george carroll – Three Percent

CoDex 1962 [Why This Book Should Win]

Chad Post — Mon, 15 Apr 2019 19:00:58 +0000

Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win posts covering all thirty-five titles .��

George Carroll��is a former bookseller and a West Coast representative for numerous publishers of translated literature. He is currently the curator of��.

��by Sjón, translated from the Icelandic by Victoria Cribb (Iceland, FSG)

Sigurjón Birgir Sigurðsson (aka Sjón) and László Krasznahorkai are the Ronaldo and Messi of translated literature. It’s fortunate that and don’t qualify in the same Best Translated Book Award year. Sjón should win the award this year. Laszlo should three-peat the award in 2020.

By this post, I’m not trying to convince the other jurors to advance CoDex 1962 to the shortlist or why this book should trump theirs. But, I swear, this is the best book of the year and I read a lot of books.

CoDex 1962 is the most ambitious submission for this year’s award. There are those who could argue Karl Ove Knausgård’s My Struggle: Book Six, at over twice its size, could hold that claim. But if one subtracts diapers and crying and toddler meal prep, that drops significantly. Or Uwe Johnson’s 1668-page Anniversaries, but because of the new material percentage and/or crap I don’t understand, it doesn’t qualify for the award. Which is good because reading another 1600+ pages would make my fucking head explode.

CoDex 1962 is three novels: “a love story,” “a crime story,” and “a science fiction story.” Plots flip over plots—myth and history and science and landscape and folklore. I would sound really stupid summarizing the plot, but basically it starts off in Nazi Germany and ends up at an Iceland biotech company. There are a shitload of asides.

Icelandic saga references—there are many, at least I think there are—went over my head at times, similar to the Continental Philosophy call-outs in Laurent Binet’s The Seventh Function of Language (Binet texted me that they went over his head at times as well).

Stylistically, The Guardian, did a pretty interesting blurb: “A clay baby becomes the narrator of this chaotic extravaganza in which Bosch meets Chagall, with touches of Tarantino.” Not sure I agree, not even sure I understand that, but there you have it.

I’m a sucker for Álex Pina’s La casa de papel. Just when I thought I had figured out the end game, when I was confident that I was tracking the story arc, it shot off in a different direction. Sjón set me up the same way. It’s a tricky book, dodging and weaving. To pull that off over its massive length—and to keep you wanting, really wanting—is damn impressive

CoDex 1962 should win BTBA 2019 because it’s playful and serious, daunting and accessible. Sjón is a master storyteller. And stories are what make life interesting, right?

Victoria Cribb’s translation is aces, just a joy. Sjón can’t be an easy writer, and this couldn’t have been an easy book, to translate.

Cribb: Sjón :: Mulzet: Krasznahorkai.

A gratuitous sidenote:

A couple of years ago, I met Sjón for coffee in Reykjavik, the result of a sweet Icelandair London / Seattle layover. He was on his way to a meeting in which Reykjavik was going to endorse Seattle’s nomination to be named a City of Literature. He told me his only regret when he visited Seattle was that he didn’t have room in his carry-on for a Seattle Sounders jersey for his son. My fanboy level ratcheted up to 11.

Just for fun, check out the “Johnny Triumph” vocals on The Sugarcubes single Luftgitar, Björk on backup.)

Books of the Future [BTBA 2019]

Chad Post — Tue, 19 Feb 2019 13:00:50 +0000

Today’s Best Translated Book Award post is from George Carroll, life-long Sounders fan, newly converted Tottenham fan..��

This is my third rodeo with The Best Translated Book Award. The first year the book that I wanted to win, Seibo There Below, did. But then there was the next year. Not even close, but you have to be a team player, suck it up, and wait it out. Look where it’s got Marcus Rashford. I don’t think the book that I want to win this year, will. It’s big, it’s ambitious, it’s complicated.

Anyway, that’s off the point. I don’t want to write about books I’m reading for the award, I want to write about books that I’m not reading for the award.

Twelve years of Catholic school has set me up for a boatload of guilt. Sister Mary Loretta through the Jesuits. My problem with the BTBA is not the many crazy stacks of qualifying books in my house. It’s how do I not read the books I desperately want to read that don’t qualify? Books that aren’t coming out until later this year. Or books, already released, that are screaming at me.

Let’s start with Martin Solares. I read , a noir novel about a man hired to locate a corrupt businessman’s kidnapped daughter. It’s not the best translated book of the year; it probably won’t even make the longlist, but, wow, Solares was a find. So I asked a friend at the publisher to run down a copy of his 2006 book The Black Minutes. It’s now on my shelf. Just sitting here. Seducing me.

I just read Jean-Patrick Manchette’s unfinished thriller. It could possibly make our longlist, although a huge chunk of the book, the ending as a matter of fact, was created from the author’s notes. That he died before he could finish it totally sucks. I read Manchette’s The Mad and the Bad which has the most over-the-top shoot-out in a retail store in noir literature. But I never read Fatale. I’m in a library queue. Getting close. I’m next in line.

I’ve got a PDF of the new Javier Marias novel . I have some issues with the more recent Marias releases—The Infatuations and Thus Bad Begins—as in they’re not good. Not everything he writes can be as good as Tomorrow in the Battle Think On Me, but crikey, close is fine. I so want the new book to be good but if I start on it, I’ll have a hard time not driving through it, hoping, hoping. Also that would mean I can’t read this Canadian novel that I’ve been assigned to read where the young narrator’s mother keeps trying to commit suicide. Gee. Hard choice.

I don’t know the new Bolaño . But that doesn’t matter. I’ll read anything Bolaño wrote. I think I have.

Missed the boat on Joe Ide’s Isaiah Quintabe novels. Watched my wife with much envy as she ran through all four of them in what felt like two days. She kept saying, “So, when are you going to read these? You’ll going to love them.” Salt. Wound.

Then there are three books that are coming out later this year that will blow the next BTBA jury’s collective mind:

I’ve been waiting patiently for five years for German author Reinhard Jirgl’s Die Stille to be translated. A bookseller in Paris has hand-sold hundreds of the French edition. A Berlin-based translator friend said that Jirgl is almost impossible to translate. Throws numbers in the middle of words and shit. Sounds perfect. This is the first English translation of anything he’s written, except for a couple of pieces for the Seagull Books catalog. If you have one of their catalogs, check it out. If you don’t, you’ll want one.

There’s the second part of The Invented Part by Rodrigo Fresán. Rumor, by way of my footie BFF, has it that the translation draft is being edited. Mind-bending, that Fresán, mind-bending. Waiting. Waiting.

Lastly there’s the knot of my guilt, László Krasznahorkai’s . Seven hundred pages of my favorite author. He claims this is his last novel. He’s won the Best Translated Book Award twice. A three-peat is a serious possibility. There’s an unedited manuscript. I’m not saying I’ve read it when I should have been reading BTBA qualifying titles, and I’m not saying that I didn’t.

Bart Simpson: Dad, are you licking toads?

Homer Simpson: I’m not not licking toads.

Two Month Review #3.5: Selected Stories (pgs. 144-207)

Chad Post — Thu, 23 Nov 2017 15:00:00 +0000

After doing a bit of a deeper dive into the situation in Catalonia—and discussing the LIVE recording that will take place on December 12th at the new McNally Jackson—Chad and Brian are joined by George Carroll to talk about this batch of Rodoreda’s stories. Although a couple of the stories discussed in this episode (especially “Before I Die”) fit in with her more domestic stories, there is a distinct shift in tone and subject as she starts writing more about World War II (“On a Dark Night,” “Orléans, Three Kilometers”), which points toward her later works, especially Death in Spring.

Both Selected Stories and Death in Spring are available through the and if you use 2MONTH at checkout, you’ll get 20% off.

Feel free to comment on this episode—or on the book in general—either on this post, or at the official

Follow and for more thoughts and information about upcoming guests. And stay tuned to for more writing and opinions from George Carroll.

And you can find all the Two Month Review posts by clicking here. And be sure to

The music for this season of Two Month Review is by Els Surfing Sirles.

Why This Book Should Win – Two Hrabals by BTBA Judges George Carroll and James Crossley

Monica Carter — Fri, 10 Apr 2015 10:00:00 +0000

George Carroll is the World Literature Editor of and an independent publishers’ representative based in the Pacific Northwest.

James Crossley is a bookseller at . He writes regularly for the store’s blog and for the website of the .

– Bohumil Hrabal, Translated by Stacey Knecht
Archipelago Books

– Bohumil Hrabal, Translated by David Short
Karolinum Press
James: This year’s BTBA longlist is excellent, and there are lots of books on it to talk about, but when you and I did that, George, we both gravitated toward the new one from Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal. We raved to each other for a while before we realized that we were each talking about a different new book—he has two on the list this year, which I’m going to say without doing any research (that’s why we have editors) is a BTBA first. I was gushing about Rambling On: An Apprentice’s Guide to the Gift of the Gab, translated by David Short, while you were selling me on Harlequin’s Millions, translated by Stacey Knecht. What makes you prefer that book?

George: Nothing much happens in Harlequin’s Millions. An elderly pensioner reflects on her life and her village. There’s no horrid tragedy in the past that shapes the characters or drives them forward. There’s no denouement lurking at the end to pull you through the book. You get to laze around in beautiful, page-long sentences deep with observation and memory. The rhythm and lyricism are powerful and subtle. I can’t believe I’m writing this. It sounds like a book I would detest. And yet it stays perched at the top of my longlist.

James: Good points. Hrabal flows like nobody else, except maybe a jazz soloist. Not pretentiously, though. He’s mostly very earthy and amusing while he’s meandering through the minds of his characters. I’d say the things you liked about HM are equally present in Rambling On, but the latter book has an advantage that the former doesn’t. Since Rambling is a collection of linked stories, all set in the Bohemian forest town of Kersko, that typical Hrabal style gets expressed in multiple voices. Each story features a different figure who has his or her own things to say about whatever’s on Hrabal’s mind. A lot of that has to do with what it was like to live under the repressive Communist regime of the 1960s and ’70s, but it usually involves a whole bunch of drunkenness, lust, and other kinds of good old-fashioned fun. You can’t tell me that doesn’t sound appealing.

George: Rambling On has it over HM in that many of the stories take place in a pub or involve a pub. It catches a bit of an edge that you don’t get from a pensioner walking the halls of a one-time castle, now retirement home. Hrabal was apparently infamous for hanging out in the At the Golden Tiger pub in Prague listening closely to others’ stories. One of my favorite scenes in RO is when Mr. Belohlavek convinces everyone in the pub to go into the forest to pace off the size of a Boeing 727 that he’s in charge of landing in Prague. Oh, wait. I’m supposed to be talking about HM. All right, so there isn’t lot of pub time in HM but there are mentions of pubs that no longer exist in the little town where time stood still like Big Stomper, Heavenly Host, Bloody Paw, Cafe Pigskin. Think I would have liked hanging out in At the Golden Tiger with Hrabal on a Saturday watching footie, of which Bohumil was a huge fan.

James: A grand, Homeric catalog of vanished pubs is just about the highest pinnacle to which literature can aspire, so I have to credit HM there. But you played my trump card for me on behalf of Rambling On when you mentioned football (note to editor: stet, please; don’t change to “soccer”). There’s a scene in the book where an uninvited guest barges in on the narrator and persuades him to be buried in particularly sacred ground: “[T]he cemetery is the other side of the forest, so you’d have pine needles an’ the smell of pine right on top of your grave, but the main thing is there’s a football pitch in the forest, an’ knowin’ how fond you are of football … there’s no other cemetery like it, the ref’s whistle will easily carry all the way to your grave.” Reading about it is the next best thing to being there for you, isn’t it?

George: The narrator of HM takes an after-dinner walk through the village with “three witnesses to the old times.” No one else is on the street, no cars, no motorcycles. She can see people watching television through their windows, and realizes the entire town is watching an international football match (the 1962 World Cup?). I guess that’s enough about football. The three witnesses—a railroad engineer, workshop foreman, and the elegant Otokar Rykr, pomaded hair, pince-nez—are a curious trio. You get the feeling that they may or may not exist, which is a bit unsettling. I’m not real comfortable with unreliable narrators. Last year I got punked by Hofmeester in Arnon Grunberg’s . I’m much more of a ham and beans reader—fewer veils, less layers. Hmm. The characters are pretty straightforward in RO. You know, I’m thinking…

James: I on the other hand don’t mind at all when things get strange and phantasmagoric. I couldn’t get enough of Mircea Cărtărescu’s from BTBA 2014, for example, which is as much both of those things as it’s possible to be. I may be coming around to HM’s side for 2015. Sounds like we’ve come to an agreement.

George: Sounds like it. The winner of this year’s BTBA should definitely be…

James: Bohumil Hrabal’s Harlequin’s Millions.

George: Bohumil Hrabal’s Rambling On.

James: Definitely.

Why This Book Should Win – Street of Thieves by BTBA Judge George Carroll

Monica Carter — Thu, 09 Apr 2015 10:00:00 +0000

George Carroll is the World Literature Editor of and an independent publishers’ representative based in the Pacific Northwest.

– Mathias Énard, Translated by Charlotte Mandell
Open Letter Books

Last year, I advanced Mahi Binebine’s Horses of God, tr. from the French by Lulu Norman, for The Best Translated Book Award a book that follows the lives of a group of teenage soccer players from Sidi Moumen who become Islamist martyrs, suicide bombers in the 2003 Casablanca attacks.

This year I’m championing Street of Thieves by Mathias Énard, translated from the French by Charlotte Mandell, in which one of the main characters becomes involved with an Islamist group turned Jihadist.

I hope that I’m not developing a pattern – not the French translation part, the radicalism part.

Street of Thieves is a coming-of-age story of two childhood friends set mostly in Tangiers during the Arab Spring. Lakhdar, the narrator, wants freedom – to travel, smoke weed, earn money, read French noir detective novels, have sex with Spanish women. His friend, Bassam, introduces Lakhdar to the “Group for the Propagation for Islamic Thought” for whom he becomes their seller of books and pamphlets.

After the organization severely beats a neighborhood bookseller, their paths split, Lakhdar moves away, Bassam gets deeply into the group. Bassam might be involved in a stabbing in Tangiers, a bombing in Marrakesh, and ultimately an assassination.

“Men are dogs,” says Lakhdar, “they rub against each other in misery, they roll around in filth and can’t get out of it…” Exiled from his family because of an indiscretion with his cousin, Lakhdar starts with nothing, lives on the street, takes a series of jobs, goes on the run, falls in love, and ends up in a Barcelona neighborhood of junkies and prostitutes, the Street of Thieves.

Lots of big words – fate, fear, corruption, revolution, liberty, love and loyalty and tragedy, but no theme bigger than identity. Is Lakhdar more than his religion? More than his nationality? In the final pages of the book, he testifies “I am not a Moroccan, I am not a Frenchman, I’m not a Spaniard, I’m more than that . . . I am not a Muslim, I am more than that.”

Love of language, the study of language, the beauty of language are all manifested in the book. Love of books – “which is the only place on earth where life is good” – certainly won this judge over.

Street of Thieves should win The Best Translated Book Award because Énard has filtered multiple complex social issues through the eyes of a wonderfully likable narrator. If I’ve made that sound dreadfully serious, it’s my mistake.

FEAR OF THE LONGLIST by George Carroll

Monica Carter — Thu, 06 Nov 2014 10:03:36 +0000

George Carroll is the World Literature Editor of and an independent publishers’ representative based in the Pacific Northwest.

None of the spoke with pitcher Madison Bumgartner in the dugout before he took the mound in the ninth inning of the seventh game of the World Series except for a brief exchange with his catcher Buster Posey. Partly due to superstition and partly because Bumgartner was intensely focused, was in the zone.

I’m currently in The Best Translated Book Award reading zone. Please do not distract.

There are rules and traditions about not speaking the name of something, whether it’s Voldemort in the books or Nest Egg in , or saying rain while fly-fishing.

This is so, in my mind, with longlist and the BTBA.

There’s an ultra-secret password-protected, for-your-eyes-only spreadsheet that the BTBA judges use that lists the title, author, translator, publisher, language, and country for each of the 2015 submissions. There is a column for each judge to place her notes or remarks. (Don’t try to access the spreadsheet, publishers, it will self-destruct quicker than Jim Phelps’ MI instructions.)

Fortunately my spreadsheet column is at the beginning of that section, just to the right of Katrine Osgaard Jensen’s. She uses a letter code, which I’m pretty sure I’ve cracked. But I scroll right no further, for therein lies the use of longlist, the word that assigns power, the word which can strip power. “Longlist contender, must longlist, short of longlist, no longlist.” It can draw you in (I better read this) or repel (I better move on to something else).

I just have a list. Books move around like the stairways at Hogwarts. (Did I mention I just watched all of the Harry Potter movies?) Books that I read early in the process that I thought were really good, were really good, but they’re not as really good in comparison with the other really good books that I’ve now read.

That doesn’t mean that some of the books I’ve read don’t keep popping up a like a literary Whac-a-Mole. But will they make it to l-word? I don’t know.

Milena Michiko Flasar’s , Pascal Garnier’s , Eduardo Halfon’s , both Bohumil Hrabal titles and , Carlos Labbe’s , Michel Laub’s , Valeria Luiselli’s , Scholastique Mukasonga’s , Andres Neuman’s , Roderigo Rey Rosa’s , Paulo Scott’s , Solvi Bjorn Sigurdsson’s , Goncalo Tavares’ , Antoine Volodine’s , Christa Wolf’s .

All have much to love and I can do no better than to arrange them alphabetically.

Cesar Aira’s , Roberto Bolano’s , Hilda Hilst’s , Jorn Lier Horst’s , Giulio Mozzi’s , Haruki Murakami’s , Audur Ava Olafsdottir’s , Antonio Skarmeta’s , Juan Pablo Villalobos’ , Urs Widmer’s .

Again, only alphabetical, all flawed in little ways, but solid nonetheless.

Predicting the longlist is a bit like handicapping horses: consistency, class, form, and pace. Books get boxed, parked out, shuffled back. Fortunately, I have miles to read before I sleep and need not place my bets until March.

Colombia vs. Japan [World Cup of Literature: First Round]

Chad Post — Tue, 17 Jun 2014 14:00:00 +0000

This match was judged by George Carroll. For more info on the World Cup of Literature, read this, and download the bracket.

Garcia Marquez was my gateway into non-dead-white-guy authors in translation. I read One Hundred Years of Solitude on a chaise lounge in Waikiki, on a trip when my friend Howard and I drank the pool bar out of Heineken. But I was sober enough most of the time, enough to appreciate that there was more out there to read than my then steady diet of American noir.

The first line in One Hundred Years of Solitude and the first line of the second chapter are the only two sentences I’ve committed to memory—that, and the opening of James Crumley’s The Last Good Kiss.

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.

When the pirate Sir Francis Drake attacked Riohacha in the sixteenth century, Ursula Iguaran’s great-great-grandmother became so frightened with the ringing of alarm bells and the firing of cannons that she lost control of her nerves and sat down on a lighted stove.

When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.

I first read Murakami in a hammock in Mexico on my honeymoon. I was too lazy to locate a bookstore in Tecate, but found a galley of Kafka on the Shore in the hotel library. That started a thorough run of Murakami; that’s a hell of a lot of cats in a short period of time.

For years, when asked, I would say that either The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle or One Hundred Years of Solitude was my favorite book. The World Cup of Literature rules disallow both of these books because they’re pre-2000 releases. The only Garcia Marquez work that qualifies is Memories of My Melancholy Whores. Six Murakami titles qualify, including Kafka, but The World Cup of Literature entry is the very troubled 1Q84.

There are no match-ups in the first round of The World Cup of Literature that approach the naming rights, product placement, endorsement deals, or star bling of Colombia / Japan. The burden of commercial success over perceived literary merit haunted this match-up since the bracket was posted.

Crikey, it’s fucking hot in Manaus. Sweat is pouring over my eyebrows like Gullfoss (I seriously wish that Eidur Gudjohnsen was in Brazil rather than Luka Modric). The weather favors Team Garcia Marquez who thrives in heat and humidity. Team Murakami usually practices either in the mountains or at the bottom of wells.

1Q84 entered the pitch in its spiffy Chip Kidd designed kit, visibly suffering from over-exposure. The team is comprised entirely of members of former great Murakami sides with the exception of a young striker, Aomame.

The captain of the Colombia side, unlike many footballers who go by one name, has no name. We’ll just call him Jose Arcadio, because there’s one too many of them in One Hundred Years of Solitude. When manager Jose Pekerman realized that his side was a 90 year old journalist and a sleeping virgin on valerian, he decided to park the bus.

Alberto Zaccheroni sent multiple Murakami recurring themes down the flanks. Tengo, the other forward, confused, was unable to deliver any shots on goal, and waited sullenly for a midfielder to drop the ball on his only good foot (think Eddie Johnson or Wayne Rooney).

All Japan advance, all Colombia defense. Two minutes into stoppage time, Aomame realized it might go to PKs and you don’t know what a 90-year-old whore-monger can deliver when needed. Fuka-Eri sent a cross to Aomame who did a roll and scissors, then entered her parallel universe. She reentered the pitch reality on Arcadio’s weak side and finished into the bottom left corner.

Japan 1 – 0 Colombia

——

George Carroll is the World Literature Editor for Shelf Awareness for Professionals and the Soccer Editor for Shelf Awareness for Readers. In other words, he’s got this nailed.

——

Fucking BTBA!

Chad Post — Mon, 13 Jan 2014 14:32:13 +0000

This week’s BTBA post is written by George Carroll, a publishers representative based in Seattle who blogs at He is also the soccer editor for Shelf Awareness and he and Chad frequently spent part of the weekend texting about EPL match-ups and Manchester Fucking United. He’s also helping to organize our forthcoming World Cup of Literature.

The protagonist of Rafael Bernal’s is a police hitman named Filiberto Garcia. His job is to eliminate people as directed by his superiors. He says “Pinche!” a lot, mostly in exasperation. Katherine Silver translates “Pinche!” as “Fucking!”

So, here’s a synopsis of the book seen through Garcia’s interior monologue:

Fucking tame tiger! Fucking goddamn captain! Fucking furniture! Fucking jokes! Fucking Chinamen! Fucking experience! Fucking laws! Fucking Revolution! Fucking Chinamen and old people! Fucking conscience! Fucking loyalty! Fucking sovereignty! Fucking colonel! Fucking mysteries! Fucking gringos! Fucking Outer Mongolia! Fucking souls! Fucking bitch! Fucking tears! Fucking Marta! Fucking Poles! Fucking Chinese gal! Fucking stiffs! Fucking investigation! Fucking gringo! Fucking broad! Fucking Russian! Fucking mission! Fucking washed-up gringa! Fucking little brat! Fucking father! Fucking del Valle! Fucking Charanda! Fucking host! Fucking bills! Fucking Chink! Fucking meat! Fucking hands! Fucking team! Fucking life! Fucking faggot! Fucking Doris! Fucking Liu! Fucking solitude! Fucking wake!

My favorite line from the book actually doesn’t have “fucking” in it. Garcia is dressing to go out, straightening his tie, arranging his handkerchief, examining his nails, “The only thing he couldn’t fix was the scar on his cheek, but the gringo who’d made it couldn’t fix being dead, either.”

The first short story in Zhu Wen’s is Da Ma’s “Way of Talking.” Da Ma is a pretty annoying character. He and his class are sent to northeast China for a month’s training in the People’s Liberation Army. When they’re on the shooting range, he points a rifle at the students on his left and yells “Freeze! Or you’re fucking dead.” One of the students says “Fucking hell! . . . That gun’s loaded! Fuck, fuck, fucking fuck.” Four occurrences in one sentence, devoid of other words, is hard to beat.

I recommend both Rafael Bernal and Zhu Wen’s books highly. They’re very fun reading that I’ve been able to sandwich between The Literary Submissions of High Art.

Finally, there’s a book I haven’t received yet—Jens Lapidus’s It’s part of The Stockholm Noir Trilogy, published in Sweden as Aldrig Fucka Upp. Nice to know some things just translate easily.

Blood Curse and I Will Have Vengeance

Chad Post — Mon, 18 Nov 2013 15:00:00 +0000

There are curious similarities in three Italian mystery series, written by Maurizio de Giovanni, Andrea Camilleri, and Donna Leon.¹

They’re all police procedurals, and all set in Italy: Naples, Sicily, Venice.

The three protagonists are Commissarios: Luigi Ricciardi, Salvo Montalbano, and Guido Brunetti.

They all report to self-serving, social-climbing, ass-covering Questore buffoons: Angelo Garzo, Bonetti-Alderighi, and Patta

Each has a loyal, efficient, well-connected right-hand Sergente / Ispettore / Brigadier: Raffaele Maione, Giuseppe Fazio, Lorenzo Vianello.

And they all have testy, feisty relationships with their forensic pathologists: Doctors Modo, Pasquale, Rizzardi

But this is where most of those similarities end.

De Giovanni’s Commissario Ricciardi novels are set in 1931 Fascist Italy whereas the other two series are contemporary.

Ricciardi has a neighbor, a muse, who he doesn’t meet until the second book in the series. Montalbano has a girlfriend who appears frequently at the beginning of the series but then gets more and more distant as the series progresses. Brunetti has a relatively happy marriage although his boss’ secretary is a bit of distraction.

Quite a few of Leon’s victims end up floating in canals. Oh, I hate floaters.² Most of Camilleri’s novels have two incidents or two separate crimes that appear to be unrelated, but come together somewhere along the plotline. And de Giovanni’s Ricciardi has visions, which is the main thing setting this series apart from the others.

Ricciardi sees the last few seconds of the lives of victims’ violent deaths. Many of them lurk in the shadows and aren’t connected to the investigations. A child who fell from a third-story balcony (Can I go down and play?), a man in a barbershop bleeding from a razor cut to the neck (By God, I didn’t touch your wife! ). Gushing blood—there’s a lot of gushing blood.

His visions are a blessing and a curse. The upside is that even though the words the victims speak are enigmatic, they aid in resolution of the crimes. The downside is, well, life sucks when you’re sidestepping grotesque images of dead people all day. His solace comes in the evening when he sits in his room, watching his neighbor across the courtyard doing embroidery.

The tricky, and frustrating, device that de Giovanni uses is mixing up his character’s narratives. Most of the time he identifies who’s speaking or pondering or doing bad things. Other times he doesn’t, which creates red herrings and sends you down dead ends.

I Will Have Vengeance involves the death of an opera tenor, and Blood Curse, the death of an elderly fortune-teller and moneylender. Neither perpetrator is obvious or stereotypical. Both books, yes, read them, but in order.

De Giovanni is a very talented writer. He keeps enough hidden, layers his writing deep enough that the twists and turns come naturally. The books are dark enough to work in Europa’s World Noir series, which thanks to a very aggressive marketing campaign, were on feature tables in most independent bookstores over the summer.

¹ Donna Leon has lived in Venice for 25 years, so I’m just going to call her Italian. I’ve lived in Seattle for 25 years and I don’t call myself a Pennsylvanian.

² A great line and timely line by Coroner Dominic DaVinci in DaVinci’s Inquest.

Latest Review: "Blood Curse" and "I Will Have Vengeance" by Maurizio de Giovanni

Chad Post — Mon, 18 Nov 2013 15:00:00 +0000

The latest addition to our reviews section is a piece by George Carroll on two Maurizio de Giovanni books that Europa Editions recently released: and

I’ve been hoping to cover more crime books on the site—mainly because there are so many, lots of people, including Tom Roberge, that love these sorts of novels, and because it’s a genre of fiction that I don’t read very often—and thankfully George Carroll agreed to try and review some of these for us.

The first ones he decided to write about are two of the five books by Maurizio de Giovanni that has published. He opens by comparing this series to those from two other famous crime writers:

There are curious similarities in three Italian mystery series, written by Maurizio de Giovanni, Andrea Camilleri, and Donna Leon.

They’re all police procedurals, and all set in Italy: Naples, Sicily, Venice.

The three protagonists are Commissarios: Luigi Ricciardi, Salvo Montalbano, and Guido Brunetti.

They all report to self-serving, social-climbing, ass-covering Questore buffoons: Angelo Garzo, Bonetti-Alderighi, and Patta

Each has a loyal, efficient, well-connected right-hand Sergente / Ispettore / Brigadier: Raffaele Maione, Giuseppe Fazio, Lorenzo Vianello.

And they all have testy, feisty relationships with their forensic pathologists: Doctors Modo, Pasquale, Rizzardi

But this is where most of those similarities end.

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