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Tag Archives: Maurizio de Giovanni

Year of the Thriller: Novelhistorian Turns Eight

24 Monday Oct 2022

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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Alice Hoffman, book reviews, Chris Bohjalian, historical fiction, Jenny Tinghui Zhang, Kelly O'Connor McNees, Lauren Groff, Lucy Jago, Maurizio de Giovanni, Niall Leonard, no and furthermore, Peter Manseau, Rebecca Starford, shame, thriller

Another blog birthday and recap of my favorites from the last twelve months. I can’t remember a year in which they included so many thrillers, all literary. For a genre that’s supposed to fly on high-octane action, it’s remarkable how much thrust these authors achieve by putting character in the cockpit.

Not that these novels lack compelling plots; on the contrary, they have propulsion to burn. It’s just that the depth of characterization increases the tension, rather than getting in the way, as the common notion of thrillers would have it.

Pieces of eight, otherwise known as the Spanish dollar; date unknown, but after 1497 (courtesy Numismática Pliego via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

How? I think it’s because the protagonists carry around an internal “no—and furthermore.” They don’t need an antagonist threatening them—though that happens, often—because they have so much to hide, and their sense of shame drives them to take risks.

Exhibit A has to be Hour of the Witch, Chris Bohjalian’s tale of a battered woman in 1667 Boston who brings suit to divorce her husband. That makes her suspect in this Puritan town, if not criminal—and she can never admit her great shame, which is that she has sexual desire.

A different secret to hide drives An Unlikely Spy, Rebecca Starford’s novel about a young woman hired by MI5 in 1939 to track British Nazis. From the wrong side of the tracks, the new operative is brilliant at dissembling—she’s pretended all her life she comes from a higher social class than she does—but the self-deception comes at a price.

Social class also pushes the envelope in A Net for Small Fishes, Lucy Jago’s story about cut-and-thrust intrigue at the court of James I. An herbalist and fashion consultant, hired to rouse a young, beautiful countess from her depressed stupor, quickly gets in over her head, betrayed partly by ambition but mostly by the ruthless aristocrats she serves.

In M, King’s Bodyguard by Niall Leonard, Queen Victoria’s funeral in 1901 attracts Europe’s crowned heads and anarchists who’d like to kill them. Since Kaiser Wilhelm is a likely victim, the head of Scotland Yard’s Special Branch must work with his German opposite number, who’s probably lying about his identity. Our hero bows to convention outwardly yet holds subversive ideas, among them a sense of decency he knows others don’t share. That makes him fascinating and gives his enemies an edge: they’ll stop at nothing to achieve their goals, whereas he draws back.

The World That We Knew, by Alice Hoffman, ventures into mystical territory via a female golem created in 1941 to protect Jewish children from the Holocaust. Much more than a page-turning survival story, this novel, set in France, portrays human characters trying to transform themselves—and a nonhuman character wondering what life means. A beautiful, passionate narrative about life and death, love as miracle and sacrifice, and the nature of grief.

Jenny Tinghui Zhang’s Four Treasures of the Sky offers a contest between good and evil through a single character and often reads like a thriller. A young Chinese girl kidnapped in the 1880s and sold into sex slavery in San Francisco fights to free herself. But her face and gender are inescapable, and her shame at how people treat her sharpens her pain to the breaking point. This novel is bleak but essential reading.

Matrix, by Lauren Groff, isn’t a thriller, whatever its title suggests—it’s about Marie de France, an author of fairytales appointed in 1158 by Queen Eleanor of England to run a failing abbey. Marie deploys her considerable social and political skills attempting to put the place back on its feet and to create a haven where the women in her charge can escape men’s influence altogether. That may sound like a fairytale too, but Groff makes you believe, and her prose is spectacular without calling undue attention to itself.

Peter Manseau takes up similar issues in The Maiden of All Our Desires, except that the convent he portrays, though run under similar principles and rendered in similarly tactile prose, is about faith—where it comes from, what it means, and what gets in the way. The residents have secrets, desires, and questions, as well as a different take on dogma—and the bishop’s coming to decide whether rumors of heresy are true. A thought-provoking, engaging, and entertaining novel.

So long as we’re talking about women challenging church doctrine, consider The Myth of Surrender, Kelly O’Connor McNees’s story set in 1960 about two pregnant teenagers resigned to giving their children up for adoption at a Catholic home for unwed mothers. But these young women, who think they’ll outrun their shame and bypass a youthful mistake, have unpleasant surprises in store. An old story, to which the author gives fresh punch and stunning twists.

I’ve never read a mystery quite like I Will Have Vengeance, by Maurizio de Giovanni, in which the detective’s character and outlook drive the story, also a page-turner. Set in 1930s Naples, concerning the murder of an opera star, the narrative shows why hunger and love are the motives for all crime. That truth affects the brilliant, moody, yearning protagonist, who has the reputation of being cold, yet feels more deeply than anyone around him.

Fine novels all, with more than a few thrills to spare.

Hunger and Love: I Will Have Vengeance

03 Monday Oct 2022

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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1931, book review, character-driven mystery, clues in plain sight, compelling detective, crime and emotion, empathic detective, Fascist Italy, historical fiction, lightning narrative, Maurizio de Giovanni, Mussolini, mystery, Naples, opera, well-crafted whodunit

Review: I Will Have Vengeance, by Maurizio de Giovanni
Translated from the Italian by Anne Milano Appel
Europa, 2012. 212 pp. $16

Commissario of Police Luigi Alfredo Ricciardi doesn’t need his job, strictly speaking. Financially secure, a rarity in Naples in 1931, and of aristocratic lineage, he could be a gentleman of leisure if he wished, marry a woman with blue blood like his, and live pleasantly, attending parties and the opera. But Ricciardi’s job lends him his sole purpose in life, and the reasons why make him one of the most compelling fictional detectives I know of.

He has no friends or family, save a seventy-year-old woman who was his nanny during his childhood, and who feels free to lecture him on his workaholic habits as she serves him dinner, typically an hour before midnight. Neither sociable nor personable, Ricciardi puzzles most of his subordinates—indeed, most people he meets—and if it weren’t for his brilliant track record, nobody would want to work for him. His brigadier, Maione, is the only policeman on the force to realize how everyone misjudges Ricciardi, whose deep green eyes seem perpetually full of sadness. If anything, the commissario feels too much.

But even Maione doesn’t know why, or what ghosts lurk in his boss’s mind—literally. Ever since Ricciardi stumbled across a murder victim in his parents’ garden as a child, a scene he privately euphemizes as the Incident, he’s been deluged by empathy for the dead. As he walks around Naples, he hallucinates corpses he’s seen in the past, imagines what they felt just before they died, and, remarkably enough, uses that perception as an investigating technique. That’s how Ricciardi lives his work, for he’s known all his life “that crime is the dark side of emotion.”

The Incident had taught him that hunger and love are the source of all atrocities, whatever forms they may take: pride, power, envy, jealousy. In all cases, hunger and love. They were present in every crime, once it was pared down to its essentials, once the tinsel trappings of its outward appearance were stripped away. Hunger or love, or both, and the pain they generate. All that suffering, which he alone was a constant witness to.

And oh, by the way, Ricciardi hates opera and its excess of feeling.

Teatro San Carlo, Naples, the world’s oldest continuously active opera venue (courtesyflickr.com/photos/stojaphotography/18734141725/in/photolist-, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

His singular opinion on that subject for his time and place figures in I Will Have Vengeance, for not only does the title come from an opera, the murder victim is a famous tenor. In life, Maestro Arnaldo Vezzi’s singing and stage presence commanded devotion from adoring audiences, but nobody liked him up close, especially not the managers, cast, and crews who had to work with him, and whom he terrorized. Even so, his star power was such that money flowed in his direction, and wherever he performed, he drew packed houses.

Consequently, who’d kill the goose that laid so many golden eggs? What provocation would push a member of the opera company to commit that murder and sweep all practicality aside? Those are the questions Ricciardi wishes he could answer, for the killing happened in Vezzi’s dressing room during an intermezzo, which points toward a perpetrator who’d have free backstage access.

Besides the hard-working Maione, assisting Ricciardi is a priest who loves opera. Thanks to a network of favors granted and received, Don Pierino Fava manages to witness performances from a spot just behind the curtain, as he does the fateful night in question. At Ricciardi’s request, he explains the opera’s story line and the ins and outs of operatic performance—details that matter to the investigation, dear reader, so pay attention. But it’s not just business between priest and commissario; the good Don Pierino, though flabbergasted that Ricciardi hates opera, also senses the shadow over the man’s soul.

I Will Have Vengeance moves like lightning, without waste motion or words, proving once more that a character-driven mystery can be just as riveting and suspenseful as its plot-centered cousin. As with the opera, every detail matters, and all’s in plain sight, something I appreciate. There are no tricks here, no rabbits pulled out of hats. I also like the departmental politics, and how Ricciardi handles his boss, an incompetent with friends in high places, which is to say that the commissario shows him no respect. Occasionally, that allows de Giovanni to work in subtle political commentary about Mussolini or his Fascist regime.

Another subplot I like concerns the sole outlet for Ricciardi’s softer feelings, a young woman who lives in a building across from his, and whom he likes to watch embroider at night. Trust me, it’s not creepy, and there’s more going on than even the hawk-eyed Ricciardi can guess.

I Will Have Vengeance is a masterful mystery, and I heartily recommend it.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

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