The City of the Living – The Framing Device

What a year!

From January to April, things were moving along nicely. My goddaughter-niece turned one – despite the fact that I cannot remember life before she arrived – but then a few things rocked my little bubble and the people I hold the dearest. It has culminated in the twelve months of 2023 feeling like three years. It wasn’t all bad, there were some positives amid the… seizures… tears… pneumonia… the end of a friendship… cyst on the brain… a stenosis diagnosis… a healing trip to London to experience the shattering catharsis of A Little Life on stage… a Fringe & Bracket reunion… tears… fractured limbs… a much needed sunshine break… I started writing again… all those murdered babies and no ceasefire in sight… ‘Whoopi’ was vacated… relief… healing and self-care… stopped expecting a ‘me’ from anybody… I stopped writing again… boundaries… said enough… I am enough… oh, and Last Christmas finally made Christmas #1 39 years after initial release – RIP George x

Anyway. Phew. Shrugs, *blows raspberry at stress and worry*

I did manage to see some films this year albeit non-film festival ones courtesy of my Curzon and mubi memberships. Below are the twenty I admired the most, half of which excitedly were directed (and written) by women and depict the whole gamut of emotions experienced by a multitude of fully-rounded, complex humans. My favourite being the masterclass in misogyny, Justine Triet’s pitch perfect Anatomy of a Fall.

Favourites Films of 2023

Favourite Books of 2023

Thankfully, I also managed to read. Again, not as many as I’d have liked but personal distractions aside, 60 isn’t too bad. That’s 17,339 pages – actual pages too as I just don’t think I’m cut out for a Kindle. Absolute fave eleven are below left, on the right is a pile of honourable mentions: fiction and non, a volume of comics, women in translation, four blokes and a bit of poetry. If somebody was to make me choose just one, then today it would be Lagioia’s The City of the Living which I happened to review earlier in the year.

TV/streaming highlights of 2023

It was the year that bid farewell to The Marvellous Mrs Maisel (flashbacks, forwards and ageing make-up galore. Also, can’t spell it with just the one ‘l’, soz), Succession (AKA Wambsgans Win) and Happy Valley (bye-bye Tommy Lee Royce). There was a second series for Somebody Somewhere which is just the loveliest show in the world; gentle, tender, funny, and full of grace and warmth. Other TV highlights for me included:

Poker Face – Casino cocktail waitress Charlie Cale (Natasha Lyonne) entangles herself with some shady people following the murder of her best friend. She goes on the run, solving crimes wherever she ends up. Made all the more interesting by her uncanny ability to spot a lie. Think Wonder Woman (sans lasso) meets Columbo via the quick-witted brain of Rian Johnson.

The Last of Us – Pedro! In the adaptation of a game I will never play! Yet more importantly, S1 E03: Long, Long Time – Survivalist Bill (Nick Offerman) makes an unlikely connection in Frank (Murray Bartlett). Perfection.

The Bear S2 E08, Forks. Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) finally comes into his own after Carmy (Jeremy Allen White) sends him to a posh restaurant to ultimately polish the cutlery.

Dark Winds – It’s 1971 and the discovery of three dead bodies in a motel coincide with an armoured bank heist. Navajo reservation cops Lt. Joe Leaphorn (Zahn McClarnon) and Sgt. Bernadette Manuelito (Jessica Matten) investigate the brutal deaths of three of their own with the help of a new recruit, Jim Chee (Kiowa Gordon). A revisionist western mini-series at its finest, re-appropriated from the perspective of indigenous Americans by indigenous Americans (producers Robert Redford and George R.R. Martin’s names add a little cash/cache). It’s brilliant and thankfully has been renewed for two more series. Whether we, in the UK get those remains to be seen but I sincerely hope so.

The Fall of the House Usher – I, admittedly, haven’t really been a fan of anything Mike Flanagan has done since The Haunting of Hill House (2018) but I think, he may have surpassed even that with this celebration of all things Edgar Allan. The whole cast bring their A-game and it is deliciously dark, twisted and utterly compelling from the first ten minutes. Poe-etic even (ugh). As an aside, I bloody love Bruce Greenwood – the perfect replacement for the other guy.

Fin

The City of the Living

In Elena Ferrante’s Frantumaglia: A Writer’s Journey (2015), fellow Italian writer Nicola Lagioia was afforded the opportunity to pose a number of questions, via e-mail, to the inimitable author. This also coincided with the year they were both finalists for the Strega Award (Lagioia eventually won for his first novel in translation, Ferocity). It’s a fascinating repartee and at one point, he states “For me literary needs always take precedence over the journalistic ones.” This is certainly evident in his latest book – a book which states it’s a work of fiction on the verso of the title page but then acknowledges that “the story told in this book is true” AKA “the most vicious crime in modern Roman history”.

In March 2016 in an apartment just outside Rome, the body of twenty-three-year-old Luca Varani was discovered brutally murdered at the hands of Manuel Foffo and Marco Prato. Two seemingly ‘ordinary’ men from ‘decent’ backgrounds. The crime supposedly sent Italy into shockwaves at the time but managed to bypass the UK entirely. The first I heard of it was when I started Nicola Lagioia’s The City of the Living, published by Europa editions UK and translated by Ann Goldstein (Queen of Italian translation and brilliant friend of Ferrante).

This gripping literary work of true crime pulls together months of interviews, courts documentation and correspondence with one of the killers in such a way, it reads like fiction. While the crime itself is stomach-churning and the conclusion of the court-case infuriating, Lagioia never loses empathy in portraying every injured party of this tragedy (and there are many). He seeks to expose Foffo and Prato’s humanity even when actions proved they had, frighteningly, lost it. Painting a truly compelling narrative of class, corruption, drugs and violence, he forefronts class, betrayed expectations, sexual confusion, and the provocative blood ties often unbearable in families.

Lagioia describes The Eternal City as one of absolute freedom but this story shows just how oppressive that liberty can be. The author, who lived in Rome for many years before moving on, pulls no punches in depicting the decay of a city crumbling, not only via its historic ruins but from its rotten core. A metropolis of darkness and an underbelly most tourists are unaware of. So convincing is his prose that it soured my opinion of a place I once adored.

A lot of its publicity has compared The City of the Living to Capote’s In Cold Blood, however, I find it pointless to compare the two. Both are incredible pieces of writing but this, is less dated, more incisive and one tends not to question its veracity (Dave Cullen’s Columbine or Michelle McNamara’s I’ll be Gone in the Dark are probably more appropriate contemporaries). After reluctantly finishing it, the first thing I did was Google the case. I was furious to not only finish the book but also in such a way, where justice failed (yet again!). I had to, if only to see these people whose lives and death(s) had kept me so rapt over three days because at no point does the author give any description of the three men beyond the height of one and the hairpiece of the other.

The City of the Living is a brilliant and disturbing page-turner brimming with tension. The book is a must-read about the reverberation and ruination of lives following a brutal act, in which identity crises, sexual complexities, personal supposition, and the location it all happened in played a part. It bolsters the notion that once again, humans can be atrocious and the belief in/notion of justice is not only blind but, at times, ridiculous.