Gold, Frankincense and Dust - Valerio Varesi

Parma is shrouded in autumnal mist.   Commissario Franco Soneri is called to a body found on the verge of the autosrada, where there has been a multi-vehicle pile-up.   A lorry-load of bulls have broken loose and there is a Roma camp close by.   The body has been badly and deliberately burnt.

The victim turns out to be a beautiful young Romanian girl with links to the Roma people.  She operated under various names and had a string of well-off older lovers who have different perspectives on her character.   Whilst they certainly give her presents, she is not a prostitute.   Her day job seems to have been cleaning for a specialist firm of goldsmiths.   She was, however, having an intense affair with the husband of the proprietor and was three months pregnant by him.

Soneri investigates at a leisurely pace.  We are gently introduced to the unique working of the Italian crime and judicial system.   The book was written in 2007 and it is therefore just about credible that a middle-aged commissario like Soneri should still be immune to technological advances.   Soneri does things old-style.   He believes that coincidences happens, that people are fallible, and all will become clear in the end.   His private life is going through a troubled time, so he increases his visits to local bars and trattoria.  He meets a down-at-heel marchese whose aristocratic demeanour gets him carte blanche for his eccentricities.   He too is one of nature's philosophers and his interactions with Soneri are highlights of the story.

I was reminded of Camilleri's Mantalbano novels.  The focus on food, regionality, character - alongside a wry commentary of the current state of affairs.   Reading it was pure pleasure.   I'm no expert on translations from the Italian but I will certainly keep an eye out for translator Joseph Farrell's versions of Dario Fo's plays.  In fact I think I might Google them now...

Gold - Blaise Cendrars

The subtitle says it all: The Marvellous History of General John Augustus Sutter.  Sutter was a Swiss ne'er-do-well who abandoned his wife and children, pitched up in California in the days when San Fransisco was basically a landing stage, and made himself the richest man on the planet, all in the space of a decade.

Then - the twist no one could ever have seen coming - gold was discovered on his land, and it ruined him.

Cendrars was a modernist, himself half-Swiss.  He seems to have spent fifteen years boiling this epic story down to a bare 120 pages.  The result, published in 1924, is startling and seductive.  He declaims what seem to be facts but are probably not.  There is no characterisation, no real development.  Yet this detachment somehow contrives to make the great man's stupendous downfall all the more poignant.

A striking original, well worth discovering.