Tuesday, December 15, 2020

The Transaction, by Guglielmo D'Izzia

The Transaction is a novel set in the 1980s in Sicily, with murder and the mafia as important (though off-stage) elements of the story. But D'Izzia's novel is less Montalbano than Pirandello, not so much a crime novel as a literary and philosophical tale. The author is from Sicily, but emigrated to Canada and wrote The Transaction was written in English (with the creative license of a writer, à la Nabokov, whose native language is not English).


The story concerns a businessman from Milan, sent to a small town in Sicily to finalize a land deal that would allow his company to open a branch in the south. But the journey is plagued with difficulties from the beginning: his train breaks down and he is late arriving in the town, only to find that his contact there has been shot dead. From there, he wanders from one hostile encounter to another.


The narrative is in the first person, and there are hints that the narrator is creating some of the hostility himself, through his manner and attitude, And when the obstacles to his mission seem insurmountable, he remains in the town, courting hatred and danger, well beyond any reasonable time, despite insults and injuries.


The text is very detailed, evoking the claustrophobic Sicilian town vividly. The story is told clearly, though without a lot of forward motion, and I was pulled right along to the end. A major theme and characteristic element of the story (and this is hardly a spoiler) is that the "transaction" of the title never happens. The ending is, in fact, quite puzzling, leaving the reader to decide if the narrator is suicidal, infatuated, or perhaps insane.

Sunday, December 06, 2020

The Second Life of Inspector Canessa, by Roberto Perrone

Roberto Perrone's The Second Life of Inspector Canessa is the second book in a new series from Walter Presents, which is the BBC's excellent series of crime TV series from around the world, and Pushkin Press. Perrone's novel, originally published in Italian in 2017, deals with the aftermath of the "years of lead," the period of terrorism (from the left and the right) in the 1970s and 80s, viewed from the perspective of today. Canessa, a retired Carabiniere, is suddently called back from his calm new life as a restaurateur in a remote coastal village, when his estranged brother is killed alongside a famous terrorist recently released from prison.

 

Most of the book is set in the present, with frequent flashbacks to explain Cane Canessa's career fighting the terrorists. And most of the present-day is the ex-cop's private search for the reasons behind his brother's death. The investigation is an interesting tour through the Italian justice system, and the story has lots of intrigue and a good bit of shooting. Overall the book is a satisfying introduction to what has become a series featuring perrone, though I have a couple of reservations. The first thing is that young women seem always to be compellingly attracted sexually to the old men ocupying most of the key roles in the story. Some of the wome of the women clearly have financial motives, a few have professional motives, but especially in Canessa's case, young (much younger than him) women are throwing themselves at him in a way that stretches credibility and also reinforces what is altogether a limited sccope of action for the women in the book. Canessa also possesses superhuman powers, it seems, when people are trying to kill him (in a shower of fire from AK47s, for example), but that's just a quibble.


So I would recommend the book for a glimpse into a segment of Italian history, but I would hope for some more realistic and sympathetic female characters in the sequels.

Friday, December 04, 2020

Black and Gold: Two classic noir noves


These two noir classics are firmly placed in their time: Cornell Woolrich published The Bride Wore Black (under the pseudonym William Irish) in 1940 (it was made into a film in 1968 by Francois Truffaut). Dolores Hichens published Fool's Gold in 1958 (and it was filmed by Jean-Luc Godard in 1964 as Bande à part or Band of Outsiders). Both films significantly differ from the original novels, but that's another story.

Black is a classic revenge story, though we don't know the details of the original offense until the end. The bride systematically murders the men on her list, but the police cannot find the connection among them. Each murder occupies a chapter, with the leading lady taking various roles in each. Some of the means of execution seem a bit far-fetched (she doesn't plan them so. much as seize on the means at hand, and finding the creative means that she uses stretches the imagination of the reader a bit).  But Woorich is a master of the genre, and holds our attention nonetheless, and the final chapter includes several surprises, leading us through to the end. The setting varies from urban to rural to wilderness retreat, all vividly of the era of the '40s.



Fools' Gold evokes the California of the '50s, but not the glittery Hollywood California: the setting is hardscrabblek semi-urban, with a link to various criminal gangs of the area and as far afield as Las Vegas. But the focus is on a young man on the make, self confident and charismatic, who seduces an old friend and a young woman to help him steal a stash of money that the girl knows about (in the house of her guardian, an older woman).

In classic noir fashion, the caper starts almost immediately to slip out of control and then tip over into chaos. The story has an inevitability anchored in the personalities of the main characters and in the social milieu. One interesting aspect of the novel is that it has a long tail--once the caper has already played out, Hichens follows her characters as they disperse around California and each in his or her own way deal with the collapse of the scheme and of their future.

Godard made the story into a charming paen to youth, with a famous dance sequence in a bar and a furious race through the Louvre. French milieu matches the American original, in terms of class and misfortune, but Hichens original is darker, more true to noir and to the story itself.