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WORK TITLE: Ferocity
WORK NOTES: trans by Antony Shugaar
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1973
WEBSITE:
CITY: Rome
STATE:
COUNTRY: Italy
NATIONALITY: Italian
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicola_Lagioia * https://www.europaeditions.com/book/9781609453824/ferocity * https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/oct/15/ferocity-nicola-lagioia-review-darkness-and-corruption
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1973, in Bari, Italy.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, editor, and literary critic. Turin International Book Fair, Turin, Italy, director, 2016–. Has served as one of the film selectors for the 2013 and 2014 Venice International Film Festival.
AWARDS:Viareggio Prize, 2010; Premio Strega, 2015, for La ferocia.
WRITINGS
Also author of the novels Tre sistemi per sbarazzarsi di Tolstoj (senza risparmiare se stessi), 2001, and Occidente per principianti, 2004.
SIDELIGHTS
Nicola Lagioia is an Italian writer, editor, and literary critic. Born in Bari, Italy, in 1973, he published his first novel, Tre sistemi per sbarazzarsi di Tolstoj, in 2001. He was one of the film selectors for the 2013 and 2014 Venice International Film Festival. In 2016 Lagioia began directing the Turin International Book Fair.
Ferocity, the translation of his 2015 Premio Strega-winning novel La ferocia by Antony Shugaar, was published in 2017. Michele is not content with the police ruling that his half-sister Clara Salvemini’s violent death is nothing more than a suicide. Being born to the mistress of the head of the Salvemini family, he has always been considered an outsider to the family except with Clara. His return to try and figure out what really happened to her brings up past conflict and creates new ones as Clara’s life is exposed. Michele also learns just how corrupt his family’s real estate empire is, and Clara’s role in helping to keep it successful through illicit means.
Booklist contributor Annie Bostrom observed that “Lagioia’s prose–in Shugaar’s translation—depicts … a violently alive setting that plays off its characters.” A contributor to Publishers Weekly commented that the “oblique kaleidoscopic” way that Lagioia shifts between multiple timelines permits “the mystery to slowly and captivatingly resolve while offering a layered portrait of contemporary Italian life and the abuses of power that money can excuse.” Although a Kirkus Reviews contributor did not recommend the novel “for the casual reader,” the reviewer insisted that readers “will be swept up in a rich and rewarding literary experience.” The same reviewer called the novel “a mesmerizing exploration of failure, resilience, and profound, multifaceted loss.” In a review in Bomb, Kristen Martin confessed: “I was disheartened to find that Lagioia never fully endows Clara with rich interiority or motivations that read as fully believable.” Martin conceded, however, that “as every other aspect of Lagioia’s novel is intricately planned, I am willing to concede that perhaps the opacity of Clara’s motives is purposeful. Michele reflects on this point before Clara’s death: ‘We’re guided by forces of which we’re unaware, we act without knowledge, we say things whose motive is unclear, crimes without guilt and deaths without any apparent cause.’ Ferocity gives us plenty of these possibilities to consider.”
Reviewing the novel in Financial Times, Zoë Apostolides explained that “the story is one of extreme paradoxes—between wealth and poverty, duplicity and honesty, legitimate and illegitimate children—and though this can appear stark and hyperbolic, there’s a sense throughout that the history of the Salveminis taps into a wider national consciousness about who has licence to ruin another person.” Apostolides credited Shugaar, noting that the novel is “elegantly translated.” Writing in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Deborah E. Kennedy mentioned that “the layers not only advance the story but also complicate our understanding of this world of men on the brink and women surrendering to despair.” Kennedy remarked that since “Clara dies in the first chapter, very few pages are devoted to her point of view and the ones that are suffer from a frustrating brand of lyricism doing little to mask the fact that her actions are often contradictory to the point of absurdity.” Kennedy appended that “as a somewhat creaking mechanism of plot and intrigue, her erratic and self-destructive behavior doesn’t have an explanation beyond grief over her estrangement from Michele; and it is in exploring Clara’s affairs and the impact of her fidelity on her husband, Alberto, that Lagioia’s hitherto artful critique of Italy’s machismo culture veers off-course.” Kennedy concluded: “Bleak though it may be in its view of humanity and the future we’re facing, this novel offers many pleasures, not the least of which is Lagioia’s rich approach to simile, his unique ability to bring together the terrifying and the beautiful.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, October 1, 2017, Annie Bostrom, review of Ferocity, p. 25.
Financial Times, October 6, 2017, Zoë Apostolides, review of Ferocity.
Kirkus Reviews, March 1, 2017, review of Ferocity.
Publishers Weekly, August 21, 2017, review of Ferocity, p. 82.
ONLINE
Bomb, https://bombmagazine.org/ (October 31, 2017), Kristen Martin, review of Ferocity.
Festivaletteratura, http://www.festivaletteratura.it/ (February 7, 2018), author profile.
Los Angeles Review of Books, https://lareviewofbooks.org/ (October 18, 2017), Deborah E. Kennedy, review of Ferocity.
Nicola Lagioia
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Nicola Lagioia
Born 1973
Bari, Italy
Occupation Writer
Nicola Lagioia (born in 1973) is an Italian writer.
Born in Bari, Lagioia debuted as a novelist in 2001 with Tre sistemi per sbarazzarsi di Tolstoj (senza risparmiare se stessi).[1] With his novel Riportando tutto a casa he won several awards, including the 2010 Viareggio Prize.[1] In 2013 and in 2014 he was among the film selectors of the Venice International Venice Film Festival.[2] In 2015 he won the Strega Prize with the novel La ferocia (a.k.a. "The ferocity").[3]
Nicola Lagioia, born in Bari in 1973, is an editor for the Italian publisher Minimum Fax. He is the author of three novels and a collection of short stories. His books have been awarded the Strega Prize, the Premio Volponi, and the Premio Viareggio, among others. He lives in Rome. Ferocity is his English-language debut.
A novelist and literary critic, he was born in Bari in 1973 and has directed the Turin International Book Fair since October 2016. He defines his work as a writer as "a middle ground between a scientist and an exorcist". He made his debut in 2001 with "Tre sistemi per sbarazzarsi di Tolstoj", a love story set in contemporary Rome, with the protagonist's bizarre confidant: Leo Tolstoy. With this novel, Lagioia turns a conventional plot into "a machine for the destruction of literary clichés", making himself known due to the originality of the work. His second novel, "Occidente per principianti" (2004), is a vivid and many-voiced novel featuring a journalist with few prospects, a student and a film-maker threatened by creditors who are hunting for the supposed first love of Rodolfo Valentino, showing us a country that is obsessed with the anxiety of appearance. After "Riportando tutto a casa" (2009, Premio Viareggio-Rèpaci, Premio Vittorini, Premio Volponi), 2014 saw the release of "La ferocia", the result of a long drafting period justified by the author saying, "Hemingway said that you should always experience what you write about. I don't think you necessarily need to have lived it, but we must have deserved it. If I write about a murderer, I have to put myself in his shoes. And all of this takes time". Starting with a girl being hit and killed on a desolate spring night in Puglia, Lagioia's noir slowly reveals the origins of the victim (a high-ranking family from Bari with morbid secrets and conflicts) and manages to weave the intricate and ruthless depiction of an (extra)ordinary family from the South. This book won the author the Premio Strega 2015.
(photo: © Leonardo Cendamo)
Ferocity
Annie Bostrom
114.3 (Oct. 1, 2017): p25.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Ferocity. By Nicola Lagioia. Tr. by Antony Shugaar. Oct. 2017.464p. Europa, paper, $18 (9781609453817).
Though Lagioia's English-language debut, his fourth book and the winner of Italy's Strega Prize, will draw comparisons to Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan quartet, it deserves its own classification as complex, darkly absorbing, and mysterious literary fiction. In the southern coastal city of Bari, Clara Salvemini, daughter of a powerful construction magnate, stumbles naked and bloody into the path of a truck on its way back to Taranto, a more industrial city on the other side of Italy's heel. After her death is ruled a suicide, her half-brother, Michele, the closest of her three siblings, is the last to even know she's gone. When Michele returns to Bari from Rome, where he works as a journalist, he's haunted by memories, grief, questions about his sister's death, and his own, simmering demons. Drilling down deeply into many main and secondary characters' stories, Lagioia's prose--in Shugaar's translation--depicts a family living far from the ease it projects; loyalties and betrayals painted in shades of gray; and a violently alive setting that plays off its characters.--Annie Bostrom
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Bostrom, Annie. "Ferocity." Booklist, 1 Oct. 2017, p. 25. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A510653736/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=4525a7b5. Accessed 12 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A510653736
Ferocity
264.34 (Aug. 21, 2017): p82.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Ferocity
Nicola Lagioia, trans, from the Italian by Antony Shugaar. Europa (PRH, dist.),$18 trade paper (464p) ISBN 978-1-60945-381-7
In Lagioia's powerful novel, Clara Salvemini's violent death is ruled a suicide, causing her estranged brother, Michele, to return to the family villa to investigate. Growing up, Clara was the only member of the family to treat Michele, a son of the patriarch's mistress, with any kindness. His return reminds the family of their shame at his confounding childhood behavior, his stints in mental hospitals, and his very existence. As he tries to understand the family's story of Clara leaping to her death, he discovers the rotten core of his father's real estate empire that relies on bribery, shady accounting, and blackmail. In particular, the family's most recent development of resort condos has fallen under suspicion for its environmental impacts and threatens to ruin all the Salvemini patriarch has worked for. Lagioia drifts between timelines as Clara's family, lovers, and acquaintances slowly reveal how she drew them into the web of the Salveminis and how they witnessed her unraveling. This oblique kaleidoscopic approach allows the mystery to slowly and captivatingly resolve while offering a layered portrait of contemporary Italian life and the abuses of power that money can excuse. (Oct.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Ferocity." Publishers Weekly, 21 Aug. 2017, p. 82. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A501717276/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=107b6c5f. Accessed 12 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A501717276
Lagioia, Nicola: FEROCITY
(Mar. 1, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Lagioia, Nicola FEROCITY Europa Editions (Adult Fiction) $18.00 10, 10 ISBN: 978-1-60945-381-7
Lagioia makes his enthralling English-language debut, translated into dazzling prose by Shugaar.Amid what is likely the most stirring passage ever written in all of literature about a gas station sky dancer, a naked, blood-covered woman emerges from the brush, stumbling past "tiny, fuzzy-winged creatures" that sway in the dark as though "tied to the moon's invisible thread," and wanders onto the highway. This is Clara, eldest daughter of the Salvemini family of Bari, whose death that night is ruled a suicide by purported leap off a parking garage. Her half brother, Michele, with whom Clara cherished an almost supernatural bond as a child, born of an affair and incompletely absorbed into the family when his mother died in childbirth, is plagued by suspicions about his sister's death. "In the intricate forest of grief, a path emerges," and, as Michele questions his flatly dismal past and his father's motives, a deep substratum of insidious corruption and habitual degradation emerges, threatening not only the tenuous stability of the Salvemini family, but the very ground beneath their feet. Beware comparisons to popular modern family sagas: this is a complex novel, intricately orchestrated and, above all, inventively composed. The past and present pile up and fuse, dissolve, reunite, with characters living present action and recalled memory all at once; a single action may be refracted and revisited from several vantage points, filtered through various characters' perceptions. Grammatical subjects flip abruptly from one line to the next, and it is only through Logioia's often virtuosic character development that the attentive reader will remain oriented to the progression of events. Not recommended for the casual reader (or easily scandalized), but those who persevere will be swept up in a rich and rewarding literary experience. A mesmerizing exploration of failure, resilience, and profound, multifaceted loss.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Lagioia, Nicola: FEROCITY." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Mar. 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A482911771/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=a03d2027. Accessed 12 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A482911771
Greed, Italian Style: on Nicola Lagioia’s Ferocity by Kristen Martin
Corruption, capitalism, and death in Puglia.
Home of the Bill T. Jones / Arnie Zane Company
Oct 31, 2017
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In the opening scene of Nicola Lagioia’s novel Ferocity (Europa Editions), we zoom in on a hyper-literary description of singed moths: “As they approached the artificial lights, the golden angle of their flight was shattered. Their movements became an obsessive circular dance that only death could interrupt. A nasty black heap of insects lay on the veranda of the first of these residences.” What might initially seem to be a stylistic embellishment that has little to do with the actual plot—a distraction from the naked, bloody woman who walks past those floodlights and onto the highway between Bari and Taranto—turns out to be an important symbol of how humans encroach disastrously on each other and the natural environment.
The naked, bloody woman who struts out into the night is Clara Salvemini. Her last name means something in Puglia, the heel of Italy’s boot—she was the first-born daughter of Vittorio Salvemini, a powerful builder and real-estate developer from Bari, seen as a “master of the city.” Her body is found at the foot of a parking garage, and her death is ruled a suicide. The book’s plot is driven by the quest to uncover the truth. In part, it’s the saga of the Salvemini family, a portrait of a patriarch’s greed and its consequences.
Ferocity Novel
One might expect an Italian novel that concerns itself with corruption to delve into organized crime. Ferocity, instead, focuses on the seemingly more benign world of white-collar extortion, centering on Vittorio Salvemini’s construction business and his understanding “that behind the zoning plans there was legislation, and behind that… there was nothing but an initial act of arbitrary personal will.” The mob leaves bodies in its wake, but the victims of this kind of criminality are not immediately visible. When someone like Vittorio greases palms or threatens blackmail to get people to look the other way as he flouts regulations and restrictions, people don’t usually end up dead.
Lagioia—a celebrated contemporary literary novelist in Italy—knows the Mezzogiorno well. He was born in Bari in 1973, and his 2009 novel Riportando tutto a casa (Bringing Everything Back Home) follows three teenage boys whose fathers get rich in the economic boom of the 1980s. Translated by Anthony Shugaar, Ferocity won the Strega prize, Italy’s most prestigious literary award for fiction, and marks Lagioia’s English-language debut. It’s a smart choice for his introduction to an Anglophone audience, since it isn’t hard to envision this book in the context of the American South, or in any other part of the globe where unrestrained capitalism has led to environmental disaster. Comparisons to “Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl and Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, filtered through the fierce Mediterranean vision of Elena Ferrante,” don’t do justice to how Ferocity renders moral and political corruption’s rampant and universal prevalence.
The white collar crime at the center of the story is “the Porto Allegro affair.” Porto Allegro is a tourist complex Vittorio is constructing on the Gargano coast; it has drawn the ire of environmental activists for neglecting zoning restrictions regarding protected coastal pines. Via the kaleidoscope of perspectives, we learn who pays for the corruption that pads the pockets of Puglia’s most powerful: devastation is wreaked on the environment (plovers drop from the sky after drinking from lead-infested waters near the tourist complex), and environmentally-caused illnesses afflict the poor on the fringes of cities (people living near the steel mills that supply construction develop lung and stomach tumors).
Perspectives shift frequently and without announcement, slipping from one “he” to another “he” within the space of a paragraph. Characters move through the present and the past as they narrate, and the line between the two is frequently blurred. These disorienting shifts reveal how white-collar crime in fact pervades every level of Southern Italian society, from a lower-class Tarantine truck driver to the chancellor of the University of Bari. Each character has his own motives for willfully ignoring it.
Through Clara’s death—which most of the novel’s characters are callously uninterested in—we are able to see how capitalistic greed has bred moral decay. That decay is uncovered as Michele, Clara’s mentally ill half-brother with whom she shared an intense relationship, strives to better understand her life and death. Michele is the only one who has a motive for unveiling what really happened to Clara, and in turn, for bringing to light his family’s depravity.
The book spends a lot of page time depicting the characters’ intense misogyny. We hear from multiple characters that women deserve to be shown the back of a man’s hand. When Clara was alive, she chased after her “one long moment of happiness” with Michele, believing the path back to him was to sleep with Bari’s most powerful men—who her father blackmails—allowing them to beat and rape her. Given this focus, I was disheartened to find that Lagioia never fully endows Clara with rich interiority or motivations that read as fully believable. The desire to reunite with her brother as he was in his adolescence is hardly a satisfactory answer to why Clara aids and abets her father’s corruption. Clara is forever subjugated to men, including Michele, who she spends her final years pining after.
Still, as every other aspect of Lagioia’s novel is intricately planned, I am willing to concede that perhaps the opacity of Clara’s motives is purposeful. Michele reflects on this point before Clara’s death: “We’re guided by forces of which we’re unaware, we act without knowledge, we say things whose motive is unclear, crimes without guilt and deaths without any apparent cause.” Ferocity gives us plenty of these possibilities to consider.
Kristen Martin is at work on a collection of essays that explores and meditates on grief—her personal and lasting grief over the deaths of her parents; cultural representations of grief on television, in music, and in literature; and our society’s ever-morphing relationship with grief and mourning. Her personal and critical essays have been published in Literary Hub, Hazlitt, Catapult Magazine, Real Life, The Hairpin, Guernica, and elsewhere. She teaches first-year writing at Baruch College and works as a consultant at the Columbia University Writing Center.
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Ferocity by Nicola Lagioia — famiglia territory
An energetic tale of greed, vanity and murder in southern Italy
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Zoë Apostolides
OCTOBER 6, 2017 0
The state highway connecting Bari and Taranto is usually quiet at 2am. Animals snuffle in the deserted gardens of country houses, while “in the distance, a sizzling tiara marked the city”; moths approach the artificial lights outside, performing “an obsessive circular dance that only death could interrupt”. And death is about to interrupt. This first, panoramic sweep homes in on thirtysomething Clara Salvemini, eldest daughter of a wealthy property developer. Clara is walking, bloodied and naked, down the middle section of this deserted road; “the bruises on her ribs and arms and lower back”, we are told, are “like so many Rorschach inkblots”. The next morning she is found dead in a parking lot: the coroner pronounces suicide.
La ferocia was published in Italy in 2014 and received the prestigious Strega Prize the following year. Nicola Lagioia’s fourth novel and English-language debut — elegantly translated by Antony Shugaar — takes many characters, central and ancillary, as its protagonist, like a Greek chorus narrating from varied and often contradictory texts. Clara’s father, Vittorio, reeling with grief, finds the news “plummeting down into him like a ball of cement tossed down a stairwell” and contemplates the images of his child as he knew her, “ . . . each detached from the others”. We’re privy to the recollections of a warehouse worker at a textiles plant, a shoe-shop clerk, a body-building instructor, a chief surgeon, all of whom remember a different woman for different reasons. She is simultaneously the “daughter of a well-known builder” and “an ancient Egyptian deity, preparing to step out of a sarcophagus”.
For Alberto, Clara’s husband, the loss is compounded by her recent withdrawal, erratic behaviour and the affairs he tried to ignore. Clara’s younger brother and favourite sibling, Michele, is “a hotbed of malaises”. At the time of her death, Michele lives in Rome. “A family of crazy people”, thinks Alberto at the funeral, “and the craziest one of all didn’t even show up.” Michele’s eventual arrival forms the second half of the novel, and follows his attempts to solve the mystery of his sister’s death.
Ferocity resists classification as a whodunnit, focusing instead on the corruption coursing through a society desperate to seem more moneyed than it is, a masquerading city of “offices, courthouses, journalists, and sports clubs”. Lagioia reveals a flair for social satire, suggesting that Bari itself is complicit in the woe of its habitants, so keen to maintain a sense of swaggering “untouched privilege” at any cost. Clara’s elder brother Ruggero, for instance, was once “enrolled in an elementary school where the fees were higher than the worker’s compensation checks received by the labourers for their injuries while employed by our father”.
The narrative jumps between present-day and historical interactions and events, lending it a filmic quality whose scenes build an overall portrait of the wider vanity, greed and violence that led to Clara’s death. It’s a work of startling energy and structural precision, an ambitious novel whose linguistic brilliance is frequently at odds with the twists and turns of Michele’s quest for the truth. When trying to gather information Michele encounters reluctance and fear, an unwillingness to cooperate, but, we’re told, his motivation comes “from beyond a bloodstained veil, and he felt sincere sorrow for anyone who, forcing him to cross it, would be smeared with the same substance”.
The story is one of extreme paradoxes — between wealth and poverty, duplicity and honesty, legitimate and illegitimate children — and though this can appear stark and hyperbolic, there’s a sense throughout that the history of the Salveminis taps into a wider national consciousness about who has licence to ruin another person. This is neatly summarised by one journalist who notes, “In Italy the family is sacred. Usually people prefer to let themselves be destroyed by theirs.”
Ferocity, by Nicola Lagioia, translated by Antony Shugaar, Europa Editions, RRP£13.99/$18, 447 pages
Paving Paradise: The Beauty and Terror of Nicola Lagioia’s “Ferocity”
By Deborah E. Kennedy
181 0 2
OCTOBER 18, 2017
IT’S A SHORT EXCHANGE in the middle of a sprawling story, a bit of dialogue between two characters in a coffee shop. One character is labeled simply “pockmarked guy,” the other, “proprietor”:
“Like Ilva?”
“Even worse.”
Translated from the Italian by Antony Shugaar and available in English for the first time with Europa Editions, Ferocity, Nicola Lagioia’s 2015 Strega Prize–winning novel, mentions Ilva only once and does so, it would seem, in passing. However, nothing in this inconvenient, untamed, but ultimately brilliant novel about the rise and fall of the Salvemini family, is throwaway, and Ilva is both a spot on the map and a proper name synonymous with manmade, environmental catastrophe. Think Three Mile Island or the Hanford Nuclear Power Plant, and you’re on your way to understanding the import of the proprietor’s words of warning.
The men are comparing the havoc wreaked by Ilva, a real-life Taranto-steel-mill-turned-superfund-site responsible for 83 percent of Italy’s most harmful emissions as well as 400 premature deaths in the region, to Porto Allegro, the shopping center that could make or break the fortunes of the fictional Salveminis. The fact that building Porto Allegro on a stretch of pristine Italian coastline could be on par with Ilva in terms of environmental destruction is not news to Vittorio, the 75-year-old Salvemini patriarch and self-made millionaire real estate developer, but the simple truth is, he doesn’t care about plovers and pink flamingoes. He wants only to preserve his wealth and reputation.
Ferocity is part ecological thriller, part murder mystery — at the heart of the story is a young, beautiful dead woman — and part family saga. The dead woman is Clara Salvemini. A gorgeous cipher, she is many things to many, many married men. She also has a problematic cocaine habit and a tendency toward depression. One night, she fails to come home to her beleaguered husband, and the next day she is found bloody and mangled at the foot of a tall parking structure. The official cause of death is suicide, but Clara’s half-brother, the Salvemini black sheep, Michele, suspects foul play.
Lagioia’s story is set in the ’80s in southern Italy, mainly in the cities of Taranto and his native Bari and is therefore inspiring inevitable comparisons to Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels. Lagioia, like Ferrante, is concerned primarily with Italy’s dark and shameful underbelly. Taranto is “charming, unless you lived there.” Bari is “that fucking city.” This is not the same country where Lucy Honeychurch lost her bearings and found herself. There are no waving fields of poppies, no Baedeker-toting Charlotte Bartletts, no Eleanor Lavishes shaking out mackintosh squares. In their place are industrial parks, oil refineries, suburban shopping malls built on a foundation of lies, and men and women so damaged by the inherent cruelty of the human race it’s hard to distinguish their inner rot from the decay that surrounds them.
A good deal of that inner rot is a direct result of the culture’s embrace of rampant sexism, another subject dear to Ferrante’s heart, but in Lagioia’s hands misogyny is less a social construct and more of a force of nature. Contemplating a recent case in which three men beat another half to death, a Bari chief justice — and former lover of Clara’s — places the blame for male brutality on “a residue from a time before the first laws were chiseled into the basalt, a very distant ferocious era, always ready to open wide beneath our feet.” That isn’t to say that Lagioia is letting men off the hook. He isn’t interested in clearing the men responsible for Clara’s fate or painting as harmless their distasteful way of referring to women as sluts and whores and nothing more. Rather, one of his main projects in this aptly titled novel is plumbing the depths of our wildness, uncovering once and for all the line that separates man from beast. His conclusions — like his vivid prose and tangled plot — are intoxicatingly complex and discomfitingly circular. On one hand, Lagioia suggests that we are all animals, indistinguishable in our appetites from the snakes and sewer rats that skulk around the edges of tourist traps and cineplexes. On the other, as thinking and scheming creatures of capitalism, we are culpable for the destruction of the very habitats the most vulnerable beasts count on for survival. Plovers fall from the sky in black clouds of doom. Flamingoes die in agony, emitting cries never before heard by naturalists. And men keep on paving paradise.
Vittorio’s talent for navigating the notoriously corrupt world of Italian municipal politics has quite literally changed the landscape in and around Bari. His success has also made it possible for his wife and children to live comfortably if not happily in a well-appointed villa on the fashionable side of town. Annamaria, Vittorio’s wife and the mother of three of his children, is tortured by the presence of the fourth, Michele, the product of Vittorio’s affair with a younger woman. Ruggero, the eldest son, is an ambitious oncologist whose rise to the top is both eased and thwarted by his father’s obvious lack of scruples, and Gioia, the youngest daughter, is a spoiled mid-twentysomething, more concerned with Twitter likes and access to designer clothes than she is with her own sister’s death.
Michele, with his ambiguous mental health history and near-supernatual bond to Clara, understands instinctively that his family’s response to her death smacks of complicity, or at the very least apathy, and he launches a haphazard but passionate investigation into the web of political functionaries, low-level dignitaries, and just plain low-lifes that somehow succeeded in bringing down a ferociously vital young woman, the only person on the planet Michele cared about and, more importantly, the only one on earth who cared about him. His journey is both a physical and psychological one and takes him not only to the slimiest corners of a vice-ridden city, but also to the darkest parts of his psyche. In the end and against the advice of Ruggero and an environmental protection administrator, Michele turns whistleblower, convinced the ghost of Clara is steering him from beyond the grave.
The above makes Lagioia’s plot sound hard-boiled, but it is actually meandering, philosophical, and dizzyingly layered. I Am Love meets Toni Morrison, The Godfather meets Love Medicine. The layers not only advance the story but also complicate our understanding of this world of men on the brink and women surrendering to despair. Clara is at the center of that world. She’s the magnet, the muse, the why and wherefore. Character after character after character recounts his first and last and best and worst hour with her, including sweaty sex in an empty gym, humiliating sex in a sad hotel, and self-effacing sex in a movie theater, while a woman onscreen is battered by her boyfriend, and, as the scenes pile up and build on each other, Clara’s essence is alternately illuminated, blurred, polluted, and purified.
This could explain one of the weaknesses of the novel. Because Clara dies in the first chapter, very few pages are devoted to her point of view and the ones that are suffer from a frustrating brand of lyricism doing little to mask the fact that her actions are often contradictory to the point of absurdity. While waiting for one of her many married elderly lovers to return, Clara thinks of Michele, remembers him as a boy and longs to reunite with him. But not with the Michele that at that time is living in a functional state in Rome, but with the Michele of somewhere else, the Michele of her youth who resides in a universe parallel to the one in which she is married to a man she doesn’t love and prostitutes herself on a daily basis: “She herself must clearly be somewhere else, because otherwise the Clara that went to bed with a repulsive old man would have no explanation.”
As a somewhat creaking mechanism of plot and intrigue, her erratic and self-destructive behavior doesn’t have an explanation beyond grief over her estrangement from Michele; and it is in exploring Clara’s affairs and the impact of her fidelity on her husband, Alberto, that Lagioia’s hitherto artful critique of Italy’s machismo culture veers off-course. He even goes so far as to suggest that Clara’s affairs are by definition more injurious than the many infidelities past generations of Italian women have suffered through because “the despotism of their men was so crude and idiotic that it never struck them in full. But with a man who put up with betrayals as Alberto did, there could be an even greater oppression: in the apparent reversal of roles, an attempt to abuse power that aspired to the absolute.”
Ferocity is as much about the corrosive nature of power as it is about family, sex, and the scars etched on the earth by human hands. Corruption colors everyone and everything bruise-purple, and while Lagioia allows Vittorio to mellow somewhat over the course of the novel, to take small steps toward his Don-Corleone-in-the-garden-with-his-grandson moment, he makes it clear that his wealth and influence have come to him not through merit but through a systemic hypocrisy that favors the hollow and self-deluded: “If businessmen failed to keep their thresholds of awareness high, if they allowed thoughts to emerge that, once on the surface, would explode in all their total contradictory essence, then they’d never be able to rule the world as they do.” It’s impossible to resist the temptation to read some of these lines as an indictment of the Berlusconi administration, and now, with this English translation, a whole new set of readers can draw their own conclusions about ruthless real estate moguls freed from the burdens of conscience to bend both man and land to their will.
Bleak though it may be in its view of humanity and the future we’re facing, this novel offers many pleasures, not the least of which is Lagioia’s rich approach to simile, his unique ability to bring together the terrifying and the beautiful. A teenage Michele, forced to live without Clara for the first time when she decamps for England as part of a foreign exchange program, is overcome with the sensation that, in her absence, his days are dark fantasies robbed of substance, “as if the nightmare were being dreamed by a Xerox machine.”
Like life? Even better.
¤
Deborah E. Kennedy’s short stories have appeared in Third Coast magazine, Sou’wester, and North American Review, and she has contributed pieces to Salon, The Establishment, and The Oregonian. Her debut novel, Tornado Weather, was published by Flatiron Books in July 2017.
Ferocity
By Nicola Lagioia
Published 10.10.2017
Europa Editions
464 Pages
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