A few stray tweets and some late night drunken conversations have come to this - The Giallo Club.
For anyone unfamiliar with the term, it is the word the Italians use for mystery/crime fiction. So I thought I would pinch it for here.
The idea is that this blog can be a meeting place for a book club based around detective stories by Italian writers or novels which have Italy as their setting.
Once we have a group together, hopefully we can agree on a first title to be the subject of discussion.
See you all in a late-night bar on the dark side of Florence. Well, at least, that's where I'm going to imagine we meet.
To get the ball rolling, I am looking for nominations for our first book.
Among the authors suggested have been Leonardo Sciascia, Massimo Carlotto, Gianrico Carofiglio, Michael Dibdin's Zen series, Carlo Lucarelli, Andrea Camilleri and Niccolo Ammaniti.
Put a comment below, with impassioned reasons for picking a particular author and/or title and we'll take it from there...
As we've already discussed - although it may be of interest to other members - I've recently finished The Columbian Mule, by Massimo Carlotto, but I can't really recommend it; not the translation, at any rate. Stilted, no real empathy with any of the characters, fairly thin plot.
ReplyDeleteDidbin still takes a lot of beating, and the first three in the Giuttari novels work, but Death of a Mafia Don is poorly constructed and thin.
Pity I'm limited to reading in translation.
My next venture will be with That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana, by Caro Emilio Gadda, then Carlo Lucarelli's De Luca trilogy.
Don't forget about Fruttero e Lucentini: "La donna della domenica" is a masterpiece and I would mention "A che punto รจ la notte" too.
ReplyDeleteMauro
(mauropalermo on Twitter)
It looks like That Awful Mess might be our best contender on the basis that we have one already reading it and one about to start. I will update info shortly...
ReplyDelete