By Antonio La Cava
Winning, unique, ambitious, the project that has joined some of the most famous Italian crime writers to summon an anthology of crimes stories, Crimini, which has been adapted for the television.
Crimini, published in 2005 in Italy and now translated too in English, has been appreciated by a huge public of readers, keen on the different crime writers: Niccolo’ Ammaniti, Andrea Camilleri, Massimo Carlotto, Sandrone Dazieri, Giancarlo De Cataldo, Diego De Silva, Giorgio Faletti, Marcello Fois, Carlo Lucarelli eand Antonio Mancini.
Every writer sets his story in the area where he lives, giving thus a peculiar view of nowaday’s Italy.
The curator of Crimini is Giancarlo De Cataldo, who is also one of the authors of the nine stories. He “recruited” the best Italian crime writers, able to represent that narrative genre best known as Italian noir.
But about the definition of Italian noir not everybody agrees, seeing in the mingling of styles and different genres of writing a mixture without unity, which included Camilleri, closer to detective stories, and Lucarelli or Faletti, typical crime writers.
Far from giving it a label, the work, that can look inhomogeneous, highlights though a strong element of cohesion: the image of a gloomy-coloured Italy with a barbarised humanity that every day the crime news highlights with ruthless truth.
According to De Cataldo, the Italian noir is an “original way of narrating the myths, the rituals, the (occasional) splendours and the (frequent) miseries of contemporary life”.
There are, De Cataldo says in his introduction, the underlying themes of the anthology: corruption, material and moral, “which takes the man to go beyond every ethic limit”; the foreigners, with the underworld of the crime linked to the migration flows; and the obsession with success, which “urges to reach fame at any rate.
To open the book is the story, written by Ammaniti and Manzini, You Are My Treasure Chest, which charmed many readers in describing a cocaine addict plastic surgeon, emerging as the most ironic of the nine stories.
The register of irony and grimace is used, in fact, in many tales, to accompany events like homicides, investigations, shadowings, drug and arms traffics.
One of the best stories is The Last Gag by Dazieri, about an ex comic actor, ex alcoholic and owner of a bar, who investigates on the murder of the man who took away from him fame and love.
The style of the detective story stands out in Death of an Informer by Massimo Carlotto, where “a police inspector investigates a drug trade, among Croatian criminals and Chinese mafia”.
The Boy Who Was Kidnapped By the Christmas Fairy, written by De Cataldo, is about a man who, to found some money to give back to his usurers, organises the kidnapping of a boy. And only the help of a non-European will save him.
Crimes, besides being an anthology that collect the stories of the most famous crime writers, is doubtless an appalling and truthful image of the evil spirit of Italy.
Copyright 2008 GIORGIOSTUDIO Ltd – All rights reserved
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