Scan barcode
A review by ridgewaygirl
The City of the Living by Nicola Lagioia
4.0
"Think of those horror films where a group of kids goes on a retreat for a weekend in a house at the edge of the forest, and at a certain point, at night, while they're all sleeping, monsters arrive?" said the other writer. "Except that in this case the monsters arrive not from the outside but from within, they come from the obscure depths of those kids."
This is work of non-fiction by Italian author Nicola Lagioia, who is known for his crime novels, using the brutal 2016 murder of a young man named Luca Varani by two other young men to explore Roman society more broadly, but also diving deeply into the lives of all three men and their families, as well as his own experiences as he investigates this crime that fascinated all of Italy.
Lagioia is doing something more substantial here than just writing true crime, although that is the easiest description of what this is. It is similar to Emmanuel Carrère's The Adversary, although Lagioia makes this not about his interactions with the two murderers but about their motivations, or more exactly, their attempts to explain their motivations even to themselves. As an American reader, it was startling to see how easily members of the press got access to confidential information like police interviews. While a lot of space is given to the timeline of the crime, the description of the actual murder isn't graphic.
Another focus is the city of Rome, a city that Lagioia portrays as a decaying and corrupt corpse, yet when he and his wife make the decision to leave, they recognize quickly that they made a mistake and for all its faults, they don't want to live anywhere else.
This is a fascinating look at something we are used to over here (true crime narratives) from a different angle, as well as being a glimpse into what life is like in Rome. I will note that this book is often described as fiction, or in one case as "true crime fiction," but whether that is due to the author's reputation as a novelist or the publisher being well known for literary fiction, this book is non-fiction.
This is work of non-fiction by Italian author Nicola Lagioia, who is known for his crime novels, using the brutal 2016 murder of a young man named Luca Varani by two other young men to explore Roman society more broadly, but also diving deeply into the lives of all three men and their families, as well as his own experiences as he investigates this crime that fascinated all of Italy.
Lagioia is doing something more substantial here than just writing true crime, although that is the easiest description of what this is. It is similar to Emmanuel Carrère's The Adversary, although Lagioia makes this not about his interactions with the two murderers but about their motivations, or more exactly, their attempts to explain their motivations even to themselves. As an American reader, it was startling to see how easily members of the press got access to confidential information like police interviews. While a lot of space is given to the timeline of the crime, the description of the actual murder isn't graphic.
Another focus is the city of Rome, a city that Lagioia portrays as a decaying and corrupt corpse, yet when he and his wife make the decision to leave, they recognize quickly that they made a mistake and for all its faults, they don't want to live anywhere else.
This is a fascinating look at something we are used to over here (true crime narratives) from a different angle, as well as being a glimpse into what life is like in Rome. I will note that this book is often described as fiction, or in one case as "true crime fiction," but whether that is due to the author's reputation as a novelist or the publisher being well known for literary fiction, this book is non-fiction.