I Like It Like That

This post is courtesy of Best Translated Book Award judge, the inimitable George Carroll. Not only is he one hell of a West Coast sales rep for publishing companies large and small, he has an inexhaustible knowledge of translated literature.

I’ve been skulking around in the shadows with The Best Translated Award submissions. Everything I’m reading is bleak. I’m even thinking about designing a t-shirt that says “I Read World Literature: I like it Dark and Depressing.”

This quick wrap-up is specific to the mysteries on that list. To be honest, the chance of a mystery working its way through this year’s submissions would be tough (unless you really think The Infatuations is a mystery) but they are there. Like Cardiff City or Crystal Palace in the EPL– they might get relegated next year, but for now, they’re here and deserve notice.

Massimo Carlotto’s At the End of Dull Day is a sequel to The Goodbye Kiss. To avoid a prison sentence, narrator Giorgio Pellegrini sells out his friends and makes a deal with crooked cops. He ends up with bags of cash and tries to buy his way into respectability. Pellegrini is sadistic, misogynistic, and cruel. In the Richard Stark novels, Parker has a few rules that he follows, one of which is that no one gets hurt or killed unless it’s necessary. Pellegrini maims or kills anyone who gets in his way or can identify him. The day after brutally beating and disfiguring a politician’s maid – just to make a point – he tells the counselor:

“I can promise you that I’ve that I’ve shown considerable restraint and offered no more than a tiny demonstration of the extent of my professional skills in the field of inflicting violence. You can’t even begin to imagine how good I am at the work I do….”

There are three qualifying Maurizio de Giovanni titles, two of them are set in 1930’s fascist Italy and feature the character Commissario Riccardi: I Will Have Vengeance and Blood Curse. Riccardi has terrifying visions of the last few seconds of victims’ violent deaths – blood pumping from knife wounds, enigmatic last words of vengeance and sorrow. For a Commissario in solving homicides, it’s a blessing and a curse.

“The body’s head lay on the tabletop, resting on the left cheek; on the right, a large fragment of mirror jutted out from the throat, reflecting a vitreous eye and a twisted mouth from which a trickle of drool oozed. Riccardi heard singing in a soft voice…”

De Giovanni uses an effective, sometimes frustrating, way of telling the story – he writes part of the narrative identified by the characters’ names but also writes sections with just pronouns. In the first book, it seems that all of the female characters are blonds with blue eyes. You’re never sure which one is contemplating what.

There’s a vulnerable, romantic aspect of Riccardi that eases the incredible sorrow he experiences from the visions he witnesses, which is very well written.

The Bone Man by Wolf Haas is the sequel to Brenner and God. Haas is much lighter than de Giovanni and Carlotto, but you can only measure noir & mysteries by degrees, right? Haas is a bit of fresh air though, a real kick-in-the-pants, very funny.

He has an engaging way of involving the reader by throwing in asides:

“You’ll have to excuse me, but it really gets on my nerves sometimes, how sanctimonious people can be. Now, where did I leave off?”

“And let’s be honest, people make an unbelievable fuss about sleep these days. It’s got to be the best bed, everything organic, and absolutely quiet of course …just because people need to park their asses somewhere.”

The plot of The Bone Man opens with human bones found in a pile of chicken bones at an Austrian chicken shack. Yummy. The plot does involve a goalie from a soccer team, which is always a plus with me. Oh, and, Blood Curse has this: “That would explain the extent of the bloodstain across the floor, a trail nearly a yard wide. We have a center forward on our hands, he thought.”

Looking forward to reading The Fire Witness, which comes with high recommendations. The jacket image has a hammer on it, so I can imagine where this one is going to go.

I Will Have Vengeance
Blood Curse
At the End of a Dull Day
The Goodbye Kiss
The Bone Man
Brenner and God
Fire Witness