Massimo Carlotto has a fascinating history, being a convicted murderer who was the victim of one of Italy's greatest miscarriages of justice, imprisoned and living in exile for years before he finally received a Presidential pardon almost 15 years after his wrongful conviction. He has since turned to crime writing, penning a brand of hard-boiled novels reminiscent of great novelists such as Cain and Hammett.

The Fugitive is Carlotto's account of his years spent in sel-imposed exile from Italy, trying to avoid incarceration. He flees to Paris, a city of exiles, and also to Mexico, where he finally comes unstuck, informed on to the police by his lawyer. He then returns to Italy to face further trials, and the incredible conclusion to his legal saga.

I found it difficult to believe that a work based on such an amazing story could be bland reading, but The Fugitive is. At times it comes across like a wry and quirky travel book rather than the story of a life on the run from the law. The narrative is observational and clinical rather than exciting, with lots of attention given to the author's weight problems. There is very little to engage the reader's emotions until two-thirds of the way in, where Carlotto recounts the story of a missing Mexican child. Even then, your emotions are engaged by the child's fate, not by any of Carlotto's struggles.

What I felt was missing from this book was any sense of a pursuit. Carlotto had no nemesis figure, there are few near misses with arrests and so on; most of those were his own paranoia at work, not real scrapes with the authorities. Int the last act, where Carlotto recounts his appeals on return from Italy, you start to get engaged with him, and anger at hi splight builds. This points out the other weakness of the book. The chapters about his flight lack the context of what he was fleeing from. The book needs to set the scene of the crime and the original trial first, and then go into the years of exile. Inexpilcably uninteresting and disappointing from a master of hard-boiled crime fiction. ( )

The Fugitive is a surprisingly light (but not lite), humorous, and everyday account of the difficulties of living on the run.

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This book is classified as fiction but it reads a lot more like a documentary of life on the run from the scary Italian judicial system, particularly since the factual account on which it is based is that of the author himself, Massimo Carlotto. Carlotto has been nominated and awarded a number of prizes for his mysteries. If this indeed can be called a novel it can be called a crime novel but not a mystery. It was pretty clear on that score from the first pages.

Carlotto has laid out in these pages, with compelling detail, the insidious damage that life on the run can do to a person. I imagine much of it can be applied to the many people who were not involved in any way with crime but who simply had to flee some event that threatened their lives. There are many examples.

The sad, lonely, debilitating details of his time in exile are set against a worldweary and heartwarming support of exile communities in Paris and Mexico City. In particular, his description of life in Mexico City was poignant, heartbreaking and punctuated by displays of the goodness of human beings with a true zinger at the end of this chapter of his life.

It's an interesting read and a worthy entry into the venerable halls of Europa Publishing. ( )

Un caso di "giustizia" italiana. Da leggere.

Esercizio letterario autobiografico. Senza infamia e senza lode ( )