Despite the fact that I am supposed to be reading (and finishing) two or three other things, I read Medusa this weekend, a later entry in the Aurelio Zen series by Michael Dibdin (published in 2004).
10 Amazon readers gave this book an average of four and a half stars, and I'd say they're well deserved. I really enjoyed reading it because I didn't really notice myself making an effort to read it; the prose pulled me along and when I lost my place it didn't bother me too much to reread a chapter. I think his prose is very handsome.
The book opens when a retired army officer, reading his paper on the tram in Milan, discovers that the corpse of a man he thought everyone has forgotten has been discovered in the Alto Adige, a part of Italy that abuts Austria. He knew this man and he knows that he's in danger. Gabriele's fear, and his cross country flight, inspire some similar road warrior behavior in Zen, who visits Alto Adige, Bolzano, Verona, Cremona, and Milan before getting to return to Lucca. As Dibdin says, Zen feels at home in police archives, and has visited most of them at one time or another.
In this novel, Dibdin satirizes the sloganeering of modern Italy, what he calls "Italia lite": enthusiastic assertions of the need for teamwork while serving the public while the same old internecine agency rivalries between the Ministry of Defense and the Ministry of the Interior rage on, as healthy as ever.
He also talks about the "Mysteri d'Italia," how matters are settled quietly, behind the scenes, by powerful members of the oligarchy who never step forward out of the shadows.
In this story, Zen has aged quite a bit since Ratking; he's living in Lucca now, with a woman named Gemma. Their conversations are priceless.
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