was wondering. Montalbano is my kinda guy. There are people to *do* the modern-day, not-very-challenging stuff, and even when they get stuff wrong (as they did, to his almost-fatal detriment when a shoot-out costs him the life of a friend and a month in the hospital) things will turn out, they always do...just learn to live with the consequences...but only he, Montalbano, cares to or can ferret out the seemingly unimportant but emotionally charged secrets of the past.

I was walloped upside my little punkin haid by the ending of this book. I could NOT believe an American publishing house would do this! Of course, they only did it ten years after it became a bestseller in *the rest of the world*, but let's let that slide. They did it, thank you Penguin, and they made a lovely object of the book, and they have published all of the series in proper order *smoochsmooch* on their corporate ham-producing-areas to boot!

I won't encourage anyone to read these books because, if you need encouragement, you're not the Right Stuff for them. (*snicker* THAT oughtta cause a stampede!)

REASONABLE DOUBTS, third Guido Guerrieri procedural set in Bari, Italy

REASONABLE DOUBTS
GIANRICO CAROFIGLIO (Guido Guerrieri #3) {tr. Howard Curtis}
Bitter Lemon Press
$9.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4.9* of five

The Publisher Says: Lawyer Guerrieri is asked to handle the appeal of Fabio Paolicelli, sentenced to sixteen years for smuggling drugs into Italy. Everything seems stacked against the accused, not least because he initially confessed to the crime. His past as a neo-fascist thug also adds credence to the case against him. Only the intervention of Paolicelli’s beautiful half-Japanese wife finally overcomes Guerrieri’s reluctance. Matters get more complicated when Guerrieri ends up in bed with her. Gianrico Carofiglio, born in 1961, is a judge and anti-Mafia prosecutor in the southern Italian city of Bari. Bitter Lemon Press introduced him to English-speaking readers with his best-selling debut novel, Involuntary Witness.

Book One review — Book Two review — Book Four review — Book Five review

THIS BOOK WAS BORROWED VIA INTERLIBRARY LOAN. SUPPORT YOUR LIBRARY!

My Review: Third in the Guido Guerrieri Italian legal procedural thrillers, this outing finds Avv. Guerrieri tilting at windmills again, with a twist: He's running an investigation into the client's story. He's taken the case of an imprisoned drug courier who insists he's innocent of knowingly transporting 40 kilos of cocaine from Montenegro back to Bari in the car carrying himself, his wife, and their small daughter. He was a small-time crook before, yes, and (unknown to the client) was even a nasty Fascist gang-bully in the 1970s who beat young Guido up in the street. But to imperil his own wife and daughter by doing something so stupid as to run a hundred pounds of cocaine across international borders?! Never!

But word in the prison-yard is that Avv. Guerrieri is a good one, a lawyer who does the job he's hired for, and makes the case work for the client. This time, though, Guido faces something a little bit tougher than just a client probably guilty and just denying it out of embarrassment at involving his family, or even the long-ago beating he got at the client's hands (which the client's clearly forgotten): Don Quixote de Guerrieri has met his Dulcinea, the client's beautiful half-Japanese wife Natsu.

And here Guido Guerrieri is, single and everything, since Margherita left for New York and a new life (the rat!). And here Natsu is, unsure of her husband's innocence, unsure of her future, unsure of how to tell her daughter that Papa's not coming home from his business trip until 2025...what can you expect a woman to do when a handsome older gent with sad eyes and a penchant for reading strange books, a sophisticated palate that can really appreciate her cooking, and a way with soothing her deeply unhappy daughter's nightmares falls into her lap?

In the end, as always, Guido sees justice served, and sees his services amply rewarded in the process by solidifying his excellent reputation among the criminal classes, with the local narcotics officers, and the Italian judiciary, all at the same time. Not for the first time, Carofiglio weaves a believable resolution to a plot he seems to have set in motion specifically to challenge the clockwork universe into crushing our Don Quixote hero with the windmill blades.

At the end of the last book, Guido and Margherita were celebrating Christmas together! He'd even jumped out of a plane to impress her! And in one short passage at the very beginning of this book, Carofiglio dispatches her to the same place that all happy-making things go in the lives of hard-boiled sleuths. I was a little bit surprised at first, then I remembered the cardinal rule of noir: No one is happy for long.

A doomed affair with a client's wife is a great noir touch, too. No one even moderately sentient can doubt for a second that, once Natsu appears, Guido's going to succumb to her and that she's going to offer up the goods. All progresses apace, and the expected complications ensue; and perhaps that's why this installment isn't quite so thrilling to me as the previous two. I suspect that the far greater emphasis on the investigative parts of the case as opposed to the actual court arguments and examinations might contribute to my lack of superhappy. But the elements are there, just in smaller proportion to previous outings. All I can hope is that the series doesn't become all PI instead of procedural.

I really like the translations of these books, I must say, since they give me credit for being intelligent enough to need the occasional reinforcement of the book's Italian setting by using actual Italian in some non-critical but very practical ways. My favorite example is the characters calling each other, when culturally necessary for them to do so, by their job titles, eg Guido being called "Avvocato" or "Lawyer-man" in professional contexts, exactly as they would in Italy. Grace notes like this are very important to my sense of pleasure in a book, and greatly enhance my willingness to read more of the series.

I continue to enjoy these books, and wait eagerly for the next installment. That's saying something from a man whose "to be read" shelf has over 1000 titles on it.

A WALK IN THE DARK, second Guido Guerrieri procedural set in Bari, Italy

A WALK IN THE DARK
GIANRICO CAROFIGLIO (Guido Guerrieri #2) {tr. Howard Curtis}
Bitter Lemon Press
$9.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4.9* of five

The Publisher Says: When Martina accuses her ex-boyfriend—the son of a powerful local judge—of assault and battery, no witnesses can be persuaded to testify on her behalf, and one lawyer after another refuses to represent her. Guido Guerrieri knows the case could bring his legal career to a messy end, but he cannot resist the appeal of a hopeless cause. Nor can he deny an attraction to Sister Claudia, the young woman in charge of the shelter where Martina is living, who shares his love of martial arts and his virulent hatred of injustice.

Book One review — Book Three review — Book Four review — Book Five review

THIS BOOK WAS BORROWED VIA INTERLIBRARY LOAN. SUPPORT YOUR LIBRARY!

My Review: In the second installment of the Avv. Guido Guerrieri legal thriller series, Our Hero has accepted the case of an abused woman who wants to bring civil suit against her battering, stalking ex-lover. Who just happens to be the son of the most powerful criminal judge in the city of Bari. And he didn't get that way by passing out Christmas hams to the needy, if you get my drift. Martina, at considerable risk to herself, wishes to put an end to the charm in her ex's charmed life by making him face publically the harm he's done her; he isn't, unsurprisingly, prepared to let this happen, and he retains the meanest, most sick-making kind of silk-upholstered shit-sack of a lawyer one can imagine. (The author being a judge, I suspect this character is a sarcastic payback on someone or someones he's dealt with in his anti-Mafia trials.)

Cue Guido's Don Quixote music! Saddle up, Sancho Reader, we're going for a tilt at the windmill of privilege, social and societal. Guido hears about the case with aplomb...she's gotta be kidding, so he slapped her around, this isn't a criminal case, c'mon! stalking? what, a man can't walk down a street?...until a combination of a feminist martial artist/nun, a female public prosecutor, and the head of the local deviant crimes unit all singing the same song makes him listen, and re-evaluate. Then they tell him who is alleged to have committed the crime.

Whoa Nelly! Career suicide help line, my name is don't do it, please tell me everything...and by god, Guido does the amazing and the improbable: He learns to accept that male privilege is a mindset, and society doesn't even notice it. (I'd add straight privilege if it was relevant, which it's not here, but it's equally virulent.) He's already sure he wants to take down the son of the local bought judge because he's an old leftist. (Old, hell, he's a puppy of forty.)

And Guido works his most sneaky, ju-jitsu-inspired magic in the trial that ensues. He really gives it a twist this time. So does the author. SUCH a twist, with nuns and cops and lawyers and sleazeballs all enmeshed in a fracas that had me, no exaggeration, gasping and jumping up and down.

In a paltry 215pp, I lived through the entire range of my emotional reactions to violence. Each of them. In turn, simultaneously, in order of virulence, and finally in catharsis.

I am not a subscriber to the Woman is Saintly Victim school of thought. I do not believe that men are abusers and women victims by nature, despite the crap that infests our fictional bookosphere. The issue of stalking, and its nastier ancillary complexes, is a very real one and a very scary one. The world has mean, nasty, horrible people in it, and by all that's holy, they need to be put away, stopped, found out and exposed. This novel satiated my strong need for that to happen, and it did a brilliant job of it.

The ending, while emotionally intense and not entirely pleasant, came close to being perfect. Close, so close...one event did not happen, and that is my one cavil with the whole thing.

I'm a big fan of the less prurient, more procedural style Carofiglio uses in these books, compared to the confessional, almost pornographic closeness to the dramatis personae most American procedurals use. Don't be surprised if your take on the style changes...from con to pro, but possibly the reverse...in this installment. It's a balancing act, as it always must be, to decide what details to present, what relationships to flesh out, what to suggest and what to explain. Carofiglio makes the most use of suggestion of any crime writer I've found.

Me likey. A lot.

THE SHAPE OF WATER, first of the late Camilleri's Montalbano novels

THE SHAPE OF WATER (Inspector Montalbano #1)
ANDREA CAMILLERI (tr. Stephen Sartarelli)
Penguin Books
$6.99 ebook platforms, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Andrea Camilleri's novels starring Inspector Montalbano have become an international sensation and have been translated from Italian into eight languages, ranging from Dutch to Japanese. The Shape of Water is the first book in this sly, witty, and engaging series with its sardonic take on Sicilian life.

Early one morning, Silvio Lupanello, a big shot in the village of Vigàta, is found dead in his car with his pants around his knees. The car happens to be parked in a rough part of town frequented by prostitutes and drug dealers, and as the news of his death spreads, the rumors begin. Enter Inspector Salvo Montalbano, Vigàta's most respected detective. With his characteristic mix of humor, cynicism, compassion, and love of good food, Montalbano goes into battle against the powerful and the corrupt who are determined to block his path to the real killer. This funny and fast-paced Sicilian page-turner will be a delicious discovery for mystery afficionados and fiction lovers alike.

My Review: Television made me do it.

No. Really. There's an Inspector Montalbano mystery TV series made in Italy, filmed in Sicily, and all in Italian with subtitles. Since there are no Italian people in New York City and environs, our local PBS stations AND the city's wholly owned TV station neither one carry it. {/sarcasm}

It was left to a not-very-cultured bud of mine in **DAYTONA, FLORIDA** of all the lowbrow, low-rent places, to gush and rave and generally make a to-do over scrumptious Sicily and handsome Montalbano blah blah blah. Wench. And oh the insufferable coos of "Really? Truly? You haven't even *read* the books? No! Get out!"

THEN, to add insult to injury, who but a cyber-siren (second class) reviewer and friend should pop up with more rapturous flutings about Camilleri and Montalbano and well, you see?? See?! How on earth is one two-eyed human supposed to resist a cyber-siren's enticements? Okay, she's not up there with the Goodreads Gods yet, but just a few more eye grafts and it's Katie bar the door!

So fine fine, I give, five lights, I'll go get the blasted thing. I did, at 2:10pm yesterday. I finished the second read at 4pm today. It's short, obviously, but it's just completely fabulously delicious. It's wry, it's witty, and it's got my favorite quality: Good people do the right thing, even if it's illegal, and bad people don't get away with dick.

Montalbano's got a lover in Genoa, a hot chick who happens to be his friend's daughter, and she's all worked up for him, as well as a murder suspect who is an Italian man's wet dream: tall, blonde, Swedish, racing car driveress. Does he cheat on the lover? No. Does he seem to want to? Not so much, he really can't be bothered about silly stuff like that when the local party big-wig is found half-naked and dead in the local errr, mmm, uuuh "playground" shall we say. The man's widow, completely unfazed by this, helps Montalbano see the details that are wrong, the little discrepancies that shouldn't be noticeable, but when added up make the whole picture...askew.

The resolution to this case is one I wish some publisher would allow an American author to get away with. I just can't say enough about the rightness of it all. Sicily needs me, I must fly there immediately! Well, via Camilleri's books. And over a smallish Northeastern city, where I plan to *bomb* a Certain Cyber-Siren Party's residence.