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The Faletti's "Braccio" |
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| 08/12/2010 |
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The Dark Pages begin with Italy, as does Giorgio Faletti in his latest novel, Appunti di un venditore di donne, set in Milan in the late 1970s.
Says Faletti: “I have to thank a critic, Giorgio De Rienzo, who panned my first books and then after the last wrote that it would be interesting to see me focus on an Italian story. So I began thinking about it. I had only the title and a sentence, the opening. Then one day, in Turin, while I was shooting a TV show on the 1970s, I asked myself where I was in those years. I was in Milan, a city where you could make all of your dreams come true. My dream was to be do cabaret, hopefully successfully.”
Thus was born the story of 35-year-old Braccio, castrated by a crime boss he tried to cross. Today, Braccio women [in fact, the novel’s title translates to Note of a Seller of Women] and lives in Milan. “At night in Milan you’d only come across cops, thieves, hookers and artists. We were the artists. We thought we were living the best life possible. I was part of that world. After having written books that I would’ve wanted to read, Appunti di un venditore di donne is one I would have wanted to write, and I had an ‘acting’ relationship with the characters in this book. Besides having written it, I played it out, and in this novel there is a part of me in every character,” adds the writer.
Cynicism, greed, rancor as well as enormous tenderness make up the novel. “This book is a ‘first’ for a number of reasons: the Italian setting, the first-person narrative, and above all the fact that is a noir rather thriller. In the thriller you always have to be somewhat over the top, you submerge yourself in the hardest and most impenetrable cage, you can bend reality to the plot. (Michael Connelly, the Chandler Award recipient of this year’s Noir festival, gives a clear example of this in latest novel, when he wrote than any ‘error’ should be attributed to the author). In noir, however, the plot has to bend to reality.”
Appunti di un venditore di donne is the story of a generation that sacrificed everything for power, a generation that committed moral suicide. What’s worse, says Faletti, “the following generation mistook that suicide for martyrdom.”
Still waiting for one of his books to be made into a film one day, the author continues down his artistic path, especially cinema and music, with a musical based on an adult fairy tale he wrote, which will soon be hitting bookshelves.
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