Holy Smoke by
Tonino Benaquista
pbk out January 04
(Bitter Lemon Press)
at £8.99
A triumphant start for Bitter Lemon's new series of foreign crime in translation. Back
in 1992, this book won three major prizes in France and, whilst I've had the
occasional problem with French prizewinners in the past, this one was surely well
deserved.
True, it took me some time to warm to Antonio Polsinelli, Benaquista's first
person narrator. Tonio is a Frenchman born in France of Italian immigrant parents
(like Benacquista himself), eager to distance himself from his background. "The road
is long", he reluctantly writes on behalf of ghetto friend, semi-illiterate Dario, in a
letter to Dario's girl-friend. The letter will result in Dario's death, leaving Tonio the
less-than-proud owner of a small vineyard in the southern Italian countryside,
strangely once owned by Dario. Tonio is soon to find out that the ties of family,
history and culture cannot be shaken off as easily as he supposes.
Benacquista is himself both a prolific novelist and a screenwriter, perhaps best
known over here for his screenplay (with its director) for Jacques Audiard's film Read
My Lips. Here, in a sympathetic translation from Adriana Hunter, he produces an
economically written, fast-moving narrative (most British crime writers would have
written this twice as long and half as good), packed with incident, flecked with
humour, full of acerbic reflections on his own background and culture, seemingly
straightforward. It's not until about twenty pages before the end that we (and Tonio)
realise how comprehensively we have been fooled.
As Libération had it, 'a story of wine, miracles, the mafia, fascists and even
love', not to mention the philosophy of cooking (and eating) pasta, the latter serving
also as a metaphor for the art of the crime novel itself. If that idea intrigues you, don't
miss this one.
Holy Smoke by
Tonino Benaquista
