The missing Venetian novel

L’amante senza fissa dimora by Carlo Fruttero and Franco Lucentini.

The title of this blog-post is perhaps misleading. The novel is by no means missing, if we look at the international market. It came out in Italian in 1986 and sold extremely well. French and German editions became best-sellers. But it never appeared in English – and the two joint-authors, Fruttero and Lucentini, remain largely unknown to English-language readers.

This is a great pity, since their novels (six in all) are, for the most part, very good mystery stories and also highly effective social satires, with the authors focusing a cynical eye (or, rather, two pairs of eyes) on Italian society from the 1970s on. Their first two novels were set in Turin, the city where they both lived (although Lucentini was from Rome), and they were hugely successful in Italy. An excellent film of the first one, La donna della domenica (1972), came out in 1975, directed by Luigi Comencini, starring Marcello Mastroianni and Jacqueline Bisset as protagonists. The second novel, A che punto è la notte (1979), was made into a very good television series, again starring Mastroianni (1994).

Their subsequent novels were set in other parts of Italy: Siena (Il palio delle contrade morte, 1983), Rome and England (La verità sul caso D, 1989), a pine-forest on the Tuscan coast (Enigma in luogo di mare, 1993) – and, of course, Venice (L’amante senza fissa dimora, 1986).

Now I have a particular reason to be interested in the success – or, rather, the as-yet lack of success – of these novels in English. I have translated three of them: La verità sul caso D, Enigma in luogo di mare, and – appunto, as they say in Italian – L’amante senza fissa dimora, the novel set in Venice. Two of these translations were duly published (by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in the USA, and by Chatto and Windus in the UK), but the English version of the Venice novel never made it into print – despite the fact that Chatto and Windus paid me in full for my translation work.

Why should a publisher pay for a translation and then not proceed to publish the book? Well, it all came down, of course, to sales figures. Unfortunately, neither of the first two novels proved particularly successful in either the US or the UK and Chatto decided it wasn’t worth the risk to persist with the third one.

In the case of the first one they published, La verità sul caso D, I wasn’t especially surprised that it didn’t work out so well. It had been an odd choice as an English-language launch.* Although I enjoyed translating the book, I was more than a little doubtful about its effectiveness as a novel. It is a strange book in many ways. Fruttero and Lucentini had been commissioned to write an introduction to a new edition of Charles Dickens’s last novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood. As is well known, the novel, a detective story, was unfinished at Dickens’s death, and no-one has yet come up with a satisfactory solution to the “Mystery” of the title. Fruttero and Lucentini, fine mystery writers themselves, came up with a number of ingenious ideas – and decided that a simple introduction didn’t give them enough scope to expound them. So they invented the idea of a convention of fictional detectives, all invited to Rome, to discuss the novel. And after each chapter of Dicken’s text we are presented with lively discussions on the events so far between such figures as Hercule Poirot, Sherlock Holmes, Father Brown, Philip Marlowe and Lew Archer. Unfortunately, it doesn’t really work; the ideas they come up with are often intriguing and sometimes persuasive, but the portrayal of the detectives themselves (particularly that of the American private eyes) is not always very convincing. It might have worked better as a satirical essay; as a full-length novel it seemed a little forced. (And the final twist of F and L’s story is, to put it mildly, very unfair on the figure of Wilkie Collins…)

An Enigma by the Sea (1994) is a better novel in every way, but perhaps for English-language readers it fell between two stools: that of the meditative and slow-moving literary novel and that of the thriller. It’s a pity; the novel is witty, full of interesting characters and wonderfully evocative of a particular corner of Tuscany.

Chatto and Windus would probably have done better to have led with the Venice novel, L’amante senza fissa dimora (provisional English title, No Fixed Abode). Since good novels about Venice always find a wide English readership, I feel sure that this one would have been successful. It’s a highly intriguing mystery novel, the main mystery being just who the title character (“The Lover of No Fixed Abode”) is: Mr Silvera, apparently a tour-guide, but clearly something else as well. I can give no spoilers here…

It is also a touching love-story (as hinted at in the title) and has a good range of well-drawn characters, from all strata of Venetian society. It contains some wonderfully evocative descriptions of Venice – by night, during a storm, with and without tourists, the grand open spaces of St Mark’s Square, the intimate campielli and calli of Cannaregio and Castello, the interiors of grand palazzi and luxury hotels, back-street bars and little shops. The descriptions testify to a full awareness of and feeling for the city’s complex history – and this all-pervading sense of the past will turn out to be intrinsic to the plot and to its central mystery (once again, no spoilers…).

A few years ago I was contacted by the daughter of Carlo Fruttero (both authors have sadly passed away), who told me she was in touch with Mondadori for a possible e-version of the novel in English. This naturally pleased me greatly – but I then heard nothing more. It seems a great pity.  Knowing just how eager many readers are for good books about Venice, I feel sorry that they should be deprived of this one. I obviously can’t go ahead and self-publish it without the imprimatur of the original publisher. Perhaps this blog-post, if suitably promoted, might catch the attention of the right person in the right place to remedy this situation.

Lovers of Venice will, I’m sure, love The Lover of No Fixed Abode…

*It should be mentioned that their first novel had appeared in English as The Sunday Woman in 1973, but it doesn’t seem to have done very well. The 1992 publication of The D Case could perhaps be more accurately described as a re-launch.

***********************************************************************************************************************************

Here is a passage from Chapter 9, describing a pause during a walk through the quieter corners of Cannaregio:

   There is no moon, there are no stars, but the Venetian night can do without such cosmic trappings, it can draw on its own far more sophisticated stockpile of romantic effects; it has such dreamy devices, such caressable contrivances up its sleeve that Mr. Silvera and his companion, at the critical moment of the departure from Cosima’s palazzo, are overcome by its immediate seduction.

From the way he feels his arm taken, Mr. Silvera at once notes an absence of either reproof or reappropriation; her head instinctively finds its place on his shoulder and their footsteps slip into an easy concord, while the tensions and contractions of the evening are gradually placated, smoothed out in the scirocco-stirred air, in the soft, subtle wheedling of the water against the stone, in the delicate variations of shade among the slumbering buildings.

And so, in silence, they enter a narrow sottoportico and re-emerge into the minuscule campo dell’Abbazia, which offers itself like an unexpected reward, a prize preserved exclusively for them – an old trick of the old city, repeated millions of times in its annals of love, but never failing in its effect. Thus, in silence, they linger between the two sacred facades, the pair of statues, the two right-angled canals that border the campo, and finally Mr. Silvera, still in silence, spreads his raincoat like a cloak over the steps in front of Santa Maria Valverde and they both sit and contentedly contemplate that intimate territory, Adam and Eve in an Eden of a hundred square metres – but all the work of man.

Mr. Silvera (leaning back on one elbow, while she entwines her fingers around his knee) can think of no other place in the world, among the many it has befallen him to see, where artifice attains such heights of naturalness, radiates such a sense of fullness, a fullness that cannot be perfected or increased – like the sea, a forest, a desert. The best – he reflects – that could be achieved by the sweat of the brow after man’s banishment from the Eden of divine fabrication.

From the water they hear occasional subdued thuds, as the moored boats bump into one another, and friendly creaks, light metallic arpeggios of chains. Opposite them, a small wooden bridge extends its humble planks over the canal.

There is nothing to say in such a place, and Mr. Silvera and his companion sit in silence and gaze around themselves, compressing into these soft minutes the years of the pyramids.

5 Comments

  1. Brigitte Eckert

    Let me reinforce your opinion: I also don’t understand why ‘The Lover Without a Residence’ hasn’t been translated so far. What a loss for English speaking readers.
    (I happened to recocgnize him in the first chapter and really enjoyed the mystery about his identity…!) There can’t be a fincial risk translating and publishing the book.

    Reply
    • Gregory

      Thank you, Brigitte Eckert. Yes, it is a great loss.
      I agree there shouldn’t be any financial risk. In any case, the translation is ready (though I would probably revise it before launching it…)
      I was hoping my blog-post (and related tweets) might catch someone’s eye. So far it doesn’t seem to have done so. My agent has expressed interest and as soon as I’ve had time to dust the translation off I’ll send it to him to see what he thinks.

      Reply
    • Gregory

      Thanks, Brigitte Eckert. Yes, it does seem a great loss.
      I’m hoping, with the help of my agent, to get my translation published. I just need to revise it a little first.
      Thanks for the encouragement!
      Gregory

      Reply
  2. Moriah Haefner

    The book is mentioned in Laurence Crosse’s A Novel Bookstore and from the high praise of the characters in the book about it I started to look for it and came across your blog post! Have you considered reaching out to &Other Stories (And Other Stories) to see if they will publish it? I have ordered several of their translated books for my personal reading. They are based in the UK but I subscribe to them to support novel translations. It would be an honor to read your translation!

    Reply
  3. Gregory

    Thank you for this. I’ll have to get hold of Laurence Cossé’s novel, which I didn’t know about. Fruttero and Lucentini are very popular in France. I’ll look into your suggestion about And Other Stories, which is also new to me. Of course, I would first have to get permission from the Italian holders of the copyright…
    Thanks again for your interest!
    Gregory

    Reply

Leave a Reply