The Lover of No Fixed Abode - Carlo Fruttero & Franco Lucentini (DNF)
Translated from Italian by Gregory Dowling.
This was a disappointing start to my CWA Daggers reading, not least of all because on paper I should really like this book. Unfortunately it just wasn’t for me, and I'm DNFing at somewhere around 80 pages.
Maybe this is an issue of genre expectations. I went into this expecting both a crime novel and a romance and while I’m sure that’s what it is, after getting a quarter of the way through the book I’m yet to see any crime and not really feeling the romance. The nameless narrator and Mr Silvera have exchanged some looks and one understated “Ah” across a crowded plane and that’s about it, and I’m struggling to see why I should care about either of them. Maybe if I’d gone into this expecting a quiet, internal litfic novel - if it were on the International Booker shortlist rather than the Daggers, for example - I’d be having a better time, but as it is this just isn’t what I wanted to read.
That said, I think I’m maybe being too charitable here purely because this seems to be a very well-regarded book. Frankly, I’m bored. There’s a passage in the third chapter that really stood out to me, because it sort of sums up how I was feeling about the book as I read it:
The image I preserve of the rest of the evening might best be described with the word lagoon-like. From the prawns to the pheasants, I see, rather than hear, a flat waste of banal observations on Venice […] here in Venice, a small town with fewer than a hundred thousand inhabitants, the conversation always came back to Venice.
A totally narcissistic city, remarked someone.
For close to 80 pages this book is, mostly, descriptions of Venice as seen through the eyes of our narrator and Mr Silvera, a Venice tour guide. And that’s just not enough to hold my attention, unfortunately. The authors seem in love with their lush depictions of the city, and while I won’t describe this as a narcissistic book, the thought did cross my mind as I read that passage, and I did laugh at it.
Not for me, this one.