Massimo Carlotto

This is a nasty but thoroughly gripping noirish nightmare. During a botched robbery, an innocent bystander, Clara Contin, and her young son Enrico are killed. One of the perpetrators gets away with the loot but the other, Raffaello Beggiato, is convicted and given a life sentence. Beggiato claims his partner was the killer but refuses to give up his name. Fifteen years later, Silvano Contin, who lost his wife and son, has been haunted ever since by the escape of the other murderer and has show more never moved on with his life. Contin gets an opportunity to find Beggiato’s partner and get revenge when Beggiato petitions to be released as he is dying of cancer. From this tempting premise, Carlotto creates a tense and disturbing story of Contin’s descent into darkness. It seems like it would be difficult to make a grieving widower unsympathetic but Contin quickly turns into a violent and vicious criminal. You can’t look away from his craziness though.

The story is told in the alternating voices of Contin and Beggiato. Carlotto does a good job of distinguishing between the two. Contin’s narrative is coolly logical while Beggiato’s is overflowing with thoughts, highly emotional and full of nonstop swearing. Despite this, a deliberate parallel is drawn between the two. Beggiato, of course, has been imprisoned the whole time but Contin’s stuck in a prison of his own making. They both describe the little details of their separate existences – both lead banal lives, doing the same thing over and over, trying to make time pass without thinking too much about it. Beggiato is disgusted by the poor quality prison food but Contin eats crappy prepared food by choice – he won’t cook or go to restaurants though he has the money. Beggiato complains of the indifference towards prisoners shown by the guards and the public but Contin thinks they are too coddled and feels contempt towards the lawyer, priest and a prison volunteer who try to get him to support Beggiato’s release. Carlotto can be repetitive on occasion and Contin continually refers to the title – for him, death’s dark abyss is the terrifying darkness that Clara described shortly before she died.

Beggiato is an understandable character – he’s a small-time criminal who, on drugs, did something that appalled even himself. He’s selfish and shallow, thinking mostly of how he’ll have a good time before he dies if he gets out. He does feel badly though – he regrets that the murders happened even if some the feeling stems from the shocking nature of the crime and the fact that it gave him a much harsher sentence. Contin, however, can be hard to comprehend. It’s understandable that the grief caused him to abandon his former life but given that his current life is unhappy and meaningless, his active rejection of any sort of consolation – he refuses to see a therapist, take comfort from religion or really have any interactions with other people – becomes worrisome. His machinations concerning Beggiato’s release also make sense at first but he gradually moves towards disgusting and violent actions which are narrated with the same calm as his everyday routine. Contin’s actions have a vicious strain of misogyny which is definitely off-putting, though a couple women get the last word with him. For example, the wealthy woman who volunteers at the prison is a target of his hatred, as well as the lawyer and priest, but he only attempts to get revenge on her. He often refers to how beautiful Clara was and uses that as her main characteristic so it’s easy to imagine that in his happy, well-off former life he had some slight but not noticeable sexist views/ideas of the double standard which have curdled into an especial hatred of women. The possible belief that he deserved all his former good fortune may have morphed into the wild and out of proportion self-righteousness that leads him to justify his violence. Plenty of American films and books feature a man whose loved ones have been kidnapped or killed who then proceeds to go on a violent spree, possibly against foreign-accented cardboard evil characters, for which the audience is expected to feel sympathy. This book is a nice contrast as Contin’s violence correctly leads people to call him “sick”, “crazy” and “a monster”. show less

Oh my, this is a nasty little book. An ex-revolutionary cuts a deal and turns himself into the authorities. He is eventually let go, and begins a five-year process of "rehabilitation." During these five years, he works in a strip club, commits rape, bribery, robbery and murder, all on the path to becoming a respectable member of society. A winner.

Carlotto is an Italian writer with a seemingly mean-spirited view of the world. This book is certainly comparable to works of American noir like show more Cain's POSTMAN, but it is also capable of some more thought-provoking moments and a level of subtlety that POSTMAN never really demonstrated.

Overall, this was a quick and enjoyable, if quite unsettling read. show less

One thing you can say about the books of Massimo Carlotto is that they will make you feel better about your life, because nothing that's ever happened to me holds a candle to an ordinary day in the life of Mr. Carlotto's protagonists. In this outing we meet gleeful psychopath Giorgio Pellegrini, who prances from one trainwreck to the next but always comes off without a scratch. The one-time revolutionary is back on the scene after a stint in prison and all he wants is respectability. But to show more get it, he's willing and able to indulge in all manner of bloody, violent, nasty shenanigans. Turn off your inner feminist and come along for the ride! See my full review: http://www.bostonbibliophile.com/2012/04/review-goodbye-kiss-by-massimo-carlotto... show less

Judging a book by its cover is famously futile. But I fell for it nonetheless...

The 2014 Europa Edition of Massimo Carlotto’s ‘Master of Knots’ is a superficially thing of salacious sensation. The cover-art is overtly sexual: the dust-jacket itself is unusually high quality and pleasingly tactile, and the back-cover blurb is nothing less than the opening moments of an erotic strip-tease. It all suggests a mature, sensual exploration of explicit themes within.

The short prologue, too, show more was presumably written to attract a certain type of reader. It details the death of a beautiful woman during extreme BDSM and is the only part of the novel to dare to tread that dangerous ground. Here the author gets close to the core of the matter: the morality of sexual pleasure at the knife-edge of acceptability. But then he bails out, scampers back to the safety of a traditional pulp-fiction back-streets investigation – and not a particularly well developed one at that.

It’s a cop-out, plain and simple. And I have to wonder if this edition isn’t entirely intended to capitalise on the publicity flurry accompanying the ‘50 Shades…’ film.

The teasing intro aside, Master of Knots is an entirely average detective tale. A trio of over-the-hill Italian reformed criminals – one with mob connections, two rather more lightweight – undertake occasional investigations where victims can’t involve the police. The husband of a missing woman begs them to find out what happened to his wife after the pair of them fell foul of blackmailing bad guys, one of whom has a kink for the wilder side. Don’t wait with bated breath for the Master of Knots to make his appearance: he’s nothing more than a shadow, an underdeveloped plot device, a meaningless MacGuffin.

I'll post more details about the plot over at http://murdermayhemandmore.wordpress.com/2014/08/02/master-of-knots-rarely-risqu...

The final insult: in the concluding chapter it seems that the author couldn’t really be bothered to wrap up the investigation to give the reader any sense of satisfaction. The plot just subsides into obscurity with the protagonist effectively shrugging his shoulders and passing the buck. No real resolution: no moral conclusion. And barely anything to raise an adult eyebrow in the entire story.

I understand that this isn’t the best of this author’s work. I’d certainly think twice about trying any of his other books.

5/10 show less